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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the dreaming dept.

Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.

Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I [Vivek Wadhwa] expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.

I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proven to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the planet's energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil fuel– and nuclear-based generation does today.

In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:29AM

    by ledow (5567) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:29AM (#215308) Homepage

    The article is wrong.

    Love of learning has ALWAYS been A key to success at any time in the past, present or future.

    There is absolutely no point in hiring someone who is either unable, or not keen, to learn unless - quite literally - the job is mindless and drone-like. Even then, they have to learn how to do that mindless job.

    School taught me things that are no longer true. Some of them weren't even true when I was being taught them. As such, without the ability to throw out old information, take in new, reformulate all your understanding, and extrapolate that to future scenarios, we would be dead in the water the day we left school with all that misinformation. Similarly, my career didn't exist when I was a kid. Computers were a one-per-school thing that didn't have central management. The thought of having hundreds of portable devices in even the lowest of schools, and needing teams of people to manage them, never occurred to anyone.

    Similarly, the line about driving cars? I have a car. My dad has a car. Our first cars were VERY different things to drive. My daughters will be so automated that I won't want to drive it. Guess what her daughters will be like? My granddad? He'd never driven in his life and couldn't put a seatbelt on (it may be obvious to you nowadays, but if you've never really driven in a car, the seatbelt going diagonally over your chest isn't actually intuitive!). As such just two generations ago massive changes were made, changed every generation, and in another generation will be obsolete. My father was a lorry mechanic - that position barely existed before he started in it, certainly not to the same extent, and he's now redundant as it's all done by the manufacturer who do it with a handful of personnel for an entire range of vehicles. Though neither of us were pioneers and cars and computers existed before our times, the actual job we started with never really existed as we did it in the previous generation.

    There's nothing new here. Farriers had to retrain as blacksmiths or car mechanics. Gas-lamp-lighters had to figure out new-fangled electrics or become plumbers. It's always happened, and the disruption nowadays is probably much less than that caused by telling a whole industry of miners that they are out of work. Those who can learn a new trade will survive and excel. Those who can't will end up living off the state, or earning a poor living. Hell, my telephony guys have had to pick up computer networking as they are supplying the IP and wireless phones their customers demand now, so they have to learn about VLAN's, QoS and all kinds of stuff just to plug a phone in.

    On a more recent note, I've just taken on an apprentice. They are young, keen, brilliant. However the reason I have them instead of any other is that they were desperate to learn. You can't keep information from them, because you can feel their disappointment. They want to know everything, and learn how to do all the stuff you do. That's a more employable person - if the employer has the time - than any amount of certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, et al. Absent such certifications, they stand out from the crowd. You can spot them on their CV. Did they sit on their butt outside of working hours? No, they were learning and testing relevant skills for themselves just for the sake of learning. The guy I took on has zero experience. But, hell, you give him a task, show him a brief demo once (if that!) and he's off and will do it to hundreds of machines if you need it done. He goes into his academic-based training (alongside his work-based apprenticeship) and he's showing the lecturer how to do stuff. On paper, he's just a kid. But you can't account for that keenness - and ability - to learn and to do so quickly.

    I started the same way. I came out of university, didn't know what to do for a living. I graduated in Maths. But I have a large interest in IT and had always tinkered and played and learned. I started doing some IT for schools and - before you know it - one of them asked me to look at their server that had stopped working. Never touched server-versions of Windows before then, took one look, realised what must be wrong, fixed it. A year later, after much studying and testing, I was selling my services building networks. I had some customers for over a decade before I decided to move into full-time employment doing just that - and one of those customers then snapped me up. Which led to an entire career building and maintaining school networks, with satisfied customers, from small prep schools up to large academies. I showed them things their consultants had no idea about. I actually out-bid their consultants on stuff by building things in-house in hours that they were going to sell to us for thousands. I was pulling in technologies they'd never heard of. I was able to knock up prototypes in hours based on Linux skills that I'd never imagined I'd used professionally in their all-Windows environments. I'm still in that career now, working in a top private school - I was pulled in by word-of-mouth from a previous employer as an emergency troubleshooter after a disaster. From a guy that made a school a website because he didn't know what to do after uni, to a guy running the whole IT setup for a school with millions coming into it every year. It's the ability to learn that earns my wage, not how many times I've read the book, or what boxes I ticked on a certification test. I have zero industry certifications. Almost every employer and customer I've had tells me that they've realised those with such certs are generally a waste of money for them. Quite often a conversation just goes: "We've heard that a school has done this, we think it's cool, we want to do it, nobody else is doing this at our level" "Okay" "Do you know how to do it?" "Of course not. But give me a week". By which time I hand them back a prototype that's better than their suppliers are able to offer.

    The day I stop being able to learn effectively, is the day my career stagnates and I'm stuck doing the same stuff forever. No more promotions, raises, praise, etc. I find that worrying in some ways and correct in others. I hold my staff to the same standard. You need to be able to learn, whether that's how to do things my particular way, or how to do things entirely, or just how to do the things that I find difficult and don't properly understand, or just things in a different area than I generally work in. I'm not impressed by what's on your CV if you can't learn.

    (P.S. On that note, my memory is certainly fading, and I'm noticing that I mistype a lot more nowadays. Outside of IT, my memory is atrocious, but I can remember lines of code I wrote 20 years ago. Picking up new languages and skills is significantly more difficult for me if they aren't IT-related. It worries me in case the IT side of me stops being able to learn, because outside of IT my learning ability is significantly reduced. Saying that, my apprentice and I had a 40 minutes conversation about quantum mechanics the other day and I made them understand it for the very first time in their life, despite them having zero mathematical background. But... the day I notice that I'm unable to learn is the day I need to stagnate my ambitions somewhat and dial back my career to something I can stretch to retirement. I'm hoping the day never comes.)

    Being able to learn is critical. Your career, your father's career, your grandfather's career, probably no longer exist - or won't quite soon - and certainly not in the same form. Your children's careers will be in areas that don't exist yet. You can't train them FOR that, as you have no idea what they are going to be (and wouldn't be able to pick them up yourself!). All you can do is teach them how to learn effectively. This is my argument about university education - it's not a waste of time, even if it's in "Art History". The difficulty set around any topic at that level means you have to be able to learn independently - a dying skill nowadays with rote-learning and limited curricula. A degree is proof that you can learn in difficult and testing and elongated situations, sometimes many years. The chances of you then suddenly stopping learning are minimal.

    Teach a man to fish, and all that.

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  • (Score: 2) by gargoyle on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:25AM

    by gargoyle (1791) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:25AM (#215334)

    Love of learning has ALWAYS been A key to success at any time in the past, present or future.

    There is absolutely no point in hiring someone who is either unable, or not keen...

    I'd say the only requirement is the ability to learn. Keenness might affect speed of learning a new skill or piece of knowledge but I don't see it as being a prerequisite.