What Does the Future Hold?

Help! How do I plan for a future in the “new economy!?!”

My daughter recently asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up when I was her age. I had to think for a minute back to when I was 8 - at that time I wanted to be a teacher. The only thing I knew was that I wanted to help people and the only career I was really exposed to was being a teacher. Then as I got older and enrolled in more diverse classes I realized I really enjoyed working with adolescents helping them make plans for their future. Back in the day (I graduated from high school in 2000...most of the students I work with weren’t even born then) you could pick one career and easily make a plan for how you are going to get there. Nowadays students have to learn to be resilient and flexible in order to prepare for their future.

According to the World Economic Forum, an estimated 85 million jobs are expected to be lost to factors such as automation within the next five years. Inequality is likely to increase unless workers can be “reskilled” to enter new professions. If everything goes right through the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution there could be approximately 97 million new jobs created. This is why it is so important to prepare our future leaders for relevant and needed careers, all while trying to “reskill” current workforce.

The future of the economy is becoming more and more multidisciplinary. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education Generation Z is willing to embrace this multidisciplinary mentality; they don’t want to feel pigeon holed in one area. Now the educational system has to meet the needs of the students and the new economy. It is imperative that students are given the opportunity to develop foundational communication skills so that they can work collaboratively with others, establish executive functioning skills so they learn to manage themselves, and abstract reasoning skills so that they can solve problems (Forbes, 2020).

Feel free to contact me in order to help navigate this new economy and prepare students for this multidisciplinary approach.