![]() Panic time starts this month as a million young adults feel the sting of being ejected into the real world. Yes, we’re entering graduation season and 99.9% of the post-millennials who shake hands with the principal/dean have no idea what happens next. It’s a failure of parenting, if you ask me. The time to prepare your kids for the future is when they’re in diapers. Even if you bribed the dean to get your kid into school, or went the old-fashioned route of endowing a chair at your selected institution, and even if you hired dopplegangers to sit in on their classes and take all their tests, you’re still a failure if you didn’t begin paving the way for them in utero. Proper parenting requires optimal curation of the music that’s piped into the womb, detailed consideration of the best native language for their nannies and precise dietary choices. Most important, success-driven parenting must focus on the ultimate prize: the best possible job for our scions. Beware, though, because predictions about the best jobs are often wildly off target. Every so often, I’ll read an article about preparing our kids for the jobs of the future, and precisely as often, I get a good laugh. Coding is the rage right now, with special coding camps and toys that teach preschoolers the basics of writing ifXthenY and ifJdoK. There’s no harm to it, of course, but the future has a tendency to turn out differently than we planned. The earlier we set our direction, the more off course we’ll be ten years from now. When I was in high school, we learned Fortran, which, as everyone knows, is the dominant software language today. Absolutely nothing could move Fortran from the top of the list. Ditto for the punch cards we used to enter data into our computer. Such a great tool, absolutely irreplaceable. Similarly, we were encouraged to plan for careers in space travel and we would have levitating cars and trains to ride in. Also, as predicted, we’ve been moving around for the past 40 years on jet packs strapped to our backs. Ah, good times. When our girls were younger, we were encouraged to teach them Japanese, since Japan’s economy was ascending and Japanese businesses were obliterating American industries. I never got around to enrolling the girls in Japanese studies, but it didn’t make a difference in the end. It turns out they should have been learning Mandarin. Yogi Berra said it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future, and that is a very wise bit of wisdom. One thing we can assume about almost every prediction is that it will not come to pass, and the odds of failure increase with the length of the timeline. Still, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t err on the side of hubris, so I have identified with 110% accuracy the top five jobs of the future. Train your children now, and you can thank me later.
Remember to thank me when your children have grown up and can afford to move out, thanks to these incredibly surefire job predictions. And, as a bonus, here is one more career that is certain to be a winner decades from now: Job of the Future Predictor. It’s a no-brainer. Speaking of no-brainers, there's no smarter choice than to subscribe to our weekly updates on our wacky world. Just click here and your life will be so much better than ever. Almost guaranteed.
3 Comments
David Brimm
5/7/2019 10:13:42 am
Alas, my parents neglected to fix my future in vitro. I went into communications.
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Mike Janowski
5/7/2019 11:36:24 pm
#3 will be a real thing.
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Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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