Technology is advancing much faster than we can keep up with, it seems. New inventions to make our lives better, faster, and more convenient seem to come along every day. It all seems great until we learn about how these fast-growing innovations are replacing people! When we think about how these inventions threaten our livelihood and certainly the potential career options of our children and grandchildren, it all starts to look a bit different.

The key to staying in the saddle and protecting our turf in our careers is to always think about how we could make ourselves more future-proof. What set of skills should we learn that will make our current position more secure?

This makes sense when we think about how few Mark Twains, Steve Jobs, and Pablo Picassos we have in our world. But if we are going to keep up with the tendency for things to be automated without the use of people, we need to move our skill sets over to these more creative areas.

This does not always mean that we have to entirely quit our present career and start all over in another area. In some cases, perhaps this is a good idea (if you are currently studying to become a radiologist, you might want to grab a strong coffee and fire up a google search for artificial intelligence), but probably our best challenge is to think about how our skills within our current career or job could be improved to include some critical categories that will make us future-proof. .

No matter how good the technology gets, someone will still have to create the material that is needed to communicate ideas to others. In public schools and universities, there will always be a need for a human being with that one-on-one connection with students.

Education-based skills will be sought-after in the workplace of the future.

Despite the impressiive talents displayed above by Boston Dynamics’ new robot (Spot), it is clear that dance and the fine arts will be the sole domain of human beings for a very long time to come. No matter how much the AI machines wish to break into this field, they will always be missing something.

That’s because art comes from the human mind and while it can be emulated, it cannot be created outside of a human being. Art, music, and drama are all areas in which you can develop your talents and skills and remain fairly future-proof.

Journalism, when done correctly, requires a well-versed, talented individual who can write, speak, and discuss the issues intelligently. They are people who can communicate their ideas on paper or in digital form and who can inspire conversation and engagement with others.

Can robots do this? Not very well! So if you haven’t considered including a journalistic skill set in your career portfolio, maybe you should. It may be a great way to improve your ability to stay current amid the changes ahead and future-proof in the long term.

But if you can work with this system, while showing that you can create unique sales strategies such as retargeting and marketing for today’s online businesses, you may be able to secure a future for yourself outside of the electronic world of robot workers.

Steve Jobs was intrigued by computers at an early age, so much so that he dropped out of school to work on his passion. But he took with him the art of Calligraphy, a class he had taken, and it was this influence that shaped the idea of including a selection of beautiful fonts in the first machintosh computers.

This made his product more desirable than anything else on the market at that time. He once said, “We’ve got to get great at the little things.” When we have this kind of vision and can spot a winner that can add to the computer or technology industry (or any industry, for that matter), we can increase our level of security in our job and open up new opportunities for ourselves in an uncertain future. This in itself can make an individual future-proof.

What we need to do now is to recreate ourselves. Only by looking at new ways to redefine our professional skills, add to our skill set in some of the creative categories, and evaluate who we are, can we begin to compete with the coming AI storm.

We now must prove this by always looking outside of what we do to improve upon what we can offer to make our jobs harder to be handed down to an automated process.

Keep in mind that every economy is different. The United States, United Kingdom and Australia may be similar, but their economies are driven by unique details in the laws and financial sectors. Workers must be flexible with their career goals as the economy ebbs and flows. Pay attention to the nation’s news in order to see patterns. One sector may be more popular than another one, depending on the nation’s needs.

In the end, it’s important to stay informed about the latest technology impacting the business sectors. Future jobs will be different. Changing with the times must be part of your lifelong plan. Think of automated changes as motivation to improve yourself.

Machines may perform a lot of work, but they cannot replace the human mind. Be part of a new revolution where your creative spirit drives a product or service.

Right now, make a list of your skills and think about what you can do that you’re not doing now to future-proof your career! Remember, we created computers, not the other way around. It is absoltely possible to future-proof your career but you must start planning now.

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