The Future of Careers in the Emerging Economy

Locally and globally, we continue to see that the nature of jobs is profoundly changing, and what we do in order to earn our incomes, and how we do it, will never be the same. Importantly, none of this will ever again conform to what were the norms or rules or expectations across companies or through the years. The business of getting, keeping, being rewarded for and losing jobs has become a virtual free-for-all.

On August 19th, I had the pleasure of participating in DeVry University’s first In-Demand Careers Summit. I spoke to the audience about the galloping pace of change, and how a slew of new technologies are ushering people out of their jobs, and changing the way we work and live. While many people view the current economic climate as a recession, in our shop, we view this as a period of transition and transformation. We are moving from the world as we have always known it to a radically new one – and with it comes an urgent need for new ways of doing business, structuring organizations, and living our lives.

At the event, I spoke about how careers will never be the same as they used to be, and will look very different in the years to come. The idea that there are definitive beginning, middle and end stages to an individual’s life is also shifting. People are now more likely to quit work and go back to school or retire and then take up a new career than ever before; life is less and less likely to follow a linear path. There are also no career paths any more in one place or one industry, and there is no longer any guarantee that the job will even be there as long as a year later.

We also looked at where information security is moving in the future. One of the things we’re seeing is that the rampant proliferation of new technologies, both in the home and in the workplace, is ushering in a new dimension of online privacy. In an era of heightened information security and fallibility, it is becoming more and more important to make sure your online data is not getting confused with someone else’s data. Learning how to manage this will be critical in the 21st century, especially as online personal data is controlled and owned less and less by the individual.

As technology rapidly advances, increasingly complex networks are allowing weaknesses to infiltrate and compromise entire systems. Consequently, the erosion of online privacy will increase the importance of learning how to manage and control this ever-growing cluster of networked data, and will likely create a growing demand, and market of significance, for jobs within the information security field.

Lastly, since work is no longer defined by the place, but rather by a series of activities that can be conducted virtually anywhere and at any time, those employed in information security-related fields will need to closely monitor both of these environments. Universities will also need to teach a new generation about data security and risk, and help students identify and address the real-world challenges of IT security in new and innovative ways.