The 40-Year Career is Dead
Technology innovation is now moving so fast that a technologist must reinvent themselves on average, every 4 years. If you think in terms of what drives our economy, you see we are in a social age where everything we do, say, or think is affected by the “influencers” in social media. Elon Musk with Tesla, SpaceX, and now blowing up Twitter, no matter what you think of him, influences our day-to-day lives, politics, our jobs and careers, and what we think of each other. Traditional automotive companies are now expediting their moves to electric fuel and Hydrogen and Solar are gaining new respect.
T-Mobile has moved from 4th to 1st in the U.S. telecom industry by innovating wireless, particularly 5G, which changes how we communicate personally, commercially, industrially, and socially. The wireless companies are all now becoming Internet Service Providers and the ISPs are now becoming wireless carriers. 6G will take this even further as telemedicine is waiting in the wings for robust, speedy, and reliable networks to allow for internet surgery assisted by artificial intelligence, and virtual and assisted reliable and edge computing.
Politics is now a global environment as authoritarian national leaders look over their shoulders as global citizens with a millennial, Gen-X, and Gen-Z mentality and globally merging cultures begin to strain at the last-ditch dictators and repressive regimes seeing real grass-roots movements coming for them. Black and White are beginning to become brown and the historical hate norms of the human race are flaring under the pressure of uncommon sense.
What does all this mean?
Everything around us is changing faster than ever before in human history and it’s painful.
What does that mean for jobs and careers?
The 40-year career is dead. Ditch diggers and cattle ranchers, miners and loggers, mechanics and carpenters, plumbers and electricians, road makers, and coffee makers are all dealing with this explosion of technology. Everything above is being escalated on social media, including massive changes to how we socialize on media.
Yet, we continue to think in terms of jobs and careers that span a working lifetime. We spend 4 years gaining a Batchelor’s degree, then another couple of years on a Master’s. We then fight our way up a career ladder for a few years and find we become quickly irrelevant as technology has moved on. In any trade, we are becoming old after 5-10 years and are considered veterans in a trade after two or three. The dichotomy must shift.
For decades, governments, businesses, and schools have partnered to supply the talent force, but the program is stale. The education process is changing but needs to change faster to keep up. Most authoritarian governments don’t want so much education, Schools must make it profitable, and businesses need subject matter experts much faster. The business also needs to re-invent leadership to fit the culture of the millennial and the Gen-X leader as the 60-80 hour leader weeks of the Boomers just don’t cut it for the new generations who are much more interested in the quality of life for their families.
What do you think?