Future Job Titles
By Jim Paterson - The Futurist. May 1 2002
Our future jobs will define our culture.
Labor-market forecasters believe that tomorrow's new jobs will increasingly be found in the service sector, particularly in work related to health, communications, and computers. But the new jobs will have unfamiliar titles, such as visualization specialists, social network analysts, parenting counselors, and corporate jesters, who will get paid to tell their leaders the important truths they don't want to hear.
The services and distribution sectors will easily see the most new jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Areas related to personal appearance and physical health, communications, and travel will be particularly fertile, BLS notes in a recent report, "New and Emerging Occupations."
The BLS report suggests that 25% of the industries with new and emerging occupations are involved in health, social, and educational services, while another 15% provide personal business and recreational services.
Work related to personal appearance and physical conditioning is becoming more prominent, BLS reports. More jobs will be available in exercise instruction, for example.
In the business sector, there is a continuing trend toward jobs that help companies keep pace with advances in communications. Webmasters and Web site designers will be in demand, as will specialists who can help provide visualizations for online catalogs and training programs. Trend analyst Faith Popcorn calls them explanation graphic designers.
In her new book Dictionary of the Future, Popcorn defines some 50 possible job titles of the future. Most of the jobs she identifies involve services, about a quarter of which are related to health care.
More than half of us will be working at jobs that don't exist yet, Popcorn argues, and many that exist now will vanish. She cites business analyst Tom Peters's forecast that 90% of white-collar jobs will be either "destroyed or altered beyond recognition in 10-15 years."
Health-service jobs that Popcorn foresees include bioinformationists-scientists who work with the abundant genetic information being generated and serve as a bridge between the scientist and those developing drugs and clinical techniques. She also predicts the emergence of geomicrobiologists, who will piece together bits of geology, environmental science, and microbiology to study how microorganisms might help make new medicine or clean up pollution.
Popcorn also foresees the growth of experimental therapy experts, who would connect patients with the right new therapy, and hospitalists, a type of ombudsman who can guide the patient through the maze of hospital services.
In business, social network analysts will study the real flow of power through a company, and simplicity experts will simplify and streamline a corporation's technology, Popcorn says.
On the Internet, she projects the need for cybrarians to monitor the ever-growing Internet, Web gardeners to maintain Web sites, and e-mail counselors to help employees with poor writing skills who are struggling with the "compressed, immediate, and risky nature of e-mail."
To manage our new jobs, personal career coaches will become increasingly important, as will retirement counselors and "gap year" counselors to help young people handle what Popcorn predicts will become a common period of exploration before college.
Terrorism analysts will gain status, as will cool consultants to help product marketers or city planners determine what might become trendy. And customer-relations departments will employ whisperers who are particularly adept at calming even the most irate customer or client.
"In a society that defines who we are by what we do, what could be more important than understanding what we will be doing next?" Popcorn asks. "Another way to put it: Job descriptions are the subtitles of the culture."
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20212. Web site www.bls.gov.
Dictionary of the Future by Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft. Hyperion. 2001. 414 pages. Available from the Futurist Bookstore for $24.95 ($22.95 for Society members), cat. no. B-2401.
