Katherine Phelps

The Future of Employment

Posted on 17 December 2023

This last year I taught digital literacy at a university to people studying to be primary and secondary educators. Part of that was how to prepare students for computing jobs. For the last class of the term I put up the below list of careers I believe are more likely candidates for paying jobs that need bright young people.

Sustainable materials development (chemistry):
We still need more ways to get off plastics.

Agricultural science:
Change in climate will mean that we cannot sustain growing many of the same crops in the same way any more.

Robotics:
With the coming population crash we will need robots which are made to care for the sick and the elderly. We will also need robots to clean up plastic and space debris, and to plant trees, seaweed, and the like for rewilding.

Electrical engineers:
Everything has to go electric and off petrol chemicals.

The means by which to further decentralise our society:
Communications, manufacturing, workplaces, energy production, storage and dissemination of goods. Floods and fires make this critical.

Loads of cultural things need to change:
How soon you can get a paying job in this field is hard to tell. This includes how we educate our young. We need schools to go off grading systems and onto project-based learning.

I was told to educate teachers about how to teach programming. The computing industry loves this. Not because they need more programmers, but because programmers have been expensive. Flood the market with programmers and you can start reducing their pay, since we have more programmers than jobs for them.

AI has made this easier for companies, because programs that once took five people to develop can now by done by an AI and one programmer to check on the work. It’s certainly useful for everyone to understand something about programming in order to understand what it is doing, how, and how it is affecting them–but job-wise it may no longer be the goose that lays the golden egg.

Most of all we will need to stop identifying ourselves with our careers. We need to have a mindset whereby we are prepared to shift careers as needed. One of the reasons we need to change how education is being delivered is that we need people to actually like learning, because we are all going to have to be life long learners, no matter what field of employment we go into. This shouldn’t be frightening. In fact it might even make for a more enjoyable life that isn’t stuck in a rut. The problems stem from a lack of safety-nets in order to make these shifts. There should be no shame in changing jobs, no shame in being between jobs, and every reason to expect that we will always have enough to support ourselves and our families. These are things we must demand from our politicians.

Peace and kindness,
KJ Phelps