Tomorrow’s Jobs Today

1100 words, 5 minute read

When I was fresh out of college with a catalogue of philosophy courses under my belt, a recruiter asked me to describe my dream job. My response caught both of us off guard: “I don’t want to be a CEO; I want to be a senior, ‘off the org chart’ advisor to a CEO.”

Who did I have in mind? Henry’s Cromwell, Jabba’s Sy Snootles, Eliot’s “attendant lord…full of high sentence but a bit obtuse?” I didn’t get the job. Apparently, I didn’t have the skill set my prospective employers were seeking. But at least I had England’s greatest 20^th century poet for commiseration: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

Following Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, to whom I owe the original framework for these ideas, I may have been about 60 years ahead of my time. I was proposing to be a generalist in an age of ever increasing specialization. As usual, I was out of sync. Would that I were a half century younger, I might just now be coming into my own, hitting my stride so to speak. Quelle domage!

According to Cherny, the job market of the future will not segment according to learned skills. Today our economy is organized around hundreds of occupational titles: doctor, lawyer, plumber, clerk. We are all essentially day laborers, gathering pre-dawn in our own respective occupational pods, waiting for some unsuspecting customer to choose us for some task.

Ok, maybe this model is a bit ‘depression era’ dated, but applied to today’s employment landscape, it retains an element of truth. For the most part, the job market categorizes us based on the skills we acquired in school or at some previous post. We wait for a particular employer to be looking for that specific set of skills.

But the day of the ‘skill set professional’ is coming to a close! Who needs knowledge when we have LLMs? Who needs experience now that we have AI? Who needs competence when we have Bots? Soon, we will be classifying workers based on their relevance to the enterprise rather than on their job specific skills. According to Cherny’s model, I would be a potential hire for any employer for whose felt needs matched my problem solving style.

The enterprise of the future will not be judged according to information or acumen but by creativity and problem solving prowess. I would as likely end up working for an aerospace company as for a supermarket chain and I probably would do both at different times in my career. Life would be a lot of fun…but stressful.

Following Cherny’s basic idea, I have divided the personnel needs of the modern enterprise into five problem solving charisms:

Dreamers are the creators, the inventors. Out of thin air, they conceptualize new products and novel processes. “They dream of things that never were…” (Bobby Kennedy) 

Implementers are engineers, the builders. They make the dreamers’ dreams come true, translating back of the napkin sketches into working prototypes.

Optimizers make good things better. Got milk? They’ll QC it from udder to sippy cup. 

Adaptors modify or repurpose existing products and processes to solve new problems.

Finally, Maintainers keep things going. They anticipate problems. They monitor, trouble shoot, and repair; and when that doesn’t work, they MacGyver it. Maintainers make the trains run on time…and cost effectively.

Where do your problem solving skills lie? What gets your blood pumping? The classrooms of the future will have nothing to do with acquiring information. We have Bots for that! Instructors will become (or be replaced by) educators. Learning will be student directed and problem focused and facilitated by experienced ‘Solvers in Residence’ (Sirs, formerly known as teachers). 

Every class, day, week, or term will begin with a problem to be solved and a time frame in which to solve it. With the help of a facilitator, students will work individually, collectively, and in teams toward a common solution.

In the course of a school career, each student will have multiple opportunities to try her hand at all five problem solving disciplines. What are you good at? What do you enjoy? Regardless, everyone needs a thorough understanding of all five phases of Process Enterprise.

Like a modern medical student on steroids, you will do several ‘rotations’ in each problem solving specialty. At the end, instead of choosing a career as a gynecologist or neurologist,  you will choose to spend your work life dreaming, implementing, optimizing, adapting or maintaining.

The evolution of education from instruction to invention will be painfully gradual, but the landscape already sports a few green shoots. The proliferation of consultants, investment bankers, systems analysts, and venture capitalists attests to the new relevance of generalists (vs. specialists). The emergence of subject matter focused magnet schools and the appearance of problem solving classes in some university curricula are positive signs but “we’ve only just begun.” (Carpenters)

And while we’re waiting for the problem solving curricula of the future to be developed and deployed, we may see a shift in the constellation of college majors. The STEM era may give way to a new appreciation of certain despised concentrations, especially those that have strong problem solving components. A few potential campus winners: philosophy, followed in no particular order by anthropology, economics, linguistics, logic, and graphic arts. Heck, we may even see a reemergence of the much maligned English major.

But “why wait any longer for the world to begin? You can have your cake and eat it too.” (Bob Dylan) Why wait any longer for what you love when it’s standing in front of you? Prepare today for tomorrow’s job market. Ransack the attic for your dog eared copy of Ulysses, or if you’re brave, your unopened Finegan’s Wake. Practice reading non-linearly. Decode. Retrofit your analog trained mind for the coming quantum era. And…

Challenge: If you are reading this article and have the necessary skill set, why not develop a questionnaire to measure an applicant’s aptitude and inclination for the various problem solving roles? It could be a useful service…and psst: it’s monetizable!