Here are the absolute best careers for the next generation

 
​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.
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1. Robot masseuse. After a hard day of ruling the world, what robot doesn’t need a good massage to reduce the tension in its springs? (Bonus: Our robot masters might actually keep you around for a while, or at least until they develop a better masseuse.)
2. Self-driving-taxi cleaner. It goes without saying that passengers will continue to leave a mess in the car and that garbage isn’t going to clean itself.
3. Permanent record terminator. Suddenly, all those college instatweetosnaps are going to become an embarrassment for a certain someone who is seeking a specific role at that special place. Scrubbing all the embarrassing items from the internet will require special skills and an incredible nausea threshold.
4. Beep translator. For some reason, product developers have decided everything needs to beep, pop, whoosh or jingle. Was that the pasta machine or do I need a new battery for my pacemaker? Beep translators can be lifesavers.
5. Door re-sizer. Let’s face it. With all of us working at home and having everything delivered to our doors, our obesity epidemic will only accelerate. In twenty years or so, millions of us will be too big to fit through a standard door. Door re-sizers will be like first responders, but without cool uniforms.

​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.

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