The Skills You Need for the Future of Work
Today, I’m here to speak to the 70% of people who don’t feel prepared for the future of work. This will leave you feeling more confident about your future employment.
Today, I’m here to speak to the 70% of people who don’t feel prepared for the future of work. This will leave you feeling more confident about your future employment. I’ve got actionable advice and insight into the future of work. Forewarned is forearmed.
Over half of US workers are worried about how AI will be used in the workplace.
Over a third believe it will lead to fewer job opportunities for them personally.
70% of people don’t feel prepared for the future of work.
First, we’re going to start with a story.
I remember it like it was yesterday. The year was 1980. My father had taken my brother and me to the cheese factory where he worked. We didn’t visit the factory floor. Instead, he took us to an office where engineers worked. There, on a table, was a large monitor and keyboard.
“This is a computer,” he said. “Get used to them, because someday they’re going to be everywhere.”
That was the first time I got advice on the future of work, and it stuck with me. We had computers around the house growing up. I took every opportunity I could get to learn about them. I developed an affinity for them and eventually built a 25-year career in IT. Not everyone gets such good advice at an early age.
It was decades before computers redefined work, but they did. The pace of change is faster today. With the hardware and network in place, software can change the world of work in a matter of years. As is the case with LLMs. Just a few years after ChatGPT ushered in a new era, job changes are happening and accelerating. Entire areas of employment will be wiped out. The good news is we’ve been here before, and we’re still standing.
Shifting World of Work
Technology and society have continually changed what it means to make a living. Each step eliminates old jobs and creates new opportunities for a growing population.
For the vast majority of our history, we were hunters and gatherers. Then came the agricultural revolution. As people settled in place, they developed farming techniques. This increased food production, eventually leading to the creation of many different types of specialized work.
Next, we had the industrial age. Changing the primary means of production from labor and land, to labor and capital. Factories, machinery, and financial resources. Agrarian and handicraft economies were replaced by large-scale industry in the factory system. Luddites feared machines would make people irrelevant. They didn’t, but they did shift people away from the countryside to cities and dangerous work.
The next major shift was the digital age. Computers automated repetitive tasks. The internet enabled remote work. Once again, there was widespread fear that jobs would disappear. In the end, more jobs were created than eliminated, though the nature of work changed drastically.
Most recently, the world of work was shifted not by technology but by the coronavirus. This forced rapid change to widespread remote work, and led to declines in areas such as food service, customer service, and production work. This continuation of shifts that began during the pandemic is where we find ourselves now.
Jobs of the Future
There’s a great McKinsey report on the impact of generative AI on the world of work. A link to it is in the references. It goes in-depth into the market and what’s impacting it. They grouped careers or jobs into three main categories.
resilient and growing
stalled but rising
hit and declining
Resilient and Growing.
This group represents 36% of the workforce, and is expected to see nearly 10 million new jobs for a 17% gain. To fill these jobs, we will need to elevate people from other groups.
Health care is a large part of this group. Our aging population is a significant factor in this. Of the jobs represented in this group, this may be the best target for upskilling. Most of these jobs can’t be done remotely, aren’t eligible for future automation, and require lower levels of education.
Last-mile delivery is a part of this group. It requires less education, but it’s also not a great field for primary employment. The delivery services that boomed during COVID will continue to grow. It is a field in demand, but it needs some adjustments to be sustainable as a job. Look to the section on Systemic and Social Adjustments below for more.
STEM and legal professionals are growing fields, despite being heavily impacted by AI. I work as a software developer and use AI daily. It is good as a junior-level assistant, but for the foreseeable future, it still needs a competent person to tell it what to do and integrate its output into the larger picture.
Legal is the same. I need some operating agreements to start a business. I can generate some, but you can bet I’m going to get an actual lawyer to go over what I come up with to make sure that it’s right. The message in these fields is that you need to know how to use these tools. Entry-level jobs may be harder to find.
Stalled but Rising
This group represents 25% of workers and is poised to gain nearly 3 million jobs, for 7% growth. The report was written in 2023, and as you’ll see, the news might not be as bright for parts of this group.
A group of these jobs isn’t impacted much by automation. Property maintenance, community service, and agriculture can feel some productivity gains, but aren’t eligible for automation.
The report noted some gains in construction and related fields due to infrastructure and green-energy investments made during the Biden administration. Due to the Trump administration’s freezing of those funds, the gains might not be realized.
There’s also growth driven by the demand for reskilling and lifelong learning. This includes jobs in education, creative fields, and the like.
These roles are in high demand but are also heavily impacted by AI. This means you’ll have to know how to work with AI to remain competitive.
As a personal example, I do creative work with images. I frequently find myself generating or adjusting images, incorporating them into something, and then fine-tuning them in Photoshop. Sometimes it’s just easier to do it yourself instead of explaining to AI exactly what you want.
Hit and Declining
These are areas at risk over the next 5 years and beyond. Currently, this bucket is 39% of the workforce. Up to 6 million, or 10% of these jobs, will be gone. Our most significant opportunity is to help them upskill into higher-paying jobs of the future. This is worthwhile work that will leave all of us better off when we accomplish it.
