Workforce In The 21st Century

Workforce Today ~ Episode 406

What does the workforce look like in the 21st century? Today’s guest, Lisa Nehring shares what it means to enter the workplace today. How it is different and what you can do as a student, or adult to prepare. Lisa is a podcaster at Lifeskills 101 here.

Find Lisa here: True North Homeschool Academy True North offers K through 12 live online classes and some prerecorded classes.

So many people today work at home and during the year 2020, we learned the lesson the hard way as more and more stores and offices were shut down. Many were unprepared but those who worked at home just continued on.

*Excerpt of the show – listen to the recording for the full presentation.

Lisa shares how to move forward. She believes we are just in such a time of transition, technologically we’re in, what’s called the fourth industrial revolution, and it’s really fascinating. You can look it up and check out the three previous revolutions, but we are in an industrial revolution. That’s global, we’re a global culture. And a lot of how we work is changing a lot of how we educate is changing. One book that I’ve really enjoyed the last year is called College Unbound. It’s just about how we were going through school, we would graduate from high school and there were two groups. One group would go to work and get married. And one group would go to college and then get married. Not everybody got married, but it was typical. Today that’s not necessarily the case.

You can go to work in high school. You can go to work after high school, a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities because of technology that didn’t even exist five years ago, are available today. And so a college degree isn’t going to determine your lifestyle necessarily as much as it used to. Licensing makes a big difference depending on the industry that you’re in. But we’re going to see real shifts in, in how people work and technologies that are really important and a couple of technologies that are going to become really important in the next you know, in the future three-D printing, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

During the pandemic, when a lot of people were told to stay home and work from home, people made this big shift in their life. Their kids were sent home, and parents had to figure out how to juggle work, staying at home, managing their lives, and their kids being home. Many people will not go back to work in the traditional ways that they thought they would. Other industries that are going to really explode in the future are, or not go away. They’re not going to change too much. There are jobs with stability such as our counselors, pastors, and physical therapists. And I think those two lists are very interesting. On the one hand, we have three-D printing, AI, and robotics.

We have this real techie space in this rural interpersonal space. And I think as our world grows more technologically astute with artificial intelligence, robotics, three-D printing, I mean they replaced a spleen printed by 3d. That’s crazy, right? But in that technological space, there’s this real need and desire for connection and understanding who we are as people. And that’s where the pastors and counselors come in and physical therapy, of course, a robotic entity cannot take care of PT issues. There’s just not going to work. And I think right now, as we’re all experiences that experiencing this pandemic and just walking through it, we need to be really aware of the fact that we’re living in a, in a world where we can understand what’s going on globally, by turning on our phones or computers.

We have to be really intentional about reaching out in the ways that we can. And thankfully we have technological devices to help us with that. Like just you are half a country away. And yet we’re seeing each other and talking to each other, which is a beautiful thing that is that’s amazing. And, you know, we don’t really think about the emotional side of things.

So we have to be ready. And I just think this is such a perfect time to talk about this because you happen to have an online school that is available. As an educator, for example, I’m sure they’re going to need more because things are, some people won’t want their children to go back to school. At True North, we do an orienteering class where the kids are doing college and career exploration. And they’re doing personality inventories because not everybody is going to be geared towards being an AI specialist. There’s space for everybody and who they’re created to be in this new world.

The four areas to think about are our physical, mental, social, and emotional, and again, when things get really tough, when you have a crisis in your life habits can be disrupted I really think it’s important to keep the habits that you can. So if you got up at seven before, try to get up at seven even now and then create new habits in the new space that you’re in. So one of the things we always have done for years and years, because we don’t all have to leave right off in the morning, we’re homeschoolers is that we get up and share a cup of coffee together and just talk about things. How’s it going for everybody? What’s the news and just kind of chat together. But if you don’t have this kind of habit already established create some new ones.

We can focus on the things to be thankful for that can get us through a lot of things and, and talk to each other about the things to be thankful for.