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posted by martyb on Friday August 28 2015, @06:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the studying-what-to-study dept.

The article comes out of the Australian press, but unless there's something truly unique about the Australian job market, it's almost certainly true elsewhere as well: a recent study shows more than half of young Australians are receiving college education to persue careers that will soon no longer exist. Thank robotics, industry consolidation, and the nature of the markets for the shrinking number of ways you will some day be able to earn a living.

There's a flip side to the debate, of course: there are certainly new things coming that haven't even been invented yet, that will provide job opportunities. But the trick is positioning yourself appropriately to take advantage of the new chances.

The not-for-profit group, which works with young Australians to create social change, says the national curriculum is stuck in the past and digital literacy, in particular, needs to be boosted. Foundation chief executive Jan Owen says young people are not prepared for a working life that could include five career changes and an average of 17 different jobs.

She says today's students will be affected by three key economic drivers: automation, globalisation and collaboration. "Many jobs and careers are disappearing because of automation," Ms Owen said. "The second driver is globalisation — a lot of different jobs that we're importing and exporting. And then thirdly collaboration which is all about this new sharing economy."

How does one future-proof his/her life and career?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:08AM (#228903)

    Notice that something's missing--that's right, the article never tells us what the jobs are that they are studying for which will supposedly be gone. Why? Because if the article bothered to tell the audience, there's (*gasp*) the possibility that the audience actually might have something substantial to disagree with.

    Oh puhlease. The article doesn't go into those details because its an article on a general-interest news site. Do you honestly think that the source report doesn't go into those details? I am so damn tired of people who decide to argue with strawmen because engaging with the actual facts requires you to do more than a single mouse-click. You in particular have a history of exactly this sort of playing dumb when it suits your agenda here.

    Here, I did it for you, [fya.org.au] took me less than a minute with google.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by FlyingSock on Friday August 28 2015, @09:30AM

    by FlyingSock (4339) on Friday August 28 2015, @09:30AM (#228909)

    Thank you for this post. I sadly don't have any mod points left.
    Although to spare the gp even more effort, the direct link to the report is this one [fya.org.au]. Esp page 24 appears to hold the info gp is looking for "lower-skill jobs, such as labourers, machinery operators, and administrators, will be affected by automation in the next 10-15 years". This is pretty much, what you would expect. Overall it appears to be an interesting report.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:39PM (#228953)

      Wait a tick. According to the report, Austrailians are getting college degrees in physical labour and machine operating? How the fuck can you even get a degree in something that amounts to move this box or push these buttons when the machine goes too fast?

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:48PM (#228956)

        Because degrees are increasingly thought of as something you get so you can get a job, rather than the byproduct of choosing to increase your understanding of the universe around you because you are deeply interested in doing so.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday August 28 2015, @07:47PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 28 2015, @07:47PM (#229147) Journal

      I think you need to think a bit about that. If administrators are automated away, then so is "empire building", which will result in a lot of not-mentioned jobs not being created. If the tasks that entry level professionals are doing are automated away, then there's no path for new entries. Already the paths up for lawyers are being restricted due to automation on case preparation. I assume that something similar is happening in other professions. Well, you might say "getting rid of lawyers is a good idea", but this doesn't get rid of them, it concentrates them in the hands of the wealthy. It's rather like what happened to doctors when HMOs took over. Everything is much more efficient...and the results are better for the stockholders. There's still room for a very few new professionals at large offices.

      So. Among the "soon to be automated" are cabbies, truck drivers, bus drivers, clerical workers, supermarket clerks, pharmaceutical clerks, etc.

      Well, it might take 20 years for some of those to be automated away. And what the article didn't mention is that Japan is putting lots of effort into robotic care for the aged. So expect that to be increasingly automated. What about airplane pilots? That's already in process. There's lots of areas that are "already in process" and other areas where the only effect has been reduced availability of entry level positions. And sometimes an area is "automated away" by redesigning things. Anybody remember refridgerator repairmen? Now you usually just replace it, either under warranty or not. Start contemplating what a mix of Siri with robotics only slightly advanced over the current state could do. Nursing might not be a very reasonable career to prepare for. There will (probably) still be a need for some, but the need for new bodies will be strongly reduced. And I'm not convinced that programming is exhempt. Certainly neural computers don't seem to need many programmers. A few, but not many. You may not remember how many programmers "lost their jobs" to VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet). Again, what happened was basically that lots of work that had required programmers no longer did. At that time the demand for programmers was so high that it was hardly noticed, but many companies went from having a staff of 10 or 12 programmers to having a staff of 4 or 5 that also had to double as computer operators. (Previously computer operations had been done out of house on a mainframe.) The cost of using a computer dropped so fast at that time that new jobs were created as fast as old ones were lost, or nearly so. I got through that period unscathed, as did most programmers, but only because of a "perfect storm" of favorable factors (mainly computer time getting so drastically much cheaper). This next time? I don't expect anything quite as favorable. For programming the "low hanging fruit" has largely been plucked. For hardware the "more bang for the buck" curve has drastically flattened.

      So I think that these people are drastically undercounting the damages, and overcounting the refuges. But it may be 20 years before the true storm hits. Still 15 wouldn't surprise me, and we are already in the fringes of the storm.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 28 2015, @09:32AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 28 2015, @09:32AM (#228910) Journal

    Here, I did it for you, took me less than a minute with google.

    Oh mate, do you realize you just made jiro redundant?

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:28AM (#229300)

      He can always get new skills and be back to work by Monday.