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Special Projects Assistant

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While you are daydreaming of future career possibilities, why not also begin to think about the skills you are going to need in the future?

While current career options at present may not always look great, there’s a lot to look forward to in the future. New fields are being developed almost every month, and new opportunities in a range of disciplines seem to be popping up fairly frequently – especially with new businesses (startups) being created around the world at a very fast rate. While it’s hard to specify what exactly these future careers are, there are some hints at what the years ahead could hold. Some of these careers may come across as unconventional – certainly at present – but there will most likely be a market for them, as far as the Telegraph is concerned. You can also view Sparks & Honey’s SlideShare report here about upcoming careers.

Let’s start with something science-related, which would be a food chemist. And you’re probably wondering why. Well, with the advent of 3D printers, food chemists will be able to mix ingredients using their knowledge, and ‘print’ food from a printer, resulting in quite a novel (and most certainly useful) way to create food. In fact, “NASA has already implemented a study to see how 3D food printers would fare on space missions.”

And seeing how 3D printing is going to be something fairly revolutionary (it already is in many cases), you may need some assistance in using it for the first time. Well, turns out there might be a career for that. The 3D printer handyperson would offer repairs by making parts on site, and of course fixing any maintenance issues. That will probably be a lot more intriguing than fixing a laser printer!

Carrying on with more tech-related fields, an ‘ethical’ hacker is apparently going to be a great field. Yes, that is an oxymoron. Imagine a career where you deliberately get to go into a system with malicious intent, except you’re doing it in order to find any loopholes before it gets distributed publicly. The reasoning for this is as a likely career is because, as you may be aware, even the most secure systems have vulnerabilities, and companies want to recruit the minds that initiate such breaches.

Speaking of the internet, here’s a career that you may not have thought of as an actual career – a Privacy Consultant/Cyber Security Specialist. We’re not talking about your IT consultant who ensures your computer is safe from attack. Instead, in this role, the privacy consultant would identify vulnerabilities in your personal networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…) and make suggestions to fix them. It sounds far-fetched, but it could very well be a possible career, especially with corporations’ social media pages recently getting compromised.

And those social media accounts that you probably access on your smartphone are another big market. There never seems to be enough iOS/Android/etc. developers around, and with tablets and smartphones becoming more integral parts of our lives, it’s pretty clear that the mobile application developer will be around for a while. So if your interest lies in becoming a mobile application developer, your future looks fairly bright.

If you’re looking at something more design-related, you can blend your coding skills from application development with digital architecture. As an increasing amount of our lives go digital, so too do the buildings around us – especially with new aspects of computing such as augmented reality developing (think Google Glass). The digital architect would work with advertisers to create ‘virtual advertisements’ on buildings projected through the use of augmented reality. Sounds pretty neat eh?

Delving more into traditional corporate practices (although the following practice is nowhere near traditional), we have the ‘Crowdfunding Specialist.’ This individual’s task would be to be skilled on websites such as Kickstarter and to promote ideas to attain maximum funding. Think of it as a way a corporation would act as a startup through effective promotion.

Lastly, and something maybe a bit unexpected, the agricultural industry will need more people. As you may know, more people in the world will create a need for more food, and you’d need to farm to do so. However, as land space is expected to be used increasingly for dwellings, space available for farming will be a bit harder to come by. And so comes in the urban shepherd and organic food farmer. Traditional methods of growing may not work as well as they did before, and consumption of organic goods will be (and is) on the rise. With regards to the urban shepherd, a mixture of micro-farming and using small urban plots to raise animals could be a sign of the times.

While you are daydreaming of future career possibilities, why not also begin to think about the skills you are going to need in the future? This resource from ‘Institute For The Future’ has some useful information with regards to work skills that may be useful to have in 2020, and is definitely worth a look.

So there we have it, some future careers that could develop sooner than you may think! Of course this is mostly educated speculation, so it does need to be taken with a grain of proverbial salt, but do remember that these could all be attainable positions. And finally, don’t (ever) let your future scare you.

Special Projects Assistant
visibility  62
Nov 15, 2013

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