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Let’s start with the three Laws  of Future Employment. Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers  can’t do. Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer  opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a  higher standard of living for American consumers.) Law #3: Professional people  will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

Usually taken for granted is that future jobs depend on STEM  disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). This view is  eloquently expounded by Thomas Friedman, who argues that the US is falling  behind China and India in educating for STEM careers.

Alex Tabarrok makes a case for STEM in his excellent little e-book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance. He points out that “the US  graduated just 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years  ago. In electrical engineering there were only 11,619 graduates in 2009, about  half the number of 25 years ago.” Similarly, the numbers of US computer science  grads is flat over the past quarter century. Thus Tabarrok believes the US is  falling behind in innovation and related technologies.

But Tabarrok and much of the conventional wisdom are wrong. The job that electrical engineers did 25 years ago has almost nothing to do with the job they do today. Computers now do much of the work that people used to do – computers design circuits, do all the drafting, plan the manufacturing, etc. It used to be that an electrical engineer designed the electronics in your car. To some extent they still do, but today even the smallest components come with operating systems – in other words, your car is programmed rather than designed. Electrical engineering is a career that follows Law #1: much of it has been (and will continue to be)  computerized out of existence.

Computer science careers illustrate Law #2. Computer science services are among the most tradable in the world. It is literally a global job  market. Thus the number of computer scientists graduating from American  colleges is an irrelevant number. Further, computer science jobs are themselves being computerized. The job description for today’s computer scientist is only  tenuously related to what they did 25 years ago.

Laws #1 & 2 predict that there will likely be fewer STEM jobs in the future – they are  both easily computerized and tradable. People will always be employed in STEM  disciplines, many of them highly paid, but they’ll be paid for smarts rather than education. The disciplines will be much more competitive, with older and less talented workers left on the sidelines. Tom Friedman and Alex Tabarrok, reflecting conventional wisdom, are mistaken in maintaining that increasing STEM education is a key to future economic competitiveness.

So if computerized, tradable skills won’t create much new  employment, if any, what will? Clearly, it will be non-tradable skills that  can’t be computerized. At their most valuable these jobs depend on human-human interaction – empathy. Counseling (of any sort: psychiatric, financial, weight loss, etc.), sales, customer service, management, and personal services all rely on empathy, as does waitressing. While much teaching can be computerized, what remains will depend more on empathy than anything else. “They don’t care  what you know, but they will know if you care,” is a maxim future teachers should take to heart.

According to Ronald Coase it is  generally cheaper to engage freelance labor than to hire employees, unless the market transaction costs are too high. The internet lowers transaction costs  and makes smaller firms (fewer employees) more economical. Thus we arrive at the Third Law of Future Employment: professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have jobs. This already happens in computer science: projects are put out to bid on websites for global competition. Much journalism today is freelance, as is graphic design, engineering, or any number of other skills. The third law predicts this trend will grow.

The bottom line is that today’s young people need to develop an individually unique set of marketable skills for tomorrow’s job market. A marketable skill is more than an education (which is not a skill), and also more than just job training (a skill, but no larger expertise). The useful benchmark is it takes 10,000 hours to become expert in something.

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My conclusion: a combination of technical skills and sales skills is where the future lies. You need both. But sales are more crucial than the technical skills. It’s not good enough to build a better mousetrap. You must be able to market it.

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