Gigaom AI Minute – November 18

Transcript

I think there are five skills which are essential in the 21st century job market which weren't particularly of interest in the 20th century. The first of these is the ability to teach yourself new tasks. It's something we all do and will be required to do on an ongoing basis. In an industrial economy it wasn't really that useful. You had new tasks come along relatively infrequently and they were taught to you. The second skill is the ability to communicate, broadly speaking through speech and all the other ways. The third skill is writing. Specifically, writing, because in the 20th century in an industrial economy you didn't ever really write anything and now we spend our days writing all the time. So the ability to organize your thoughts and convey them in a clear and concise way is important. The fourth is working in groups because we more and more format hot groups, do work, and then those groups break up. In the industrial economy you didn't really have that same sort of dynamic going on. The fifth, and I think the most important skill, is the ability to use technology.

Technology, in the end, is that thing that multiplies what you're able to do. If your chosen career of the future does not employ technology then you are forever the bottleneck of your career. You can never double or triple or quadruple your productivity or it would take an incredibly long time. Those who can deploy technology, however, have the ability to grow their output potentially to no limit at all. So when one is contemplating career choices of the future ask yourself where it is that you can deploy the most technology.