ROLES FOR THE NEW ERA
Tap into future opportunities now, writes Melanie Burgess A
BOUT 100,000 more tech workers are forecast to be needed by 2024, but digital jobs are not the only new careers predicted for the future. New roles are emerging in areas from personal brand management through to analog experience guidance, which involves showing people how to unplug and reconnect with the natural world.
ACS Australia’s Digital Pulse 2019 report, released by Deloitte Access Economics, reveals the number of technology jobs increased by an average of 2.5 per cent a year between 2011 and 2018, outpacing the overall labour market’s average growth of 1.7 per cent.
It predicts 100,000 more tech workers will be needed across all sectors in the coming five years.
Oxford Martin Citi Fellow Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, speaking at WorldSkills Conference 2019 last month in Russia, says much of the coming job growth will be in roles that do not yet exist, but this is not new.
“If you were to ask a farm labourer in 1900 which jobs he or she thought their grandchildren would have, they certainly wouldn’t have said they will probably be a software engineer or Zumba instructor or travel agent and so on,” he says. “Many of those jobs were inconceivable back then.”
International advocate for vocational education and training WorldSkills has identified 25 future skills that are growing exponentially across the globe.
They range from blockchain, rapid prototyping (such as 3D printing), drone operating, the Internet of Things and machine learning, right through to neural interface design, which involves using thoughts to control machinery, and agricultural biotechnology, that uses genetic engineering and molecular markers to accelerate the natural selection process in plants and animals.
WorldSkills Australia chairman Kevin Harris says different parts of the world are embracing future skills at different rates. “In some countries, future skills is tomorrow, in others, it is yesterday,” he says.
Meanwhile, a project by Deakin University, Griffith University and Ford Australia – 100 Jobs of the Future – identifies potential future jobs across technology, business and law, environment, urban, agriculture, space, people, health, data and experience fields.
For example, it predicts data waste recyclers will find new uses for deleted data while lifelong education advisers will help people develop their careers and stay up to date with training and technology.