Changing A Job? No, The Job Is Changing

Young and raring to go, but despairing at shrinking opportunities? This is your Bible to grasp the truths about emerging and future trends in the job market.

- Lola Nayar and Jyotika Sood

Are you a welder or a soldering machine operator in a power plant? Chances are, you’re not. A medical transcriptionist? Data entry operator? Machi­nist? A teller at a bank?

Perhaps, or someone you know is. Or was…. What’s common to all of them? They all sound slightly, er, 20th century, don’t they? This is a small sample­set of a certain kind of job not as universally to be found as before. Many of them did indeed require skills, patience and unceasing hard work, but some where, tragically but unrelentingly, they have been—or are in the process of being—outstripped by the pace of technological obsolescence. Yes, there are still thousands of welders and machinists, perhaps more than before: it’s the ratio that’s changing. It’s the shrinking proportion of such jobs, in relation to the total, that tells us of a sea­change. And yes, job security. Once you could spend decades in a job, even in the private sector. Now, when even government is downsizing, you could be looking at five years max, if you’re lucky.

Say you’re 19, just a year or so short of entering the job market. You’d be too young to remember a time when learning typing and shorthand was a sureshot way to land a job. Would you do that now? Not such a smart idea, right? So what do you do? First off, you must understand what’s happening.