Your job, a decade from now, will be impacted significantly by changing trends in energy consumption. If the Industrial Revolution was fueled by coal and petroleum products, the green global technological revolution will transition gradually to being fueled by wind, solar, and tide-generated sources of energy.
The good news for you is that moving toward a greener economy means that the demand for a highly skilled, tech-savvy and educated workforce will continue to increase. New technologies need a virtual army of educated employees. When a new wind turbine goes online, jobs are generated as well as electricity. Each time a corporation realizes that in the long run, installing photo-voltaic solar panels on their rooftops will result in a better financial bottom line, jobs are generated. If you continue to evolve educationally, your job ten years from now will be much better than the one you have now.
The role of information technology jobs will only grow in importance as business continues to evolve. In your future job, being tech savvy won’t be just a nice side benefit for your employer; it will be a mandatory facet of your core competencies which will interweave its way throughout your workday. Employees who lack tech skills may need to augment their previous traditional education with onlinelearning to catch up.
Your job ten years from now will have a far more global focus than it does now. This likely will require you to think not only in a more global fashion, but also move towards fluency in at least one additional language. Traditionally, the language(s) you studied as an undergraduate tend to come from the Romance family of languages such as Spanish, French,Italian and Portuguese. It’s much more likely that the importance of being fluent in Chinese—specifically Mandarin—will continue to increase as China’s economy inexorably expands.
In the past, the predominant educational emphasis tended toward a traditional view that you were educated, got it behind you, and moved on toward the rest of your life. This non-dynamic view of education meant that many folks graduated from a traditional college or university and never again picked up a text book or bothered to learn much of anything after wards, except maybe how to program their VCR. That’s not going to cut it anymore. Lifelong learning will no longer be the perquisite of tweed-clad academicians perusing dust-covered copies of Virgil in their ivory towers. You may not need to become proficient in Latin grammar, or know everything there is to know about Beowulf, but you can bet you’ll need to continue to study just to keep up.
Regardless of the field in which you currently work, the job that you’re doing ten years from now will likely look very different than it does today. Many of the trends which have continued to shape the postmodern business world are here for the long haul and aren’t going away anytime soon.