A job that did not exist

Ask an adult what they wanted to be at fourteen and the answer is usually a job that still exists: doctor, teacher, engineer. Ask what they actually do and the answer is often something that had no name when they were at school.

Data analyst, user-experience designer, renewable-energy technician, content moderator, prompt engineer: none of these appeared in a careers booklet twenty-five years ago. Meanwhile some familiar jobs have become narrower. A travel agent today does work that a search engine has not yet taken.

Two conclusions are often drawn from this, and one of them is wrong. The wrong conclusion is that subjects do not matter, because everything will change anyway. In fact the opposite holds: the people who moved easily into new jobs were usually those with a solid base in something — mathematics, a language, how to write clearly, how to test an idea — because new roles are built out of old skills.

The better conclusion is about learning speed. If your job in 2040 does not exist yet, the most valuable thing you can own is the habit of learning something unfamiliar without being taught it first. That habit can be practised now, and school is a cheap place to practise it: choose a tool nobody has explained, read its documentation, build something small, and show it to someone who will tell you what is wrong with it.

That is, more or less, how three students with no experience built a web application and ended up presenting it to a room of teachers.