Twenty of the 25 (US) jobs with “the largest projected growth don’t require college degree (& are low-wage)” – via @BillIves.

[BTW: Many of these jobs are healthcare related. Clearly, sickness and health cannot be automated/outsourced (so much).]

Simple, repeatable tasks, wherever possible, are being replaced through automation. More complicated tasks, non-core, are outsourced to cheaper locations. If you want to be (well) paid as a (developed world) knowledge worker, you need to move up the value chain toward complexity and chaos.

Complexity is difficult to pass on to someone else to deal with. It take more intellectual rigour and sophistication to prosper in complex systems. In complexity, there is opportunity – high value.

But what to make of chaos? A derogatory term generally, perhaps here we take the meaning from chaos theory, of non-linearity. Chaos is something many of us should learn to embrace, to move toward. It’s tough, because many of us also tend to think like this:

Please radically improve everything but don’t change anything.

But, as Eric Shinseki says,

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

What else is there to do? Start moving.

Seth Godin tells a plaintive tale of what happens if you do not move forward, of a Tesco warehouse in Ireland that is crushingly automating the life from its workers.

In this case, of course, the speed of work is the quality of the work. And another no-win job is created, because if someone leaves, another person fills that slot, instantly, and the departed worker is only missed if he often brought in pie for his co-workers at lunch.

How sad that so little individual value can be added to the work at hand.

More optimistically, I recently enjoyed this crystalballing of future jobs, such as:

• Hackschooling counselor
• Cultural skill Sherpa
• Curiosity tutor
• Corporate disorganizer

These are jobs born from and into chaos.

←This Much We Know.→