Category Archives: Career

Plan for career change

4th Industrial Revolution, Career, Technology
Who are you?

How do you define yourself?  How well do you adapt to change?  What new skills have you learned in the past 12 months?  How much time every week do you spend learning new skills?  Are you prepared for career change?  In today’s world and going forward these are very important questions to reflect on.  We have increasing automation of work processes due to new technology and the forces of globalisation (known as the 4th Industrial Revolution).  As a result our working lives are becoming increasingly impermanent and unpredictable, and will only become more so in the future.  Long term employment with one company or organisation (or even in one industry) is becoming a thing of the past.

Career Change

A UK worker will change employer every five years on average, according to research by life insurance firm Liverpool Victoria.  In January 2016, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the average employee tenure was 4.2 years, down from 4.6 years in January 2014.  When you look at the technological disruptions of the new technologies of the 4th industrial revolution the trend of increasing career change is set to continue and accelerate.

How about you?

What did you learn in school or college?  Is it useful and relevant to you now?  For example when I was in college in the 1980s Personal Computers were just coming in.  I learned computers for the first time on a mainframe computer in University College Dublin.  That was basically one big computer with many terminals.  Much of what I learned is irrelevant today.  Now I have a computer in my pocket called a smartphone.  Back then there was no commercial internet as we know it.  We had no idea that the internet age was around the corner.  If you wanted information you sought out books and journals in the college library.  The idea that I might one day self-publish a book or write a blog, or teach an online course was nowhere on the horizon.  In the past one year I have learned how to publish online courses.  I now have two courses and teach 1,737 students from 109 countries!  I am now working on my third course which is on changing technology and the skills we need to prepare for this new world of work and increasing change.

In summary

If we do not keep changing and growing we become outdated and irrelevant.  We must be perpetual self-improvers.  We must be life long learners.  What are your thoughts on today’s world of work and where you are headed?  Are you building new skills and keeping up to date?  Are you systematically preparing for your next job or career move?  In this world of the 4th Industrial Revolution, being ready for change and preparing for multiple jobs and careers is a very necessary response.

Best wishes,

Tom

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My online course ‘Transform Your Life: 30 Experiments in Personal Change’ will help you build the type of personal skills needed for the new world of work.   Please use the link above for a special discounted price of $9.99 (only for readers of this blog).

The 4th Industrial Revolution and Change

4th Industrial Revolution, Career, Goal Achievement, Planning, Technology

4th Industrial Revolution

This week I want to introduce a series of posts on what has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  Much of what I discuss on this website relates to personal change, goal setting, planning and futurology (the study of trying to understand and predict the future). This website and my books and courses look at how to set better goals and how to achieve goals and the psychological pitfalls to achieving goals such as the planning fallacy or motivated reasoning which was the subject of a recent post.  I also focus on how to use self-hypnosis to programme our minds for success.  All of this is future orientated at an individual level but what will our collective future look like?

The 4th Industrial Revolution

According to the World Economic Forum we are now at the beginning of a new age of industrialisation which has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  This is the age of technologies such as mobile super-computing (yes that smartphone in your pocket is a super-computer ).  We now have intelligent robots, self-driving cars, flying cars,  neuro-technological brain enhancements and genetic editing to name a few.  The evidence of dramatic change in a whole range of technologies is all around us.  Technology is changing at exponential speed. Take for example computer processing power which has been doubling every 18 months or so.  This is because scientists are learning how to pack more and more transistors into a smaller space. This rapid doubling of computer processing power is called Moore’s Law after the famous co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore.  In fact our ever faster computers are based on a new branch of science called nanotechnology.  Nanotechnology operates at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers (a nanometer is a hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair!).  The features of a semi-conductor chip today are 7nm (about 3 DNA strands stacked side by side).

The 4th Industrial Revolution and Change

The big question is what changes are rapidly advancing technologies bringing about in our individual lives and in society and how do we prepare for and deal with these changes?  What are the skills that we and our children will need for the jobs of tomorrow?  I recently attended my sons graduation from secondary school (high school) here in Ireland.  During the graduation speeches the audience were reminded that many of the students present will work at jobs and in industries that have not even been invented yet!  How do we therefore teach our children to prepare for a future that does not exist yet?  These are the questions and issues that I want to explore in coming posts.

In next weeks post I will begin looking at the type of skills we need to start preparing for the jobs of tomorrow even if we don’t know yet what those jobs will be.

Best wishes,

Tom