What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an airline pilot. I was told I’d get to see the world and apparently it paid well too! I spent time learning about planes and the necessary training requirements all without any thought of how I could acquire the zillion pounds necessary to get me through my training. I was a kid. I was supposed to be dreaming, not strategising, right? Well, I’m not so sure.
When I was 7 years old, I was fortunate enough to receive an old computer as a gift from my uncle. I quickly got bored of playing games and learnt to make my own software. Yes, nerd alert. This was the early 1990s, so there was a lot of buzz around computers. Over the following couple of years, I learnt that writing software was actually a profession. Are you kidding me? I’d get to solve puzzles, create machines and some sucker would pay me for that?! Suddenly, spending my life sitting in a cockpit and being decoupled from my family didn’t seem too appealing at all. I ended up pursuing a career in software and I still love it to this day.
I didn’t know it then, but a career in software is not such a bad thing. Typical salaries for software engineers in the UK range from £25K – £50K and you can earn more than this if you’re willing to get into something really specialist or take on a more managerial role. It’s intellectually rewarding, offers global employment opportunities and provides you with a useful set of skills that you could put to good use if you decided to start your own business. Long story short: I’m one of the lucky ones. I managed to build a decent career for myself based on nothing more than some random event that happened when I was a child. Not everyone can be so fortunate. Your ‘dream job’ may not turn out to be particularly lucrative, so how should we go about choosing a career? At what age do we need to do that? Do we follow our dreams or follow the money? Well, blindly following either is probably a recipe for disaster. I don’t particularly fancy the lifestyle of a struggling artist or an overworked doctor. I feel blessed that I just about managed to land somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. But my point is this. It was pure luck, and it shouldn’t have been. Not for me, not for any of us.
Unfortunately, your ideal job is probably not economically viable. No one is going to pay you to sunbathe, collect luxury cars, build a fort out of cardboard boxes or get drunk and puke on hookers. No matter what your ideal day is, it’s unlikely that someone will pay for you to have that experience. They pay you for what’s valuable to them, not what’s valuable to you.
Being relevant means being respected and in demand. There’s no point choosing a job that doesn’t pay well. There’s also no point in choosing a profession in a weak or declining industry. I recently heard an interesting fact about forensic science. Apparently, the number of forensics graduates produced in the UK in a single year exceeds the total number of forensics jobs in the UK. Think about that for a second. Forensics students have important technical skills and are paid well. They are respected but they are not in demand. Anyone pursuing a career in this area only to be let down by lack of demand has been cheated. They should have been armed with the analytical skills to look out into the world to see if what they were attempting to achieve was at all relevant. Likewise, anyone who has trained for a career without understanding the quality of lifestyle that career could afford them has also been cheated. Again, this pattern for thinking should have been drilled into us so we could have grown up making more appropriate decisions. But this isn’t what we were taught. Our parents taught us to chase our dreams. The government told us to get into debt and get a degree that we didn’t need.
Maybe you’re a young person still in education, a parent looking out for their children or maybe you’ve landed in a job that you hate. Whatever your position, it’s worth taking the time to think about these principles. How relevant are you and your family right now? How relevant will you be in the future? Spend some time thinking about the world. Find out what pays well. Find out the demand for those jobs. Ask yourself what you would enjoy doing. You can’t go too wrong with a plan like that.
I predate you by some years so when I was a teenager I was fascinated by physics and maths -I still am. I chose to study physics and morphed into statistics – the modelling bit, not tabulation. But my statistics was in engineering so my physics background was still very useful.
Like you, I was lucky. Computers and later the internet came along just at the right time. These enabled solutions to problems that I could never have envisaged from a purely analytical approach and now computers form a central part of anything I do whether it is statistical analyses or building websites.
But I knew quite a few people in biological sciences when I was an undergrad and I could never see the fascination – it was just one large memory subject as far as I could see, a bit like history.
