The jobs that do not exist yet, and what to do about that

It has become a standard line at career events that most of today's students will work in jobs that do not yet exist. The line is usually delivered as though it settles something. It does not. It is a statement about uncertainty, and the useful question is what a fifteen-year-old is supposed to do with that uncertainty on a Tuesday afternoon.

The unhelpful response is to abandon planning altogether, which is what the line often produces in practice. The other unhelpful response is to ignore it and go on targeting a specific occupational title as though the world had a contract with it.

Occupations change shape more often than they disappear

Whole occupations vanishing is rarer than it is made to sound. What happens far more often is that an occupation keeps its name and changes its contents. The work of an accountant, a radiologist, a translator or a draughtsman still exists under those names, but the proportion of the day spent on each part of the work has moved considerably. The parts that were routine and rule-following shrank. The parts that required judgement, negotiation, or responsibility for a decision did not.

This pattern is more useful to plan around than the vanishing-jobs framing, because it points at something a student can actually act on. The question is not which job will survive. It is which parts of any job tend to survive.

What tends to survive

Across the changes that have already happened, the parts of work that have proved hardest to hand over are recognisable:

• Judgement under incomplete information, where the rule does not cover the case
• Responsibility, meaning someone whose name is attached to the outcome
• Persuasion and negotiation, where the other party is a person with their own interests
• Working out what the actual problem is, before anyone can begin solving it
• Sustained attention on something difficult over months rather than minutes

None of those is a subject on a timetable. All of them are developed through subjects, and they are developed unevenly by different people, which is precisely what a psychological profile is able to say something about.

A capability is portable; a job title is not

This suggests a different planning unit. Instead of “I want to be an X”, the more durable version is “I am building towards work that is mostly Y”. A student who understands that they reason well with structured quantitative material and poorly with ambiguity has learned something that stays true across a dozen job titles. A student who has decided they want to be a data scientist has learned a word.

This is not an argument against ambition or against naming a target. A named target is motivating and gives direction to the next two years. It is an argument for holding the target loosely and the capability tightly, and for being able to say what the capability is.

The practical version

For a student, the practical version of all this is unglamorous. Keep the quantitative door open longer than feels necessary. Get good at writing, because the ability to make an argument in clear prose has survived every technological change so far. Find out where your own attention actually goes and build on that rather than on where you think it should go. And check the map again every couple of years, because the point of holding a target loosely is that you are willing to look at it again.

Uncertainty is a reason to build something portable. It is not a reason to build nothing.