Can we really imagine the jobs of the tomorrow?

Job fore­cast­ing can be car­ried out in two ways. The first, meth­od­ic­al and some­what short-sighted, is car­ried out by insti­tu­tions often asso­ci­ated with indus­tri­al sec­tors or pro­fes­sion­al branches, with­in the frame­work of what is known in France as the Ges­tion pré­vi­sion­nelle des méti­ers et com­pétences (GPEC). The aim is to anti­cip­ate needs, detect emer­ging issues and pre­vent pro­fes­sion­al dead­locks. These insti­tu­tions base their reas­on­ing on the exist­ing situ­ation and the trends iden­ti­fied by play­ers in the sec­tor. Their pro­jec­tions are con­tinu­ous lines.

In con­trast, oth­er act­ors, par­tic­u­larly in the con­sultancy sec­tor, work on the dis­con­tinu­ous: dis­rup­tion, the rad­ic­ally new, and the unfore­seen, all of which nev­er­the­less has to be anti­cip­ated. The dis­course then oscil­lates between alarmism, even cata­stroph­ism, and a form of enthu­si­asm that resorts to hyper­bole. The digit­al revolu­tion in its vari­ous forms offers excel­lent examples, which can be rep­res­en­ted with the “Hype Cycle” mod­el high­lighted by Gart­ner: tech­no­lo­gic­al trig­ger, peak of exag­ger­ated expect­a­tions, trough of dis­il­lu­sion­ment, gradu­al rise and pro­ductiv­ity plat­eau. Ten years ago, it was uber­isa­tion that would sweep everything away. Today it is AI. There is no doubt that the meta­verse trend will cause it to go into overdrive.

As far as jobs are con­cerned, you have no doubt heard the strik­ing phrase, “60% of jobs in 2030 do not yet exist” from a 2018 study by EY. But as Cécile Jolly, a futur­ist at France Straté­gie, reminds us, some of these new pro­fes­sions will be very small in terms of num­bers and will there­fore not struc­tur­ally change the nature of the pro­fes­sion­al world. There is a lot of talk about influ­en­cers on You­Tube and Ins­tagram, but how many are there and how many will there be in the future?

Fur­ther­more, the num­ber of jobs cre­ated from scratch is neg­li­gible. As Isa­belle Rouhan reminds us in this dossier, there are “ver­tic­al trades” that will not dis­ap­pear but will be reworked, and which, by mobil­ising more robots or algorithms, will change the role and func­tions of the pro­fes­sion­als involved in this trade.

At the same time, some pro­fes­sions seem to be etern­al but are under­go­ing pro­found changes. In inter­view­ing Adrien Book on the trans­form­a­tions of man­age­ment with the web3, for this dossier, the con­ver­sa­tion focused on the new devel­op­ments that are tak­ing place before our eyes but the power of which we do not yet fully appre­ci­ate. “The role of a con­ci­erge, for example, is one that has evolved the most in recent years: digi­codes on the one hand, inser­tion in the last mile of deliv­er­ies on the oth­er, have trans­formed this pro­fes­sion. Con­ci­erge ser­vices are also emer­ging around Airb­nb, with oth­er skills and a lot of mobil­ity. As with the role of the con­ci­erge, the once simple job of deliv­ery driver has been pro­foundly trans­formed with the increas­ing num­ber of drop-off points and human inter­ac­tion, the dif­fi­culties of access­ing these drop-off points, the use of GPS, the increas­ing lack of fluid­ity of urb­an car traffic, and the emer­gence of cyc­list deliv­ery drivers for the final stretch.

Think­ing ser­i­ously about the jobs of the future means not get­ting car­ried away by hyper­bol­ic fig­ures, the hope of a great trans­form­a­tion or the fear of a “great replace­ment” by robots or AI. It also means that we should not over­em­phas­ise anec­dot­al changes, while neg­lect­ing more pro­found but less spec­tac­u­lar devel­op­ments. And it means con­sid­er­ing the weight of real­ity. “There is a lot of talk about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence,” notes Adrien Book. That’s fine, we must be inter­ested in it. But we are in 2022 and we are still talk­ing about digit­al­isa­tion and a digit­al trans­form­a­tion as we were already doing twenty years ago. The found­a­tions have yet to be developed. The digit­al trans­form­a­tion of the world is both very fast and very slow.

What we can observe is the emer­gence of pro­fes­sions of the future. The example of data pro­fes­sions, an increas­ingly import­ant area of activ­ity, provides a good illus­tra­tion of this: we are wit­ness­ing a gradu­al dif­fer­en­ti­ation and the crys­tal­lisa­tion of new professions.

Here are three areas of devel­op­ment, where new jobs are emerging.

