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As we ring in the new year, and peer into the next decade, let’s take stock of where we are when it comes to the jobs of the future and how we’re going to prepare for them.

Jake Schwartz, General Assembly co-founder and CEO (Photo: General Assembly)

Our guest this week on Work in Progress is Jake Schwartz, the co-founder and CEO of General Assembly, a training and career transformation company specializing in the high-tech skills businesses need today.

Those skills are a moving target, but according to Schwartz, they always have been.

As technology has changed, so has work. “The chain has created jobs more than destroyed jobs, although in the micro, in almost every case it destroyed jobs initially,” he points out. “When mainframes were brought in, it really replaced rooms full of people that were called computers, right? And their job was to make all sorts of calculations, all day long.”

The difference now, Schwartz says, is the speed at which the changes are happening. “What’s happened in the last 30 years is that the accessibility of these incredibly powerful microprocessors — a device in every pocket and all of that — has created a much larger consumer base consuming and using, purchasing and developing, on these different platforms. And that has sort of accelerated the rate of change right around what work looks like.”

So what does the continuing evolution of technology mean for jobs of the future? What skills should you be concentrating on? Schwartz has some very definite views on those questions. Listen here, or find Work in Progress wherever you get your podcasts.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Episode 112: The Future of Work: 2020 and Beyond
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, WorkingNation Editor-in-Chief
Producer: Anny Celsi
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts