labour market Archives - Future Navigator

Are you ready to become a Body Language Coach for online meetings? Or a Bubble Buster? Jobs that no one saw coming when they graduated will shortly be knocking on our door. Baseline: We have to prepare to be rookies over and over again during our lives. These 10 jobs are likely to be invented from scratch as new technologies and new principles for the working place gather momentum.

By Liselotte Lyngsø, Futurist at Future Navigator.

From Leadership to Artmanship

During the corona crisis, companies and their employers have discovered that you don’t have to be physically present at the office in order to do your work. That tendency will continue to accelerate.

Studies from countries around the world show that young people don’t wish to spend their entire life working. Their career plan is not about titles and income. It’s about purpose and balance. They want to decide for themselves when, how and where they work. They don’t want to become time slaves. At the same time, they long for a caring community that provides them with proper feedback and attention. They are “socially organised individualists”. This is a gamechanger.

The winner companies will be those that manage to string together these seemingly opposing desires, while at the same time, maintaining their brand, culture, security, onboarding and innovation muscles. For sure, it’s going to demand completely new leadership approaches:

“Leaders have to find the exact right combination of tasks, personalities, conditions and personal circumstances. It all has to come together.”
Liselotte Lyngsø

Machines won’t master the skill of being you!

The expanding use of machines will automate and take over a lot of today’s jobs. This, however, will not exile or outsource humans from the labour market – rather the opposite. We will be extremely busy doing stuff that has not been invented yet.

Although machines will make many work tasks easier, there is a limit as to what they will be able to help us with. They won’t be capable of providing human skills such as empathy, curiosity, vision, ethics, laziness and humanity. It will be our job to be as talented as being human as possible while collaborating with the insights and support which the machines will provide.

The jobs of tomorrow will mirror the challenges facing humanity. Climate change, anxiety specifically amongst young people, integration of foreigners, taking care of the elderly, democratizing and improving education, fixing tele-medication etc. The endless challenges of everyday life combined with an ever-increasing level of expectations will offer us brand new occupations. We will look back at 2020 and think gosh! We were so primitive back then.

Traditional professions will morph into new forms of value creation. What does this mean in real life? Accountants will we be replaced by algorithms and pattern recognition. Instead, their job will be to guide us to build our life and business as a good investment combining sound advice, clever money, motivation and insights from smart data. They’ll guide you away from stupid loans and poor decisions in the short run. And help you to invest in long term assets. Furthermore, they will ensure that the data is ethical, valid and understandable.

Cashiers of the future will be hired to create a nice atmosphere in the supermarkets, advise customers on what to cook for their next meal, spot trends from watching the customers and ensure that it’s always preferable and far more fun to go grocery shopping in the physical world as opposed to merely being online.

Even more important: New jobs will be invented. Today they seem just as farfetched and sci-fi like as being a Facebook moderator or a professional Youtuber did 20 years ago. But they all correspond to a world in flux demanding new skills.