How Do We Prepare Kids For Those Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet?
First of all, what are these jobs that don’t exist yet?
Thomas Frey, Futurist Speaker (162 Future Jobs: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Yet Exist, March 21st, 2014) list 162 jobs that don’t exist yet. Here are the first 10:
- Station Designers & Architects
- Circulation Engineers
- Traffic Flow Analyzers
- Command Center Operators
- Traffic Transitionists
- Impact Minimizers
- Demand Optimizers
- Secondary Opportunity Developers
- Feedback Loopers
- Construction Teams – PRTs have the potential to become the largest infrastructure project the earth has ever seen, costing literally trillions of dollars and employing hundreds of millions of people.The top 10 skills that people need to acquire for these jobs according to Mr. Frey are:
- Transitionists – Those who can help make a transition.
- Expansionists – A talent for adapting along with a growing environment.
- Maximizers – An ability to maximize processes, situations, and opportunities.
- Optimizers – The skill and persistence to tweak variables until it produces better results.
- Inflectionists – Finding critical inflection points in a system will become a much-prized skill.
- Dismantlers – Every industry will eventually end, and this requires talented people who know how to scale things back in an orderly fashion.
- Feedback Loopers – Those who can devise the best possible feedback loops.
- Backlashers – Ever- new technology will have its detractors, and each backlash will require a response.
- Last Milers – Technologies commonly reach a point of diminishing returns as they attempt to extend their full capacity to the end user. People with the ability to mastermind these solutions will be in hot demand.
- Contexualists – In between the application and the big picture lays the operational context for every new technology.
- Ethicists – There will be an ever-growing demand for people who can ask the tough question and standards to apply moral decency to some increasingly complex situations.
- Philosophers – With companies in a constant battle over “my-brain-is-bigger-that-your-brain,” it becomes the overarching philosophy that wins the day.
- Theorists – Every new product, service, and industry begins with a theory.
- Legacists – Those who are passionate and skilled with leaving a legacy.
With schools so locked into testing and Common Core Standards, how do we fit optimizing 101 into the day, especially when as a nation, students are not performing as they should in reading, science or math.
The Colorado Department of Education drafted the Colorado Standards 21st Century Skills: Transformative Teaching in 2014. This approach to teaching and learning could prepare our kids with the skills needed to fill the jobs listed above.
What has become of this draft? What direction have school districts in Colorado taken to ensure kids are not just getting exposure to STEM classes but really thinking and learning differently?