Technology In Class

Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet

As educators, we’ve heard the pejorative accusation that we’re preparing our students for jobs that don’t exist yet. I’ve heard administrators say it. I’ve heard clever youtube videos making the point.

Tell us something we don’t know.

Educators have been preparing students for jobs that don’t exist for over a century, perhaps longer. With the rapid progression of technology no one has had a clue what kinds of jobs will be out there by the time our students graduate college. We know we’re preparing them for jobs that don’t exist yet.

Take Robert S. McNamara for example. Could his teachers have known that they needed to prepare McNamara to deal with the possible threat of nuclear annihilation from the Russians and Cubans when he was in high school in 1930? Could McNamara even have prepared himself? Having no defense experience, what could he have learned in school to prepare him to be Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense?

Adaptability and Analysis

It was clear that the best skill that McNamara’s teachers taught him was the ability to analyze and adapt. He was able to analyze large amounts of data and apply it to real situations, as he exhibited in his analysis of B-29 bombers and their effectiveness in WWII.

He was also able to adapt. He didn’t know anything about being the Secretary of Defense, but he adapted. He took what he had learned in the field, being president of Ford, and his experience as an accounting professor and adapted that to his new post.

Adaptability and analysis is what we can teach our students. As long as we teach them that they can learn anything they put effort toward and practice, they’ll survive. They’ll work those jobs that don’t exist yet and be fine. They’ll take the analysis they learned in Literature and Biology et al. and apply it to whatever new job will exist–Secretary of the Ether Widget World of Space and Water Technology. They’ll adapt. Hey, they’ll even be the ones that create those future jobs that we can’t name right now.

Do you want to prepare your students for jobs that don’t exist yet? Teach them adaptability and analysis. Encourage and challenge them to learn something new, something completely out of their comfortable field of knowledge. That might mean learning how to fix bikes, or how to master one aspect of a Microsoft Office program. Once they have that confidence that they can learn anything, they’ll adapt.

I’m preparing my students for jobs that don’t exist. I hope they’re part of creating innovative jobs that help us live better lives. And the adaptability and analysis lives on.

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