When a futurist tells us that in the year 2000 it is likely that we will commute to work with the flick of a switch, putting in our flextime hours at the "flexplace" of our choice -probably a workstation at home - we tend to react with awe. But such a notion is simply an imaginative extension of workstyles that are currently coming into vogue. The future is not sneaking up on us. It will not jump out from behind a tree some ten years hence and holler, "Boo!" The future is unfolding now, daily.
With that caveat offered, we should also defend the professionalism of those in forecasting field. They provide us with more than just images from a gypsy's crystal ball. They analyze and synthesize data, using sophisticated and sometimes highly creative rules and formulas. Would you believe that the rate of social change in Mississippi can be predicted by viewing current events in Sweden? According to the forecasters, social change occurs first in Sweden, long before it appears in Mississippi, Alabama, and Utah. Because of known patterns of change, the information gathered here is not just seat-of-the-pants guesswork.
Who Will Prosper?
By the turn of the century, 90 percent of the American work force will be employed in service industries, a catchall phrase that includes everything from data processing to theme parks to the neighborhood beauty parlor. But at least half those jobs will involve collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, structuring, storing, or retrieving information, according to Marvin Cetron, author of a number of books on the shape of the future.
Cetron and other experts on employment opportunities in the years ahead offer dire predictions for those who choose to remain in dead-end careers. "Few of the people who find themselves unemployed in the chaos of the 1990s will ever get another job doing work they know," says Cetron, referring particularly to persons in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that can be done by machines. Assembly-line workers, gas station attendants, agricultural workers, and miners, for instance, will find robotics replacing the work they knew.
But there is a bright side. Those who have chosen careers in engineering, technology, health, and hospitality, for example, will likely prosper. Five of the ten fastest-growing opportunities will be in the computer field, and we can expect a 70 percent increase in the demand for programmers and systems analysts. Cetron, in one of his many books of forecasts, makes a good case for specializing in the field of artificial intelligence or robotics.
Another expert, author and lecturer Norman Feingold, argues that the graying of America augues well for a career in the health field by the next century. "Twenty-five percent of the population will be sixty-five or over," he says. "There will be one hundred thousand people one hundred years old or older. There will be a strong demand for medical doctors and psychologists."
Feingold also recommends the computer field, a recommendation echoed by all of his fellow visionaries. "Eighty percent of the jobs will be in the information field by the turn of the century," he says, also mentioning engineering as a viable meal ticket.
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