When looking to begin a career, or embark on a change in your existing one, an eternal consideration is the stability of the job that you hope to move into. In an ideal world, all careers would be secure and we could choose our futures merely based on what we want to do – and if you get far enough up the chain, sometimes that can be the case. However, when you’re looking to get on that ladder (or back on, in some cases), you can’t ignore the importance of stability.
Of course, it can’t have escaped your attention that we live in a changing world – and the last few years have indicated that the pace of change is, for the moment, accelerating. This naturally raises questions about what makes a stable career. Once upon a time, that description would have been fairly broad and included jobs in growing industries – but today, it’s hard to know what can be considered future-proof, and what has been ruled out by the pace of change. The following tips, though, may be useful to you.
If You Specialize In Tech, You Should Have A Long Career Ahead
It may seem bizarre that careers in tech would be seen as future-proof in any way. After all, this is the industry in which Moore’s Law existed to tell experts just how quickly the products they were working with would become obsolete. Surely, if you cannot guarantee that the machines you are using will survive through a few years, you can’t consider your job stable?
Actually, it’s for that very reason that being a tech whiz can be beneficial to your ongoing employment. Every business that attempts to hit the heights going forward will need IT experts who can keep their efforts online – so if your qualifications include an expertise in management systems from a school like University of Alabama Birmingham, you’re going to be essential to bosses who can’t afford downtime.
Moving Into Healthcare Means Always Having A Job?
Although not the easiest work, healthcare professions do have the very clear benefit that you’re working in a field that will always be needed. There are few – if any – other occupations about which you can say that. It’s imaginable, if improbable, that we could move on from computers and devices. On the other hand, people will always be vulnerable to illness and injury, and will always need treatment.
While the pace of automation has rendered the future uncertain for a lot of jobs, there is no substitute for human abilities when it comes to diagnosing illnesses, prescribing treatments and delivering those same remedies, and offering care for those who need it. It’s hard to imagine that there will ever be a way to program AI to do what doctors or nurses can do, and right at this moment there are more jobs in healthcare than there are people to fill them.
Logistics Experts Will Always Deliver
Anyone who has sat in the driver’s seat of a modern motor vehicle will be familiar with the disembodied voice of the GPS navigator telling us how we can get where we want to go. So it would seem that the field of logistics would be one of the easiest to automate, right? Especially with driverless vehicles and drones that can just be sent wherever they need to go, why would there be any need to put people in those jobs?
Well, anyone who has spent much time relying on GPS navigation will know that it can get things wrong; with new housing developments being built on a regular basis, there will always be a need to think around the limitations of the existing software. The logistics industry will always need people, and whether as a driver or a management professional, you can be sure that you’ll provide a skill that can’t be programmed away.
One More Career That Might Work For You…
Few people have ever uttered the sentence “there is always going to be a need for data analysts” with a straight face, but it’s true. We are living in a world where business, politics, medicine and more are utterly reliant on statistics and information – and on people who can analyse that data. More information is being gathered today than has ever been before, and the companies gathering it need people who know what to do with it.
If you have a head for stats and can spot a trend, you may well have found a career that will make you an essential part of the workforce now and long into the future. Whether it’s spotting voting patterns in elections, or recognising differences in consumer habits across different population centers, there is going to be somewhere you can put your skills to good use.
It might be hubris to call any career “future proof” these days – but with the above examples, you can look at a career change with some confidence of being employable for the long term.
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Having worked in the Helping Professions – social work, criminal justice, psychotherapy for many years in the UK. It seems our work cannot be future proofed, health policies thrust upon us by politicians who do not really understand our work and simply require positive outcomes, has seen practitioners forced to retrain in methods they do not really like or approve of, take early retirement or become ill themselves. It’s a Brave New World if you’re not in a profession that involves caring. Sorry to be negative but I see my former colleagues struggling with the huge and constant demands that take no account of them as individuals.
Thank you for this comment!
So true! If you want to have longevity in your career, you have to be ready to pivot and embrace change
Indeed 👍