The Future of Work And What It Will Mean to Have a Career

I read an article on BBC about a 90-year-old mechanic who retired after 75 years working with the same company. The story made me write this article.

According to BBC, Bryan Webb started at Vauxhall in Gloucester, England as an apprentice in 1946 when he walked into the office to ask if they had any jobs. When h got to 65, h agreed to stay on for a couple of years and it turned into 25.

Much respect to grandpa Bryan. The company honored him with a Lifetime Employee Award.

I don’t want to talk about employee loyalty or loving your job as most would make of Bryan Webb’s 75-year mechanic career. Let’s instead think about the future of work and what it means to have a “career” today.

You see, elders like Bryan Webb had what you can call a career. What we have now is a cascade of job upheavals. You are a driver today, but tomorrow cars drive themselves.

You’re in finance, but suddenly computer algorithms can do the job 1000x better than you. You’re a cashier, but the world is becoming cashless.

Jobs disappear, and new ones emerge. The newly emerged jobs never remain the same. They keep changing. That means the days of one employee working for one company for decades are waning. In 10 years, the job you have will probably change into something else or become obsolete. Or the company would have transformed into a different industry.

And so, humans are required to be constantly reinventing themselves into new professionals. And they have to do this not just once but throughout their life.

The question here is;- as humans living in a hectic world, do we have the mental muscles to go through this constant retraining into new specialists?

What will the future of jobs look like? What does it mean to have a carer today?

I think the first waves of industrial revolutions were easy for humans to adapt to. Wagon riders could easily become taxi drivers and others became machine operators. But the AI revolution is a completely different beast we are dealing with.

No job is ever safe from the future of automation because these damn computers keep updating and improving themselves at a pace humans cannot keep match. And mind you, AI is just in its infancy as we speak.

So, at the age of 90, grandpa Bryan can sit and say ‘I had a career. While the rest of us when we get older we would sigh and say, “that was messy”

Most of us are dimly aware of AI and what it can do to humanity. This video below is helpful.