The future does not look good for traditional jobs--or "regular activities performed in exchange for payment," as dictionaries and public perception define them. Their days are numbered. But wonderfully new and better kinds of work lie on the near horizon: hyperjobs.
Typical Job of Yesterday
· One job (singular) per worker.
· Employed by a company.
· Functional.
· Rely on specialized skills such as accounting or engineering.
· Compensated by money.
Typical Hyperjob of Tomorrow
· Multiple simultaneous “jobs.”
· Self-employed.
· Purposeful.
· Rely on hyper-human skills such as discovery, creativity, and responsibility.
· Compensated by money and also by other forms of social exchange ranging from barter to “time dollars.”
Hyperjobs are a whole new kind of work. They leverage people's unique, noncomputerizable skills and abilities, and power the emerging global society.
Technology is, by its very nature, a job killer. The whole idea of tools, machines, and systems is to do things more easily, faster, or better than barehanded humans can. White-collar workers may currently feel comfortable about their own prospects, but in fact service occupations--including the most technical and intellectually demanding--are the new targets of technological advance.
Every day we see new evidence of service-sector job erosion: grocery checking taken over by self-service checkout stations; telephone directory assistance taken over by speech recognition and response systems; air terminal counter work taken over by ticketing kiosks; and middle-management functions taken over by increasingly sophisticated software applications.
The most intellectual and technical jobs have also made the hit list. Take college teaching and software development, for example. Cash-strapped colleges and universities hold the lid on professors' salaries by hiring less-costly adjunct professors and launching distance-learning programs that extend the productivity of professorial talent. Completely automated learning systems for some subjects are on the horizon.
Knowledge workers such as software developers are also on the automation chopping block. Software development is perhaps the most automatable of all the technical disciplines, and software-development tools are constantly being created to extend the productivity of human developers. Fewer people are needed to produce X amount of code.
Social trends also impact the earning potential of software developers. For example, the increasingly popular "open source" movement is now challenging Microsoft for preeminence in operating systems and business tools such as spreadsheets and word processors. That's great for society, but open-source developers typically make their contributions for free. They can do it because they have "day jobs." The question is, what will their day jobs be if and when paying positions, as at Microsoft, go away as open-source takes over?
No matter what the educational or intellectual level of the jobholder, white-collar jobs as we know them have become an endangered species.
Are you prepared to compete in this strange new world?