How wrong I was. Since then, genetics, genomes and many other advcances have made biological sciences almost as interesting as physics, particularly from a statistical point of view – and many physicists have moved into that area where their analytical skills are very useful.
So it is all contextual. You were lucky to have an uncle pass on a computer to you. I guess you would have benefitted from the early days of microcomputers like the brilliant BBC Micro. But we don’t really know what is round the corner. All I can say is to study something that (a) will give you a life skill rather than some training for a technology that will expire and (b) that fascinates you. If you can make a career out of that, all well and good but otherwise you can always become a blogger or an entrepreneur…
And if you think about forensic science as a victim of oversubscription, pity the poor folk who studied to be a librarian when the UK was turning out more librarians in a year than there are libraries! At least like all science. forensics is portable and can be of use elsewhere in the world which has the added advantage that you can escape paying all those student loans back….:-)
Excellent points, John. Thanks for contributing
I definitely agree that you need to do something that fascinates you. I’m sure I could train as a financial trader and make much more money that I ever could in software, but could I ever tear myself away from software? Hmm, I’m not so sure. I think I’ll stick with your advice about being a blogger and entrepreneur! Oh, btw, my digital stomping ground was actually the Commodore Vic-20 and the C64 
Future skills is a big thing for me at the moment, working out what areas will be in demand in the future, so that i can focus on developing my expertise.
Some of the indicators that i have seen reckon that generalist skills (e.g. jack of all trades, but master of nothing) will become devalued through so much information being available on the internet and competition from Eastern Europe and India.
Instead the demand will be for specialists with ‘deep’ understanding of their area and the principal of craftsmanship – taking great care and pride in the delivery of your work – will rise again. As you say, it is and will be more and more important to be relevant.
It’s true. The global economy is constantly evolving and this moves the supply and demand of different skillsets as well as creating new skills and placing stronger emphasis on others. I’m always thinking about what technology, health and education will look like in the future. Only then can we really understand what we should be doing with out time right now to ensure our success. I would agree with you in that skills are becoming increasingly specialist. Or at least, that was phase one. Phase two is the emergence of cross-disciplinary skillsets. As technology advances, the gaps between the subjects gets narrower and people are expected to be experts in computing and biology, for example. It’s only going to get tougher, and more interesting. In a more general sense, I strongly believe that if this country is going to maintain its position in the global economy, it will have to to adopt new cultural attitudes towards education. I think that will be a really painful transition, and my not even happen at all. Or is that too strong?
I agree and here I think the UK (or at least England and Wales) has shot itself in the foot with tiered GCSEs in maths and science which mean that those who study foundation level to get the ‘safe C’ can’t study these subjects at A level or above. (any exceptions will have wasted their time getting bored). The Royal Society has been wondering recently why so few kids take A level science. I would have thought that the answer is obvious.
I tried foundation GCSE maths papers from the BBC BiteSize website on our 10 year old and, despite not having done the syllabus and being in year 6 fully 5 years younger, he managed to get 41% and 50%! But the higher papers and particularly EdExcel’s Mathematics B look very good. I haven’t checked the science papers yet but we patronise our youngsters far too much and by not challenging them, they lose opportunity and become disinterested.
Better educated (at school level anyway) people from overseas will take jobs at least while the UK is worth working in. Otherwise the same people will go elsewhere and we will have a nation of Big Brother and X-Factor dreamers. I always think the Royle Family is a parody on the country – a recursive sitcom of a bunch of slobs slouching on the sofa watching the telly and eating rubbish while complaining about everything rather than doing something about it! Brilliantly observed and written.
There is a convergence in subjects but there is broadening as well. It is I think impossible to predict what subjects (outside medicine, law and accountancy) will pay well in the future. So study the classical subjects as tools plus what fascinates you because that will at least teach research and learning skills.
But don’t give up on software, Ash – you could kill two birds with one stone by devising better heuristic algorithms to make trading profits by scalping markets that have tax free trading!
