(Expansion) – About 20 years ago in middle school or high school you took a test to find out what career you could choose, you filled out a questionnaire and the result was something very similar to this: if you liked outdoor activities, biology was a good option; if you liked mathematics, accounting was your thing. Many of us choose a career based on that and on what was traditionally considered by our parents to be a good career.
The irony is that many young people continue to choose careers in this way even when the world has changed radically. An OECD study showed that gender and professional aspirations determine not only the choice of a career, but also the income that a person will have for a large part of his life: 7.7% of children aspire to be engineers; 6.7% prefer business administration; 6% Medicine; and 5.5% ICT. Girls, for their part, want to be doctors (15.6%), teachers (9.4%), study business administration (5%) or law (4.6%).
However, from my perspective there are many areas that today are no longer considered “good work” only due to ignorance. Every day I see how digital transformation is having a direct impact on the Latin American professional and labor environment.
It is increasingly common to see that in retail or manufacturing companies of products such as water tanks, food and raw materials, the technology departments are the ones with the highest growth; not only technology or financial companies are leading this boom. That has caused vacancies in IT to multiply, but the talent is being scarce to fill those positions.
A key point to update ourselves on the subject of vocational guidance is to carry out an analysis to connect the dots between the trends, the data of the profiles that are in demand in the current labor market and those that are becoming obsolete and even at high risk of disappearing. .
According to Gartner, the technology trends that will set the course for many businesses are accelerating growth, sculpting change, and engineering trust.
The first uses technologies that provide recovery and growth so that organizations can reach new and better markets; professionals in artificial intelligence, automatic systems and user experience will see their demand increase.
Technologies focused on sculpting change optimize the operational part of companies to adapt and reorganize according to market needs; specialists in hyperautomation, decision intelligence and application assembly (that is, specialists in the internet of things, that is, those who program and connect communication between robots and all automatic systems) have a promising future.
Finally, engineering trust is key due to its objective of minimizing the risks when handling large amounts of customer and user information, adding value to companies through the use of technologies such as cloud-native platforms, cybersecurity and architecture in the fabric of data from multiple sources.
In my opinion, this data is essential to provide better job orientation and start training young people who are currently in basic and secondary education. Knowing now which careers are in decline and which are on the rise could help them make a better-informed decision.
How good it would be to know the role that can be occupied in a company along with the salary range that can be aspired to in that career. That data is more public today and offers a broader picture than we had previous generations. For example, today a cybersecurity specialist has a salary of 36,500 free per month, a Business Intelligence consultant earns 40,500 free monthly.
Schools have the enormous task of providing guidance based on vocation, but also on employability potential. Today it is more than necessary to look ahead, how do we help students make one of the most important decisions of their lives in a way that gives them professional satisfaction and a good income? How can we encourage those who already bring the wave of technology above? How to prevent them from being replaced by automation? How to get out of jobs will be very scarce?
I am sure that sowing seeds of doubt in adolescents today could result in them coming home tomorrow to discuss with their parents what they heard in class about the jobs of the future, they would google about it to find out more, they would explore which are the most valuable companies and would use all that data to reflect on their future.
The good news is that little by little we are moving the balance, a recent IMCO analysis reveals that the choice of ICT career went from 4% in 2012 to 9% in 2022. There is still a lot to do as parents, in schools and on the part of of the government to give boys and girls the necessary tools to choose a professional path that gives them a greater potential for success in all senses.
Editor’s note : Emmanuel Olvera, co-founder and CEO of Hireline, the recruitment portal specialized in information technology profiles in Latin America. Follow him on and The opinions expressed in this column belong solely to the author.
