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Our grandparents, and even our parents, grew up in a stable time of technology and work. Especially relative to today.
They probably worked within some form of progression of the same skills, or went on to manage those who did. And, unless they had some sort of mid-life crisis, they definitely worked within the same industry. They likely even worked for the same employer or a few employers for most of their careers.
There have been other cultural influences that have changed this, but the rapid advancement of technology is an important one. Technology has changed so rapidly in the last 30 years that it has reshaped the workplace, and the skills required to maintain a successful career come and go faster than we think.
Many businesses appear and disappear in a flash, riding waves of technological developments and the niche market bubbles created by them. Jobs come and go right along with them. I think it would be most accurate to say the job market is more like a roller coaster now than, well, a market.
Entire skill sets become the "profession of the future" and then are gone in a decade.
The hardest part is, even in the midst of all of this, we still expect things to change similar to how they did before. We train and study for careers that might not even be there by the time we have our certifications or degrees.
Go to college, get a degree. This was sound advice from our parents who, in their generation, saw those with degrees being helped to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
But, now? Everyone has a degree. How does a degree help you get ahead when everyone has one? And is your degree even going to be relevant 10 years after you finished getting it? Heck, it takes longer than that to pay off student debt.
Getting a degree in programming was seen as the go-to career for the last 30 years. First for those who could wrap their mind around the complexities of primitive programming languages. But then languages got more streamlined, blocks of solved code became widely available, tools got better. Meanwhile, everyone got a degree and the market saturated with new graduates just in time for entry-level programming jobs to evaporate. Thanks to AI.
Honestly, what is anyone supposed to do about any of this? How is anyone supposed to be able to rely on their skillset and navigate the market from year to year? Let alone plan their life around a career?
There have been several experts who have theorized that skills themselves, especially specialized skillsets, are no longer important. And that they will become increasingly less so.
Now, the most important skill?
According to the research of author David Epstein, conceptual transfer, broad problem-solving, and adaptive reasoning are the most important skills of the future. I’m poorly paraphrasing him here, but he suggests that “hyper-specializing” is a trap. Logically, this makes sense, with the only thing that is certain is that more change is coming.
Meanwhile, back with our parents. The most groundbreaking technology of their generation: computers, entered the workplace mid-way through their careers. It didn't change all that much. Really.
Sure, all those filing cabinets were now, theoretically, useless, but the same principles of organization applied. And many organizations didn't even digitize their archives until well into the 00s or 10s. I was running up and down stairs to grab old paper documents for a previous job as recently as 2018.
The only skill requirement, really, was being able to move and click a mouse. Open a folder. Write and send an email. That's it. Things everyone already knew how to do.
Keyboard skills were already mostly universal. The QWERTY keyboard had existed for over a hundred years thanks to typewriters. Stenographers and typists were already a career, and people had, generally, used a keyboard long before they ever laid eyes on a computer.
Completing an even slightly more complex action, like opening a PDF, wasn't even disqualifying. They were already well entrenched in leadership roles, and so, as leaders, they set a standard that was tolerant of their shortcomings. That's what the kids were for anyway.
Had the PDF come along a little earlier, we likely would have quickly seen earlier members of that generation disqualified from advancing in their careers. Something like that emerging today would certainly have modern employers rubbing their hands with glee while they figured out who to include in the next layoff.
In recent memory, there have been an untold number of important skills that have disappeared and reappeared. This is, in part, because skills are coming into usefulness before disappearing like never before.
Go to college, get a degree was sound advice from our parents who, in their generation, saw those with degrees being helped to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
But, now? Everyone has a degree. How do you differentiate yourself? How does a degree help you stand ahead?
Getting a degree in programming was seen as the go-to career for the last 30 years. But then everyone got one. The market saturated. New graduates entered the workforce just in time for entry-level programming jobs to evaporate thanks to AI. And just like that, the most certain career, the career that was certain to be important for the future. Now is as uncertain as my pesky writing career as I type these words right now.
At various different points in history, there have been an untold number of instances like this. But they occur now in far greater frequency, and this is just one of many. It was more or less the topic of conversation in this viral internet thread where these workers and users gathered to share and lament their skills that are no longer relavent in today's world.
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Is knowing basic programming languages a skill that we will ever need to know again?
Lines of HTML code on a screen.
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