Auto­ma­tion of the world is well under­way. It is pro­ceed­ing along two par­al­lel paths: soft­ware and hard­ware. In both cases, it raises the ques­tion of inter­ac­tions with humans, and a whole range of pro­fes­sions are devel­op­ing around these interactions.

Both applic­a­tions and algorithms are designed for human users, and a clearly iden­ti­fied chal­lenge is to optim­ise and facil­it­ate the life of these users, both in terms of dis­cov­ery or appro­pri­ation and in terms of reg­u­lar use, which becomes a routine. User exper­i­ence pro­fes­sions are devel­op­ing around this demand, at the cross­roads of com­mu­nic­a­tion, design, and ergo­nom­ics. Either it is a ques­tion of ensur­ing that the exper­i­ence is as smooth as pos­sible without rely­ing on a third party (bot or human), and the issues at stake are good design (of a page, a sys­tem) or it is a ques­tion of organ­ising this pro­cess so that it is flu­id, easy and effi­cient. Finally, meas­ur­ing the per­form­ance of these dif­fer­ent seg­ments is also an issue – and a range of pro­fes­sion­al spe­ci­al­it­ies – in its own right.

As for robots, both in the indus­tri­al envir­on­ment and in ser­vice robot­ics when they integ­rate mobil­ity func­tions, human pro­fes­sions are emer­ging around robot edu­ca­tion and ergo­nom­ics in its man-machine inter­face speciality.

The same edu­ca­tion­al needs are devel­op­ing on the side of AIs, whose per­form­ance often depends less on the num­ber of lines of code than on the num­ber of hours spent pro­cessing data, a task that is not com­pletely automatic.

Envir­on­ment­al trans­itions are devel­op­ing in sev­er­al dir­ec­tions, with the emer­gence of new professions.

Envir­on­ment­al con­cerns are increas­ingly integ­rated into agri­cul­ture, which after a cen­tury of heavy mech­an­isa­tion and massive chem­ic­al use is now learn­ing to care­fully man­age soil and inputs. Mon­it­or­ing of soil bio­chem­istry, hydro­metry and heat (dro­naut­ics, sensors) calls for a whole range of emer­ging spe­ci­al­it­ies, from oper­at­ing drones to engin­eer­ing, as well as aspects of the farm­ing pro­fes­sion that can, in large farms, give rise to entire trades. The sale of inputs is increas­ingly integ­rated into ser­vice pack­ages that include advice and training.

Man­age­ment of nat­ur­al areas, and in par­tic­u­lar forests and water­ways, now calls for new spe­cial­isa­tions in mon­it­or­ing, dia­gnos­is, and intervention.

The energy trans­ition, based on the man­age­ment of CO2 and the switch to elec­tric­al power for some uses asso­ci­ated with hydro­car­bons, is see­ing the emer­gence of new jobs. First of all, there are all of those in con­sult­ing, from the devel­op­ment of applic­a­tions for choos­ing sol­ar pan­els to loc­al sup­port activ­it­ies. Then there are those in install­a­tion and main­ten­ance (of pan­els, heat pumps, stor­age solu­tions, meth­an­isa­tion sys­tems, etc.). Finally, there are those of man­age­ment: car­bon account­ing, fleet man­age­ment, a field that also sees the emer­gence of a whole range of manu­al jobs.

A sep­ar­ate area is that of the smart city, which is see­ing the emer­gence of pro­fes­sions in the field of design (of build­ings and neigh­bour­hoods), flow man­age­ment (sol­id and liquid), and also air man­age­ment. These man­age­ment jobs are meas­ure­ment jobs (pol­lu­tion, bio­chem­ic­al bal­ances), decision mak­ing jobs, which are appear­ing with­in the major ser­vice pro­viders or pub­lic authorities.

The digit­isa­tion of the world and the switch to all-digit­al tech­no­logy in sev­er­al sec­tors raises new ques­tions: data secur­ity and port­ab­il­ity, con­fid­en­ti­al­ity of exchanges, eth­ic­al qual­ity of exchanges and data management.

Cyber­se­cur­ity is already an indus­tri­al pro­fes­sion in its own right, with clusters of human pro­fes­sions involved in dia­gnos­is, solu­tions, devel­op­ment and mon­it­or­ing. But on the eth­ic­al side, some of these func­tions are only just emer­ging but will one day be pro­fes­sions, like com­pli­ance officers, who have become estab­lished in many companies.

Lastly, eth­ics is linked to envir­on­ment­al trans­itions: rela­tions with anim­als, plants, cer­tain water­courses and the envir­on­ment in the broad sense are caught up in a sim­ul­tan­eous drive for reg­u­la­tion (with leg­al aspects and crim­in­al risks) and pre­vent­ive atten­tion, which is lead­ing to the emer­gence of new func­tions and jobs.