Outlook 2020: Which Jobs will be Most in Demand?

A new decade is nearly upon us, and it promises to bring with it new opportunities for professional development and growth. No one knows exactly what the future will hold, but it is sure to be filled with new technologies, new types of work, and lots of excitement. Many of the burgeoning industries of today will grow and evolve over the course of the next year. Workers today need to take the time to assess their current skills and determine what they want from future employment.

New tech, new responsibilities

The evolution of business technology is often met with uneasiness - will automation replace human workers? How will the economy respond? Though automated processes may indeed change the nature of work, the technology is still far from competent enough to fully replace human intelligence. A program may be able to move data around and make predictions, but people are still needed to assess the data, make sense of it, and turn it into new business opportunities. The work itself may change, but the need for human problem-solving skills will remain. For now, artificial intelligence and machine learning are here to augment worker abilities, not replace them completely.

A data-driven world

Many of the positions that will be in high-demand by the year 2020 have a strong data component. New technologies produce and process massive amounts of data each day, giving human teams the resources to make process improvements that will directly benefit the bottom line. As the infographic below illustrates, the future will need skilled workers to create technology innovations and leverage new systems to generate more productivity.