Today’s careers the stuff of science fiction

TALI FEINBERG

Michelle Shapiro, life and executive coach at Life Solutions Architect in Sandton, says that the way we work is also changing at speed. With technology at our fingertips, we can work much more flexibly and remotely.

“Freelancing or ‘gigging’ is becoming a more popular way of working. Many organisations are choosing to outsource short-term contracts rather than formally employ workers of their own. It’s a popular view that the gigging economy is likely to expand in the near future,” she says.

“With this in mind, it’s not only important to obtain a skill-set in a career that is complimentary to the gigging economy, it’s also important to put significant effort into your personal brand.”

Enter personal-brand advisors, a career choice for the current generation. “Personal-brand advisors assist their clients to establish and maintain a positive public and professional persona online, and to establish a reputation that helps them stand out from the crowd and secure the work they need.”

Then there is the possibility of becoming a privacy specialist. “Privacy has become a hot topic; particularly in light of the age of technology and the looming enactment of the Protection of Personal Information Act. As we begin to run our personal and professional lives more and more online, it has become essential to protect personal and commercial privacy,” says Shapiro.

“A privacy specialist seeks to ensure that customers or clients utilise the most current methods to enhance and enforce the security of their digital information. This would include not only the likely suspects – such as personal information and banking details – but also the corporate data of clients.”

At the forefront of South Africa’s energy and electricity crisis, alternative energy consultants or energy efficiency technicians will be needed. “The world simply cannot continue to operate on fossil fuel for the rest of time. As state-owned enterprises such as Eskom crumble, more and more consumers – corporate and private – are looking for alternative power sources for their homes and businesses.

“Alternative energy consultants would position themselves as experts on alternative energy sources and advise clients on the best options available to them, whereas an energy efficiency technician might be proficient in implementing and installing such alternative energy sources,” says Shapiro. “Both careers provide excellent entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly taking into account the rather dim outlook on the availability of jobs in South Africa.”

You might not have heard of an “ethics consultant”, but this is another new career option. “Ethics consultants seek to advise their clients or employers on tricky dilemmas such as conflicts of interest, bribery issues, environmental-consciousness, and transparency. Corporations are becoming more and more alive to issues such as the ethical sourcing of their products and workforce,” says Shapiro.

“An ethics consultant – often with the assistance and input of other specialists such as attorneys, fraud specialists, and other corporate social responsibility specialists – may assist clients to come up with an appropriate code of ethics and code of conduct, train staff on ethical practices, and procedures, and make recommendations following audits on their clients to ensure that they are following practices that comply with local and international ethical standards and regulations.”

Other unusual career options of the future that Shapiro suggests include ethical hacking (assisting companies in preventing attacks by malicious hackers); robotics engineering; drone operation; and custom organ design, in the latter case, organs are literally designed to be used in transplants or injuries.

These organs will be “designed specifically for your body, probably using your own cells. These cells [suspended in gel] would either be used as the ‘ink’ for a 3D-type printer or they would be poured straight into an injection mould,” says Melanie Radzicki McManus for howstuffworks.com.

Finally, one could become a specialist in “big data, cloud, machine learning, and robotics process automation”, says Shapiro. These are all “buzzwords in the information-technology industry”. The possibilities are truly endless.