Factory work will continue to disappear. Globalization enabled corporations to take advantage of cheaper labor by moving jobs overseas. Automation will continue to take these jobs. Outside of key components and products, this shouldn’t be something we chase after.
Customer service and sales will see continued decline. The ability to get information and purchase products and services has already been moving to web-based platforms for a while. VaynerMedia is also talking about AI-generated avatars taking up more of this space. This will bridge the gap and provide a higher-quality level of service across digital platforms, in-store displays, and future platforms like XR.
Food services jobs will continue the decline seen during COVID. This is part of the shift away from customer sales and service and increased automation.
Office support is the final category here. The rise of remote work means fewer people are in the office to support. The digitization of everything keeps more work products in the digital work, requiring fewer people to help keep the corporate juices flowing.
Skills for Jobs of the Future
To prepare for the future, workers must be intellectually fit, lean into their humanity, and, if they want to flourish, develop an entrepreneurial spirit.
Over 10 million people will need to reskill over the next 5 years to adjust to the shifting job market. This trend will increase going forward. For individuals, this means lifelong learning is a must.
This isn’t entirely a personal project. Employers will play a critical role in facilitating this learning. This is true even today, where a majority of skills used on the job are learned on the job. Education is intellectual fitness. Like physical fitness, it will become part of a daily routine, not something done only when needed.
Being AI literate is a must. If you aren’t experimenting today, you should be. The first thing I’d recommend is to start learning how to use AI as a learning assistant. The best thing to do is use it to teach you how to use it better. Try this prompt: “I don’t know how to use LLMs, help me figure out how to ask good questions.” Then, whenever you ask a question or give a prompt, ask it to help you refine it “Improve this prompt, ask clarifying questions, and explain how and why you improved it **prompt or question here**”. The ** before and after your prompt help the LLM know where your question begins and ends.
Workers can’t lean on credentials alone. They need to focus on traits that machines cannot replicate (yet). Employers are already moving priority away from credentials to these traits.
Individuals should develop: Leadership and Empathy, which is the ability to guide teams, collaborate effectively, and understand complex social situations—skills AI cannot replicate; and Agility and Resilience, which is the mental toughness to adapt to frequent job changes, recover from setbacks, and navigate a continuously evolving career landscape. Resilience, for instance, can be intentionally built by tackling rigorous, challenging personal goals (like running a marathon).
The Entrepreneurial Shift
The model of a lifetime, salaried career is rapidly being replaced by independent, flexible work arrangements, necessitating a shift toward an entrepreneurial mindset.
The Rise of the Portfolio Career shows that the trend toward gig work, dropshipping, and content creation is a continuation of historical economic shifts, moving beyond the Industrial Age’s reliance on single, monolithic employers. Workers are now juggling multiple income streams and part-time roles rather than depending on one full-time, salaried position.
This shift has Positive and Negative Outcomes. It offers individuals greater flexibility and independence, which can be highly empowering. However, it also allows corporations to externalize risk and avoid providing benefits by relying on cheaper contract labor, leading to increased risk individuals.
Systemic and Social Adjustments
The government has a role to play in supporting an economy dominated by independent contract work and automation.
Single-Payer Healthcare is a must. A continued shift away from jobs that provide decent benefits makes this more critical. Single-payer healthcare offers better outcomes for less money. This is a no-brainer. Look to the results from the rest of the developed world if you have questions.
A shorter workweek is inevitable to shift away from the trend towards increasing inequality. Technology-driven productivity gains flow almost exclusively to the ultra-wealthy. This adjustment will increase job opportunities, reduce burnout in demanding jobs, and enable companies to provide more consistent service to their customers.
Robust social safety nets are required: Universal Basic Income (UBI) would establish an income floor, ensuring that no citizen falls below the threshold for food and shelter during economic transitions. It supports a riskier, more flexible workforce without discouraging higher achievement.
A Job Guarantee Program, alongside UBI, could offer meaningful, non-profit-driven work (similar to Great Depression-era projects). This also addresses the “meaning crisis” in society, ensuring that all citizens can engage in productive, purposeful work that provides dignity beyond a simple cash handout.
Life Prepares Us Regardless
When I was a kid, people thought sitting in front of a video game all day was bad. “You’re going to rot your brain”. But guess what? It prepared us for the future. Right now, I sit in front of a screen all day long. Yes, mental and physical breaks are needed, but this part of my childhood was beneficial.
Now I see a similar situation with kids today. I go upstairs, and they are playing a video game on their laptop, listening to music, and half-watching YouTube on their phone. On one hand, it’s not good for you to split your attention all the time.
But fast forward 25 years. Our children are managing multiple flows of work. They’re orchestrating multiple AI agents, optimizing operations, and safeguarding things from failure as the human in the loop. Paying attention to multiple things at once is preparing them for the future of work they’re entering.
All that being said, technology isn’t done. Robots are on the horizon. AI is the brain behind these robots. As we continue to improve the form and function of robots, the brains behind them will be there. Even people in careers that seem stable now are likely to face disruption in the future.
But as we know from history, that which destroys will also create the aim. And the hope is that the net impact lines up with the population. I’m optimistic because somehow humanity has always found a way. Thanks for listening.