Job opportunities in technology are growing up to three times faster than other career fields in the U.S. Long gone are the days of a linear education and career trajectory as technology continues to reshape the world's education and workplace landscapes. Nowadays, the career paths of most individuals resemble a scaffold rather than a conservative straight line.
Changes in the education and workplace landscape not only impact job seekers, but educators and employers as well. It's estimated that by 2025, we could have 20 million jobs without enough qualified people to fill them.Before you start thinking that there will be no jobs for humans to do in the near future, first realize that technology has always eliminated jobs. What we're experiencing now is nothing new. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, new advancements in everything from textiles to railroads to mail delivery to manufacturing caused jobs to disappear. The difference is that the change used to be slow. It took a long time for those jobs to disappear, so there was time to adapt.
But today, thanks to the three change accelerators of exponential advances in processing power, bandwidth, and storage, we are experiencing rapid change -- or rather, transformation. Because processing power is creating a digital explosion in our tools' ability to do more with less at a faster rate, and bandwidth is increasing exponentially, and storage is moving to the cloud, over the next five short years we will be transforming how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train and educate. As a result, we are going to see many jobs disappear, yet at the same time, many current job definitions redefined as technology gives us new and more efficient ways to do our old jobs.