Job titles have become more and more of a black box in recent years. Hip titles such as "Chief Happiness Officer" or "Social Content Producer" now exist in most large companies, and rightly so. //next columnist Markus Sekulla went on a journey to find the job of tomorrow and dug out some nuggets.
They are to be envied, our grandparents. Take my grandfather. He could roughly choose between 2 jobs. Blacksmith or carpenter. Many scientific studies show that with too many alternatives, we struggle to choose the "right" one. So my grandfather became a blacksmith and did this job happily all his life. Today, when I look around at my circle of friends, some still don't know what they really want to be even after graduating and a few years of work experience. “Is this really for me?“, they ask themselves. The fear of greener grass is real.
The bad news is that the trend continues towards more choice due to rapid technological development. Not only can I now choose to be a programmer rather than a cyber security officer, but I have to choose between the x different languages. On top of that, there is global change at high speed and new forms of organisation and ways of working that comes with it, which in turn also creates new roles.
The good news is that there are really great new jobs!
Let's take a closer look at some of these great new jobs:
Well, it actually started with a PR stunt by United Airlines, who signed Oscar from Sesame Street to be the CTO (Chief Trash Officer) at the airline. We won't go into the campaign here, but people seem to have taken to the job title. With the flood of plastic we consume every day, companies increasingly have to ask themselves what more sustainable solutions can look like that are more recyclable or cradle to cradle. Who better to do this than a Chief Trash Officer.
New models of work have hit our lives like a huge wave in the last 3 years. While in the early days of COVID we all had to stay at home, right now is the time to find the healthy balance between remote and office. But new working models go much further than just being in the office. Should you have a kicker table (kidding)? Should all meetings be 50 minutes instead of 60? Should one even have that many meetings and perhaps schedule a day completely free of appointments? Who better to answer this than a cultural architect?
Artificial intelligence is casting its shadow ahead. Content creation has been pretty much thrown into the spin cycle in recent months, with the addition of a new player. ChatGPT in particular has been in the spotlight. Many of you have probably also tried your hand at Open AI. But input (aka prompt) is not equal to input. If you ask the machine different questions, you will get different answers (this is also the case with us humans). In my eyes, if you follow a few rules, it's not rocket science, especially since you can reframe your question after the answer. But if you look around in forums (e.g. Reddit), there seems to be more to it than you might think. So who could get more out of ChatGPT than a prompt architect.
BLet's stay on the topic of AI. Here I have admittedly cheated a bit. But the job title is just too great not to have it in this list. Because the job of AI advisor to the Romanian government is not one you can just apply for. Rather, an AI itself will advise the Romanian Prime Minister and Nicolae Ciucă. Thus, the AI was created to capture opinions in society in real time, using "publicly available data from social networks", a government document describing the project is quoted as saying. Who could give a better assessment than the Romanian government's AI advisor?
For those who want to learn more about the project, visit this website (in Romanian (I guess)).
If you ask the AI itself what new job descriptions are currently available, ChatGPT says something like this (wow!):
With the increasing demand for resources such as rare metals, water and helium-3, there is a growing interest in mining these resources on asteroids and other celestial bodies. Space mining engineers will be responsible for developing the technology and infrastructure needed to extract resources from space.
There are a lot of great, fun, but sometimes blank job descriptions out there. It doesn't have to be golf ball diver, rock star web3 growth marketing hacker or break up artist, there are some new job opportunities in the corporate environment too. And there will be many more to come. So my dream of becoming a chief vertical gardener is not over yet.
Text: Markus Sekulla
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