02.21.06

Future Jobs

Posted in General, Blended Learning at 9:27 am by Norm Garrett

I gave a presentation last week at the ELearning 2006 conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which I made the statement (taken from a variety of futurists) that in the year 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because 80% of the technologies that will exist and that will create those jobs do not exist today. If you question the reality of those figures, or at least the spirit of them, then just look back 15 years to 1991. In 1991:

1. The Internet was not accessible to the public
2. The Web had not been invented yet
3. There was no such thing as a web browser or web server because the web hadn’t been invented
4. Nobody had ever heard of TCP/IP outside the halls of academia and the scientific community
5. We were transitioning from MS-DOS to Windows
6. Local area networking was only marginally functional
7. Company that nobody had heard of: Cisco
8. Companies that hadn’t been invented yet: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon
9. Virtually nobody had ever heard of email, much less used it, unless they were in academia
10. Gopher was the best source of documents on the Internet
11. Newsgroups was where most interaction took place
12. There was no such thing as .COM. There were only .GOV and .EDU
13. The term ISP (Internet Service Provider) hadn’t been coined yet as none existed
14. The best way to collaborate was dialing in to CompuServe with a 2400 baud modem
15. The term eCommerce would not be coined for several more years
16. Although computer viruses existed, they were spread by trading floppy disks
17. Trojans, spyware, spam, and bots did not exist and wouldn’t for several years
18. The typical PC had 32 mb of RAM (if you were cutting edge) and a 40 mb hard drive
19. A normal PC, not especially cutting edge, cost in the neighborhood of $3,000
20. The cutting edge processor was the Intel 386

Now, if you think of all the jobs that exist today because of the Internet alone (which didn’t exist back then, at least in a form the public had access to), you get the idea of how much things have changed over the past 15 years. Since the pace of change has increased, the difference between our world now and the world of 2020 will be even more pronounced.

We need to educate our students to live in that world, a world of which we have absolutely no knowledge. The skills we give them will need to be skills that allow them to adapt, to self-teach, and project. Are we moving in that direction or are we cruising along teaching the same way we did 40 years ago, for a world that our students will never know?

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