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campusreview.com.au
Wanted:
cyborg
counsellor
University team predicts
top 100 new future careers.
By Dallas Bastian
I
n the future, a student might receive little
more than a raised brow when asking
their careers adviser about the skills they
need to become a nostalgist or a cyborg
psychologist – as those are two of the jobs
Australian researchers say might exist in the
workforce of tomorrow.
A team from Deakin and Griffith
Universities compiled a list of 100 jobs they
say provides “an authoritative snapshot into
future work and future possibilities while
offering a glimpse of the skill sets likely to
be rewarded in the future”.
The researchers said that in the future
few jobs will look the way they do now,
some will disappear entirely and some will
be created that have never been thought
of before.
To get an idea of what those new jobs
might look like, the team interviewed 11
experts from different industries like farming
and technology.
Should the careers adviser relay the
information in the report to the budding
nostalgist – someone who works to
recreate remembered experiences for
the elderly – they would tell them that
nostalgists must have a love of history and
an eye for historical detail.
Or, if the student was interested in cyborg
psychology, the adviser might let them
know they’ll need to develop their listening
and communication skills if they want to
help people with synthetic organs, robotic
limbs and body implants come to terms
with the changes to their bodies.
Other jobs that formed the list included
chief ethics officers, employed by large
companies to ensure they’re being
genuinely ethical in their practices; space
tourism operators, tasked with taking
shuttle-loads of tourists into orbit to visit
space stations; swarm artists, who use
hundreds of drones moving in formation
to create performances; and trendwatcher,
who will know what is likely to happen next
and how to make the most of it.
“Within the job descriptions there is
optimism about possibilities for future
human and community lives, but also
warnings, for instance, about privacy issues,
sustainability challenges and what needs
to be in place to tackle these,” the report’s
authors wrote.
“There are also challenges for how we
think of ourselves in relation to ever more
complex, personal machines that will
increasingly become central to our lives.”
They added that there have been few
times in history when the future of work has
been less like the past.
In the future, relationships are likely to be
as important as what is produced, and while
“in the past, when you became something,
you were known as that type of worker,
in the future people are likely to go on
becoming new versions of themselves as
they continuously learn new skills”. ■
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