Planning a Career Path in the Face of Disruptive 21st Century Change

When I was in high school, students were streamed and categorized. Some went into a business and economics curriculum; others focused on applied technology planning for a job in various trades; others chose curricula heavy on science and mathematics, and I chose a mix of arts and sciences. Making these decisions determined whether you would apply to a university, a community college, enter an apprenticeship in a trade, or go out and get a job upon graduation.

Getting a university degree was the first step on a ladder to career success back in 1967 as I left William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate to enter the four-year Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Toronto. I wanted to be a high school teacher and so chose this path. I didn’t end up where I thought I would go. Neither did my wife who I met in university with similar aspirations to teach high school. Her subjects were French, Latin, and Greek. Mine started with geography, geology, and geophysics, and morphed into Medieval History and Islamic Studies as my learning interests changed. Neither of us ever got the chance to teach high school.

How many, back when my wife and I were in university, achieved the career for which we had ambition?

From Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden writes about U.S. employment data noting that in 2020 unemployment rates for new college graduates exceeded that of the general population at 41% while 33.8% of all college graduates found themselves underemployed or working in jobs that didn’t match what they studied or even require a college degree.

That made me think about how many of us actually go on to get a diploma or degree after high school? Philip Allingham, a retired English and Education Professor from Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, provides an answer to this question from a Canadian perspective. This data is also from 2020 showing post-secondary participation rates in Ontario where I live at 40% covering both vocational and undergraduate university programs. He also writes that better than one in four Canadian adults have a university degree.

Recently I was asked to facilitate an online interest group that meets weekly on Zoom to discuss the future. This group is facilitated by a friend of mine from Vancouver, British Columbia, Nick Arden. Like me, Nick’s journey through university into the world of work didn’t follow his original ambitions. From a co-op student at Waterloo University in Kitchener, Ontario, he went on to get an engineering degree at Cambridge, and a computer science degree at the University of British Columbia. He has worked with Canada’s largest steel company, Stelco, and describes himself as a 5-profession person who has had 14 different careers in his working life.

I look at Nick’s working life and see in it reflections of my own. I graduated with a degree in history with no teaching jobs available at the time. I went looking for work and found an educational publisher who required an undergraduate degree for a job selling textbooks. Eventually, I was promoted to the position of acquisitions editor working with university and community college instructors who were nascent authors. I took advantage of the vast library of books available to me to do a lot of self-study. That led me to move on to software development, working with computer hardware manufacturers, and documenting hardware and software systems. Then I learned about systems analysis and design, applied voice recognition systems, and went on to architect telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. If I were to describe this business life journey of more than 45 years it would be in a single phrase “continuous self-learning.”

Nick can say the same thing and today he and a business partner provide career counselling and mentoring to young people to help them navigate the world of work. His website Tech Impact teaches business survival skills for the 21st century. Like me, he believes continuous learning is the key to success in today’s world of work where so many young people find themselves facing a precarious job future. There is even a name for those who try to find their place in today’s gig economy. They are members of the precariat.

A futurist friend, Thomas Frey, has posted an article that looks at the future of work through the eyes of a child. Speculation on what skills that child will need reflects what should be apparent to anyone entering the workforce of today and tomorrow, one of continuous change. Thomas writes, “the workforce of tomorrow will need to be resilient, flexible, resourceful, creative problem solvers, ethical, epithetical, situationally aware, perseverant, purpose-driven, relentless, and totally distraction-proof.” He goes on to state that young people will need to “be better at virtually everything – smarter, quick to adapt, high energy, work long hours, durable, and much more resilient.”

Is that enough pressure for those of you who are young, about to graduate from a college or university, and reading this while considering your future career path?

What I would like to offer you is an opportunity to meet online through a new Zoom discussion group that meets every Wednesday, at 10 AM Pacific Time (1 PM Eastern Daylight Time). A successor to Singularity University’s Coffeeshop conversations, it is hosted by Nick Arden who has drafted me to be a breakout room and topic facilitator for these meetups. Our discussions range across many fields looking at climate change, the environment, society, government, and the impact of ongoing technological disruption.

In the first few meetings, participants have joined from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Consider this an opportunity for unstructured continuous learning, and for sharing and brainstorming. If interested and you seek answers to the challenges of the 21st century use these meetups to interact with people facing many of the same issues from all over the world. You can come as often as you like, or weekly. Register here for next Wednesday and subsequent meetups.