A student passed me a book titled "The Extreme Future: The Top Trends that will Reshape the World in the Next 20 Years" by Canton, James (2007) this morning, puzzled with the typographical layout of the text. In the prose, boxes that give top jobs in the 2015, 2020, 2025 and 2030 were interspersed among the text.
"What is the author trying to do here?"
That is a very good question to ask and I requested to borrow the book for a while so that I could perhaps ponder whether there is any intended outcome.
While browsing through the content, I came across this paragraph:
"You can see this model alive and well in some organisations that believe there will always be someone to fill the boots of those who cannot cut it. This is the attitude of the dinosaur organisation. This is a future that is based on a short-term naivete that there will always be job applicants, that talent is always abundant. This illusion of abundance will lead to the inability of an organisation to grow and develop new talent, and it will eventually spell disaster" (p. 113).
Very strong words being used.
Something worth thinking about, perhaps. Or not.
Anyway, back to the student's question. The connection as I could grasp really is about the kind of talents the economy will be looking for in the next 20 years. This information is interspersed to provide, I think, a break from the prose, with something for the reader to look at, kind of like a magazine.
Other questions pop into my head as I was going through the text:
1. Why is it that within a span of five years, top jobs could vary and shift so quickly?
2. How does the author derive these top jobs, if as mentioned by many, that these jobs are not even available yet? It sounds contradictory to me?
3. Who foresee the needs for such occupations in the future?
Many of these occupations do look alien to me and even sound alien to me, mainly because I am not so into some of the fields mentioned.
Haha, this could spell disaster for me, isn't it? Am I going to become quite irrelevant in the years to come?
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Change is inevitable... and we have been participating "in" the process.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, back to our school days, how many of us would imagine the kind of activities that we are engaged in now? Hm... I first touched computers only when I was in 1st year of university, have my 1st email when I was into "N" years of service (haha... I wasn't the first, apart from the senior manangement in the school, to possess an email account). It was so prestigious then... hahaha... and just 2 days ago, I was 'spotted' by a student twittering during a class visit! hahahaha...
What would be our technology habit in the next 5-10 years? I can't imagine!
:)