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McKinsey for Kids: I, Robot?
What technology shifts mean for tomorrow’s jobs
August 23, 2021Interactive
Tomorrow’s jobs will look different from today’s—and not just because you might be working alongside robots. In this edition of McKinsey for Kids, peer into the future of work and what it may hold for you, whether you’re thinking about becoming a doctor, an influencer—or a garbage designer.
What’s your dream job?
Maybe you’ve wanted to be a doctor since you toddled around with a plastic stethoscope. But if you’re like many young people, you’re probably not so sure what your dream job is.
It’s something worth figuring out, since so much time is spent working. By some estimates, one-third of your life will be spent on the job.
And some of the stuff you’re interested in now could be preparing you for what’s ahead. Check out six possible jobs of the future—you might be surprised to find you’re already developing some skills that’ll make you a good fit.
Click each card to learn more
Back to the future
Let’s say you’re into gaming but you’ve never thought about how those skills could help you become a retail designer. That might be because those kinds of jobs are relatively rare today. How do we know they’ll exist in the future?
Before we get there, let’s take a look back. The world of work has changed over time—and some jobs that used to be in demand have gone the way of the dinosaur, as you’ll see during this tour of the four industrial revolutions that have shaped work over the past 200-plus years. You’ll see how some of the changes might have played out on a farm or for those who worked in agriculture (which has seen more innovation than you’d think!).
Farm innovation through the ages
First Industrial Revolution, late 1700s to early 1800s. Early technological upgrades bloom; inventions include new farming tools, the power loom, steam engines, and more. Machines start to replace some manual work, and new forms of transport help move goods from point A to point B.These advances help economies grow. But they also mean some people need to learn to work with new tools or pick up new skills. If you were a farmer, you might think about getting a reaper for your horse to pull so that you could grow more food—and maybe even sell some of it to your neighbors.
Second Industrial (or Technological) Revolution, late 1800s to early 1900s. Innovation in manufacturing and production allows for the spread of new technologies beyond just a few regions. Think: the expansion of railroads (moving grain or people), the start of electrification, and the telegraph’s rise.
People around the globe are more connected than ever. Large-scale production and movement of goods means that even if you’re not highly skilled, you can still find good work. Certain jobs are replaced by new technology, which isn’t a bad thing—especially since these advances increase productivity, allowing people to work less than before. Say you didn’t want to be a farmhand for the rest of your life: you might work in a factory or get a job with a railroad, instead.
Third Industrial (or Digital) Revolution, mid-1940s to early 2000s. World War II spurs another wave of innovation. Transistors and computers rise, and what once was analog starts going digital; it also becomes easy to move information between different media and to use it without needing to touch it. On the farm, for example, easier access to data and new technology allows workers to grow more food on less land.
That leads to big shifts in how we communicate, play, and, yes, work. Consider the effect of cars: their introduction created nearly 7 million new US jobs between 1910 and 1950 (more than ten times as many as were lost given needed job shifts). If you made horse saddles, you might have gone out of business—but you could look for work in a car factory or at a gas station. Or get a job driving a vehicle to take food from the farm to a canning factory.
Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2010s and beyond. Now, new technologies are rising, causing the lines between physical, digital, and biological realms to blur, whether that’s on a state-of-the-art farm or in another big business. From AI to self-driving cars, robotics, 3-D printing, quantum computing, and more, change is already upon us.
If you’re in agriculture, that might mean you use a drone to monitor crops or a self-driving tractor, or to scan updates on your phone to keep track of weather. And while technology may continue to reshape the future of work, even if some jobs fade, newer occupations will rise—and they could make for a more fulfilling life.
What will these shifts mean for you when you’re entering the job market?
You’re probably not brushing up on your threshing and reaping skills—nowadays, machines can do those things faster and more efficiently than a human could. But how do you know what jobs will be part of our future? Or what skills will help you get those jobs?
How McKinsey peers into the future
One way we help is through forecasting and analyses that provide a potential vision of the future, so people—including kids—can prepare for what’s ahead. The McKinsey Global Institute is a “think tank” that has been tracking the future of work, so policy makers, business leaders, and individuals can come up with plans for keeping people in jobs that are fulfilling and interesting.
We’ve been researching this for more than 30 years, analyzing thousands of activities that might be done while working in more than 800 jobs. Doing this gets pretty detailed. For instance, instead of looking just at the number of people in the United States who work as nurses, we look at what nurses do all day and what parts of those activities might someday be replaced by technology. If part of a nurse’s job is to lift bedridden patients, imagine if a lifting machine or robot could support the more physical aspect, while the nurse spoke with the patients or their families to understand their concerns and meet their needs.
By the way, the robots we’re talking about aren’t the sci-fi specters you might be envisioning. The robots you’ve seen on TV and in movies can be cute or even scary, but the technologies used today are more about augmenting and supplementing humans, not replacing them entirely. Take a look at the many real-life settings where you might be surprised to find robots working today.
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In a hospital
This robot might be used if you need surgery—it may even suture you up after the surgeon has successfully operated.
1 of 6
You may work side by side with robots in the future—but in all likelihood, they’ll handle the parts of the job that are physically demanding or routine. Technological help can take care of the less interesting parts of work; if you work in mining, you might work from the safety of a digitized control room while directing a robot to do the actual digging. That also gives you more time and space to do things that are more creative or to make bigger strategic decisions informed by data.
