Tomorrow belongs to the Doers
The Skills, the Assets, and the Jobs of Tomorrow
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A year ago I moved to Vienna for a job opportunity. A startup with the mission to encourage young people to become changemakers and create a better tomorrow was searching for a new team member. A friend in my Facebook network had shared the job opening, and I instantly felt drawn. Although still studying at university and needing to write my Master’s thesis, I applied. The job just sounded too cool to pass. It didn’t even take me ten minutes to decide.
Now I have been with the startup for a year, doing all sorts of things in all sorts of fields, having little clue what the hell I’m doing. I studied languages thinking I’d become a high school teacher or a writer of educational books for high school students. Now I’m organizing events, doing content production, coordinating global organizers of our events, taking care of community management and partnership management, writing blog articles, producing videos, concept developing new programs, and giving workshops. I know how to teach German grammar, not how to build a global community of changemakers.
Sometimes I just pause for a moment to catch my breath. This first year in Vienna has challenged my ability to adapt, reinvent, be creative and resourceful — basically to take on the role of an entrepreneur. It feels like I’ve only done things I didn’t know how to since I’ve moved here. It makes me a little breathless.
Yet at the same time, I have no doubt that this is the direction in which the world is moving. The jobs of the future will require us not to get too comfortable doing what we know and have always done. Of course, every book on startups and exponential growth will stress the importance of self-disruption and continuous reinvention, but much points in the direction that this will even be the case for most ordinary individuals both on a personal and professional scale.
The job forecast of the World Economic Forum predicts that 65% of those currently in school will end up in a job that doesn’t even exist yet. Current students are heading towards a future, unknown and uncertain, having learned skills and knowledge hardly up-to-date with the modern world. Of course, the future has to some extent always been unknown and uncertain, but in…
