The internet is changing the future of jobs

The spear, once the epitome of technological innovation now only appears in stories of wildmen in the Nicobar islands.It took 400,000 years to go from spear to rockets but only a few decades to get you the smart-phone. This exponential advancement in technology has created a problem. It’s changing the way we work.

Today’s 10 highest paying jobs did not exist 20 years ago. We are not prepared for future jobs. We need the internet to save us! Here is how:

All future jobs require 2 expertise to be married (cross-disciplinary).

Only experts can teach us on the internet. Nobody can go back to school.

The answer is to upgrade your knowledge by learning online and marry it with your existing expertise. There are a few places you can do this like LearnApp, Udacity, Udemy or Upgrad. There are two kinds of upgrades:

Cross-disciplinary

If you already specialise in a field you need to find another field and marry the two. This creates a unique skill set that not many can replicate and helps in raising your salary. Steve Jobs brought his love for calligraphy to computers and called them ‘Fonts’ or Charlie Chaplin brought humour to video and called it ‘Entertainment’. Walt Disney combined sound, sketching and motion pictures (Steamboat Willie) and created an entire industry

If you are great at excel and analyse data, you should learn R or a data visualisation tool to bring insight for businesses. Here are some more ideas you can play with:

Augmented reality UI, Designs and avatar creators. This discipline will need to marry an understanding of 3D spaces with design and interaction.

Gene editing. This totally new discipline (CRISPR) allows us to edit genes. There will be a lot of work around the legalities of this, morale/human/animal rights, farming, vaccines or human organ design (wow) etc.. This, by far is the most technically demanding on the list.

Personalised medical officer. With the advent of personal data on the health of an individual, medicine will become more personalised relying on patient-specific data rather than the current symptomatic approach. People in the medical profession will need to marry data analytics and insights to get this job.

Software developer for cars. Electric autonomous vehicles are the future. Software developers who will be mechanics for our high tech cars are inevitable. This job is not far away, Maruti for example targets to launch 4 electric cars around 2020 and countless companies are trying to make autonomous vehicles possible.

This list is endless. The only way to future proof yourself is to make sure you follow what interests you apart from your main expertise. I’m a stock market trader with a love for travelling, UI/UX design and storytelling, I found my ‘marrying’ of disciplines by building LearnApp.co

For more recent works of marrying disciplines see this list:

Marry augmented reality and gameplay as seen by Pokemon Go.

Marry e-commerce and untouched offline marketplaces (connecting farmers to marketplaces, new shelf space for marketplaces.)

Marry government public data to data visualisation (potholes on the road, the budget of building a flyover)

Marry online creditworthiness to rural India (the credit system has to be reinvented completely.)

-- Mr Prateek Singh, Founder, LearnApp

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