What Does Tomorrow’s Tool Belt Look Like?
How are you evolving your skills? Are you challenging yourself? What are the weaknesses in your capabilities and what are you doing to address the situation?
We’ve all got to start looking forward and imagine the jobs and opportunities of the future. There is a massive shift occurring in the American economy, accelerated by the recession. But this shift was ongoing even before the current economic crisis. And crisis it is. Our country is never going to look the same as it did 5 or 10 or 15 years ago. It is the shift to a knowledge economy, and it is inevitable. This probably means higher unemployment in the long run, much like Europe where even before the recession, unemployment rates hovered around 10%. It also means we might very well all be making a lot less money, and that wealth creation won’t occur with the depth and velocity it has in previous years. This is the new landscape; we better start making ourselves comfortable here.
Defining the Knowledge Economy
Whenever I hear people lament the fact that we don’t create anything here in America anymore, my blood boils. We do create. We create more than anyone else. By a long shot. We just don’t create the kinds of things that we used to. And because a lot of the value that we create is intangible compared to refrigerators, automobiles and fabricated steel. But create we do, and it is our job to develop the vocabulary and perspicacity to visualize to recognize our creation.
Beyond the emergence of this knowledge economy, there is a concurrent shift in the definition of words like career and profession. It is always surprising to me how resistant we are to change. But this is America. We are supposed to be the nation of change. Our destiny is to change the course of history. We have done that many times before and we will do it once again. The nation has matured to such a point that The nation where anything is possible. And yet, our national exhaustion has led us to a place where we just want to turn back the clock to when things were safe and made sense.
And when, might I ask, exactly was that? Did it ever exist? The 90′s and Bill Clinton? Reagan? The early ’60′s? The roaring 20′s? The point is that our country has never been safe or made sense. I would worry when it actually does start to make sense. Think of it: We are a country built on the ideals of liberty and freedom, yet that country was partially built on the back of slaves. The 1960′s were hardly fair and safe if you were a black, a jew, gay, or a woman. The 1990′s kind of rocked, but dig a bit deeper and you can see that many of the problems we are currently facing, terrorism in particular, were festering away while we day-traded stocks and obsessed about blowjobs.
So What Are The New Skills?
1. Vocabulary: Language is so important. Until we get comfortable with terms like knowledge and information economy, and what embodies those terms, we are going to keep feeling lost and confused. We have to start sketching out what new jobs there are. We can no longer use blanket terms like manufacturing or IT. Those are vague and misleading. Let’s talk about what the new jobs are, what they achieve, who is best to do them, what skills they need, what they pay and what they can pay in the future. We too often look at salaries and compensation as static. They aren’t. For instance, I charge different amounts for different clients. This means that my income goes up and down. It’s not ideal and its hard to sketch out very far to the future. But at least I am paying my rent right? And today that is saying a lot.
2. Flexibility: We need to become more limber with what we are willing to do. It used to be said, a lot, that there were jobs that American’s aren’t willing to do. That very well may be true, but as long as it is, we cannot also complain about outsourcing and immigration. Which we do a lot of. So stop talking about what you aren’t willing to do and start proving what you are willing to do.
We also need to become more flexible with our hours, the cities and towns we live in, and our compensation requirements. I personally do a lot of work in the off-hours. The idea of coming home at 6pm and not having to worry or think about work, let alone actually do any, is a very bourgeois concept. I expect to see this concept even more thoroughly flattened out in the years to come. We are a global economy now. I have clients in the UK and fully expect to have to do more travelling. It means I do conference calls when I’m barely awake. I don’t really want to do this, but I know that I’ll need to. This is how I am embracing flexibility.
3. Technology: I think first and foremost, every American should have a blog, that is if they don’t already. I think it vastly important that all Americans, young and old, learning how to work with the internet. A blog is the easiest way to get some experience in understanding how the web works, how content is created and published, how it is indexed, how it is shared. Starting a blog forces you, as well, into learning new skills like coding languages like CSS and HTML. Now, I am not asking for everyone to become masters of web design here. The ability to log in, upload content and publish is all I am really asking for. It would go a long way towards demystifying what the internet actually is. How many clients have I trained in blogging, in Twitter? Countless. Each time? “This is so much easier than I thought, and cooler!” Indeed. We need more of that. Because once you learn blogging, you are forced to learn other things.
What’s the best way to share my blog? Twitter of course! Then you have to learn Twitter, and there is an incentive to doing so. So you learn Twitter. And maybe after that you run into social bookmarking sites, or email newsletters. Or Whatever. The point is that each stop along the way carries its own responsibilities, courtesies, best practices. And lots of listening. We discover who does these things exceptionally well and begin to admire and learn from them.
These are just a few of the new skills that we’ll need if we are going to recapture our mantle as the nation of change. I fully believe it is our destiny to lead this world. There is no other nation either willing or able to do so. Futhermore, only the United States has that combination of optimism, confidence and tenacity to achieve it. It has to be us.
Image Source: lrargerich on Flickr
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