Technology that helps people do their work better isn’t new. But the latest wave of innovations is significant. And our research shows that trends like remote work, e-commerce, and continuing automation could mean more than 100 million workers might need to find a different occupation by 2030—that’s roughly the same as the populations of Canada and Italy combined.
So, if you’re thinking about jobs that are likely to be around when you’re on the hunt, where should you look? The answer might be different depending on where you live and what else is happening in the outside world.
In China, an aging population and rising incomes mean healthcare workers and high-quality service jobs will be in demand—the medical-care arena could see a jump in demand of 121 percent through 2030. Automation could have a big effect on agriculture, manufacturing, and production.
France is likely to see high-wage jobs, such as those for health professionals, grow considerably. Work in office support—for office and bookkeeping clerks, for instance—will slow, though.
Lots of people in Germany operate machines or work in production jobs, and automation will have a big impact on this kind of work. But because the country’s workforce overall is shrinking, in the long term, there will probably be too few workers, not too few jobs.
India faces the biggest long-term changes of any labor market we studied. While jobs in agriculture may drop, the country could add millions of good-paying jobs in everything from education to healthcare to transportation as its population swells.
Japan’s workforce is aging, just like Germany’s, and in the long term, that means it will likely have more jobs than workers. Jobs that involve transporting goods (like new sneakers you ordered online) are poised to grow—and could increase by 8 percent by 2030.
While nearly five million people in Spain may need to switch jobs by 2030, with occupations like bartenders and office clerks particularly affected, the shifts ahead may be more muted. Fewer than one in five workers there could work remotely the majority of the time.
In the United States, customer-service and food-service jobs could fall by 4.3 million by 2030. But demand for workers in healthcare and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs could see big growth.
The United Kingdom has a large service economy, with lots of jobs in retail, food service, and office work. While those may be vulnerable to change, healthcare, creative, and STEM jobs are likely to increase.
It’s also interesting to look at what skills will be in demand in the future. How do we know what might be useful? We asked hundreds of workers and leaders about the skills they are prioritizing, and there’s been a notable rise in people saying that social and emotional skills—plus advanced cognitive skills (including critical-thinking, decision-making, and statistical skills)—are at the top of their list. And that can be good for you: say you want to move into healthcare after working at a bank for a few years. In the past, that might have been seen as a real leap. But if the skills most valued for bank staff of the future are more about crucial social and emotional skills, because software has automated away some of the more rote analytics that used to be involved, you might be able to shift to a new line of work, even without going back to school.
Maybe your parents have been on your back about résumés, cover letters, and other tips for the job search. But the way people get jobs is changing, too. When it comes time to look for a job, if you haven’t already been on the hunt, the way you apply and get hired isn’t your grandparents’ process.
Instead of walking into a store and asking for an application, you’re likely to apply online or even via an app. (Do you like sharing on social media such as TikTok? When an executive noticed people sharing career advice on it, the platform began testing a tool to recruit employees on it, to take just one example.) And companies are already using machine learning to screen applications—which has begun to change the way some people write their cover letters and résumés. For instance, adding in specific keywords used in the job listing might make it likelier you’ll get an interview.
And technology could also help bridge gaps in the job market, say, to help people out of work find new positions and spur an increase in independent work. Career Exchange is just one example. This platform, powered by eightfold.ai and supported by McKinsey, sprung up in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when entire industries (like in-person food service or retail) were disrupted and many people found themselves out of work. Using AI, the tool helps match your skills with open positions, benefiting job seekers and companies alike.
Find your fit
Now that you know what shifts are in motion, maybe you want to look again at jobs you might enjoy. Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers here. Once you’ve made your picks, you’ll see a few jobs in different industries that you might want to consider, plus the skills that can help you succeed.
Artist
Architect
Urban farmer
Lawyer
Digital-currency adviser
User-experience designer
Healthcare aide
Teacher
Social worker
Precision-medicine compounding pharmacist
Doctor
CEO
Game designer
Garbage designer
Digital tailor
Drone-traffic controller
Mechanical engineer
Data scientist
Computer engineer
Question 1 of 3
School’s out. In your downtime, would you rather spend time with people or spend time on a computer?
People
or
Computer
For a more in-depth quiz, or to see where you might fit at McKinsey, explore our Careers Quiz or browse job openings by interest, location, and more.
This interactive experience was written by Torea Frey, based on reports and articles from the McKinsey Global Institute. It is brought to you by McKinsey Global Publishing, in a collaborative effort by Emily Adeyanju, Heather Andrews, Mike Borruso, Peter Gumbel, Drew Holzfeind, Richard Johnson, Stephen Landau, Lauren Meling, Janet Michaud, Kanika Punwani, Charmaine Rice, Katie Shearer, Dan Spector, Stephanie Strom, and Nathan Wilson, with Justin Metz and Chris Philpot providing additional illustration support.
If you have read this far, we hope you have enjoyed it. Want to tell us what you thought and how we could have made it even more enjoyable and useful to you? Drop a note to our publisher, Raju Narisetti, at newideas@mckinsey.com.
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