Oh, don’t get me started on maths education! I remember seeing a forum post in the past that showed example questions from maths papers in exams from every decade since the 60s or 70s. The decline was painful, and comparing our materials to overseas materials is just embarrassing too. We’ve really got to step up our game. We’re supposed to a developed country with one of the largest economies in the world and we can’t even teach a subject that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years (up until 2nd year Bachelors, I think)
Anyway, our youth is totally screwed lol but you’re clearly an attentive and intelligent parent who understands what’s going on out there so I’m sure your son be successful
Good Post – I think while generalists are good, the best skill of all is being adaptable – embracing change and being flexible. I believe the key is getting the balance between keeping your options open and becoming to ‘generalistic’!
Interestingly, my wife has a degree in forensic science – and I can confirm that there are really no jobs in the field. Fortunately a lot of industries accept ‘science degrees’ so all is not lost.
I like your point about keeping that balance in order. Walking that line can be pretty difficult at times. Something has to give. Currently, I find myself sacrificing my technical skills because I spent time on things like this site. Decisions like that can be difficult to justify sometimes. I’d also agree with the adaptability point. The body of human knowledge is growing at such a rate now that anyone who cannot adapt will just be left behind.
The whole generalist / niche thing can be likened to products or shops that fall into the middle ground.
This current recession has killed off many middle ground businesses, leaving behind the mass-production, stack it high-sell it cheap businesses that sell to the masses (think Tesco, Aldi, etc) and the very high-end niche businesses that sell to the super-rich (think Cartier, Rolls-Royce).
Where generalism fails is that for jobs the middle-ground is disappearing. People will still be able to work with light skills and qualifications,but the money then will be paid will be much reduced.
Meanwhile the specialist ‘craftspeople’ will be able to charge a fortune for their time. The point about cross-disciplinary skills is interesting as i guess it produces a whole range of new niches that people can strive to make their own.
Reading through John’s comment made me think of an article i read in the Evening Standard on monday about most IT teachers knowing less about IT than the children they are teaching and that most IT lessons are about creating powerpoint presentations that bore the socks of the students. The next key point being that we are teaching people to be slaves to the application and that IT lessons should teach people how to create and own their own applications.
Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times yes! Tech education in the UK is woefully inadequate. We don’t need American tech CEOs to tell us that. Any nerd who is unfortunate enough to come into contact with the IT A Level syllabus will be able to explain how much of a joke it is!
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If the economy keeps going the way it is, there’ll always be homeless people and drug addicts! So I will be relevant. I hope!
Perhaps not a street paper in the U.K though…
Alex and I were watching football with his 16 year old neighbour a few months ago. He was trying to decide what course he should study at university – he listed the options to us and said “Which one will make me the most money in the future? That’s the one I’ll do!”
To me that was really refreshing! Firstly that he was thinking about his future rather than looting a JJB Sports, but secondly that the money he would make in a job in the future was a massive factor for him when deciding what course to do. I did a bullshit course at university, but was lucky to have decided by my final year what I wanted to do and got into that pretty quickly. However my course is not relevant to this. I think students should be encouraged to weigh up what’s going to make them money as well as provide them with a career they want to do! There needs to be a happy balance, and for me there was too much emphasis on just going to university and not enouch emphasis on the financial benefits in the future.
At school, my ‘career advisor’ said, ‘At university, just do the subject you’re best at.’ Right. Quite why I didn’t challenge this lady, I don’t know *slaps 18 year old self around the head*, but I didn’t, so I merrily toddled off to do a history degree. How flippin’ stupid.
What she should have said was, ‘Look at the state of the British economy. Look at growth areas and burgeoning employment opportunities. Look at employment statistics by degree. Done that? Brilliant. Do engineering, maths or physics, you obnoxious punk.’
Damn you. You summed up my point much better than me using much fewer words. That’s slightly annoying, but it’s nice to have you on here. We missed you!