Job Vacancy.

For a long time, like most people, I didn't change jobs. I was in private business with a partner and we succeeded in what we set out to accomplish over nearly 20 years until we sold. Some time off, for no reason other than I could, and not knowing what I wanted to do next, gave me pause to think about my next job. I took a couple of years out from the industry I knew best and built a small restaurant and cooked for my supper, so to speak. Not a normal sequence of events compared to my past history but certainly more aligned with today's thinking that a couple of years can seem a lifetime. Jobs that lasted forever are changing and disappearing with the new business landscape. Banks and manufacturers are making sure of that, as the current headlines scream of job losses.

I mention the above in the context of people searching for that special niche that will satisfy a lifetime occupation, so that decades pass in working bliss, without challenge and thought of change. Today the cliched gold watch at 25 years is an anachronism of times past when the opportunity to move jobs was not just limited by the number of job vacancies but also by the number of occupations available to you. Today you can be anything you want to be or anything you dream to be, for a month, a year or even what seems a lifetime to some, two years. As technology changes, so does the occupational landscape and what people were happy doing ten, twenty or even five years ago is going through the greatest change in business history.

Jobs not around five years ago sustain entire industries today and challenge the status quo for the future. A drone dispatcher, as opposed to "top gun" pilot, the Star Trek tele transport operator as opposed to the taxi driver, the holographic and digital global architect and the amnesia brain surgeon are jobs in development requiring CV skills not present today. Up skilling required for robot designers, 3D engineers and replacing most things with technology has some futurists predicting two billion jobs to disappear by 2030.

What definitely won't be around are many of the face to face interactions we rely on daily. There certainly won't be check out operators in supermarkets, people handing over music CDS or movie DVDs for your weekend pizza nights, nor will there be people building your next house or even tending to your medical needs. So without that retirement package to set you up on your own desert island, what are the safe occupations that will test even the most ardent change manager? Seems all the projections counter with 3 jobs that will never be outsourced to technology or realigned to future needs. Politicians, prostitutes and criminals are coming into their own as job disintermediation takes place. So take heart that the drones we have running our country will, like the cockroaches, outlast the nuclear winter of change.

So if you don't want to enter the political, flesh or gun toting drug smuggling cyber criminal occupations, take heart that the opportunity technology and change brings gives generations following the ability to choose what they really want to be, even if it doesn't exist yet. What do you want to be when you grow up?