Look for customers and markets, not jobs.

I recently saw a news post on Facebook that had a photo of youth from an East African country in a public demonstration. The young people were on the street in a protest to highlight growing unemployment among university graduates. One placard read: ‘For every ten applicants only one gets a job. Where should we go?’

Young people find themselves in difficult times with growing unemployment in all continents. And instead of joining everyone around you moaning, what else can you do?

Think for yourself. All along you have had a teacher or parent come to your rescue when there seemed to be darkness all around. It is your turn to establish why you are here, what you are living for and what you will do with your time and gifts (yes, you have some). You are likely to end up on a path to slavery if you let other people do that for you.

Finding a job after graduation lets you have a place where you are serve clients in a business that other individuals have struggled to set up over many years. You probably do not know their story. But they may have taken loans, begged help from family and perhaps failed many times before managing to stay afloat. No one is entitled to entering that safe place straight from college.  Would you like to try square one?

There are opportunities in the various circumstances we find ourselves in if we bother to stop and ask: how did I get here?  Why did I enroll for a course that makes one feel useless unless they are looking at the job advert supplement of a newspaper? If you chose the easy way through college, you may want to consider finding a course that gives you hard skills and empowers you to provide services and produce goods that society needs.

The days of secure, paid employment in government offices or the private sector are over for the majority of the population. There will be more workers offering their services for pay in short or long-term contracts. Prospective customers are no longer those within country boundaries. New opportunities can be accessed in new ways with technological advancement.

Stop moaning about jobs and go after the markets. 

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Quote of the day:

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

Here come the robots

If you live in the developed world, you will already have noticed the rising influence of automation in industry, especially in manufacturing and agriculture. The Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology estimates that 45 percent of American jobs may be taken by computers in the next 20 years.

Photo: Jiuguang Wang (Flickr)

In the Canadian province of Ontario where I live, there are machines to milk cows, prune grapevines and to do a whole range of farm and store-related tasks. At one farm in Seaforth, the new equipment is not only able to milk a cow, but also indicate when the animal is likely to fall sick or is ready to get pregnant.

The number of areas where machines are able to replace human beings is not only restricted to routine operations. Car manufacturing plants in Japan have used robots for a while. At one of the Toyota factories in Japan, 96 percent of production is done by 760 robots even as Toyota tries to reverse this trend in order to nurture master craftsmen.

Where do these developments leave the hordes of job-seeking young people (many without any technical skill)? Harvard University researcher Tony Wagner provides a useful maxim for those entering college or about to leave in search for work: ‘the world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you do with what you know.’ As more jobs are taken over by machines, more individuals will be required to acquire new higher-order skills and continually learn in order to keep jobs or offer their services in the market.

The depth of learning that takes place in our colleges and universities will determine whether young people can do something with their education and even muster machines before they take their jobs. In many of my posts I will highlight the value of learning to write computer code. Computer programming is one of the tools that will enable many young people enter portfolio careers and to ride ahead of machines (as machines depend on our instructions). In England, programming is going to be taught from elementary school (through to 16 years) starting this September.

The ability to write instructions for machines is the literacy of the 21^st century. Do not get left behind.

          (Dr Tony Wagner speaks about 7 essential survival skills in this video)