Viewing Your Career Future

We can think about our “jobs” as how we earn a living, how we spend our time, or how we find inspiration, but one thing is for sure, the nature of jobs is changing along with the corporations, societies, and other environments in which we do the work.

Job creation starts with innovative thinking. One of the easiest ways to begin thinking about future careers is to focus on what may be a problem in the future and invent a job that will solve it.

Here are three basic approaches:

1. Retrofitting: Adding new skills to existing jobs.
For example, as space tourism grows, what services will be needed to support customers and businesses?

2. Blending: Combining skills and functions from different jobs or industries to create new specialties.
For example, you may be a wonderful sales person but currently working in an industry that is in decline. By focusing on your transferrable skills (persuasiveness, interpersonal communications) as well as your interests (singing, painting), you may be able to create a new occupation in an industry on the rise. Perhaps you would lead music-therapy programs in hospitals or nursing homes as a clinical choral consultant.

3. Problem solving: Necessity is still the mother of invention, and the supply of future problems for people to solve seems limitless.

Doing what you love. . .

An additional way to create an emerging career is to monetize your passion: Two brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, made bicycles for a living, but they were fascinated by the possibility of flying machines. In 1903, they succeeded in building the first successful airplane, thus creating a new job for themselves—and eventually jobs for thousands of other people.

If you are unhappy with your career or concerned about the future, taking a more futuristic view could help you make your own pathway to a rewarding and successful career.

For a more in-depth look into the research of “Emerging Careers and How to Create Them” by Cynthia G Wagner this publication can be found in The Futurist Jan – Feb 2011. Copies can be requested from www.wfs.org