Recently, I started exploring the job market, having taken a 6-month hiatus. Not only is there a wealth of jobs, but the “sturdiness” of the positions and business models are refreshing.
Yes, sturdy when you consider what occurred decades prior.
In 1991, computer programmer Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web, an encyclopedia of information, accessible by anyone with a PC, browser, and coaxial or Ethernet cable connected to a modem or router. It was kludgy, slow, and frustrating at times, and glorious when you could finally connect and find what you were seeking.
It was also the golden ticket to ecommerce, start of the age of dotcom, and slow demise of the print catalog. Before the ubiquity of the internet, a treasure trove of wonderment would arrive in your mailbox: Land’s End, L.L. Bean, and Eddie Bauer for clothing, Williams-Sonoma, Brookstone and Pottery Barn for the kitchen and house, Harry & David for the tummy, Hammacher Schlemmer for wonderment, and Daedalus Books for enlightenment.
My favorites were Banana Republic and J. Peterman’s, which crafted stories about their clothing, turning cotton cardigans into regalia for pearls or politics, equating floppy floral hats to endangered buildings and famous people’s letters, and flip-up sunglasses as a necessity for dazzling passersby at French sidewalk cafés.
Catalog companies were giants, reinforcing their dominance with alluring stores in shopping and strip malls. Seemingly overnight, flipping through paper catalogs was replaced with clicking through digital images and pages of text on emerging dotcoms. By 2000, there were thousands of dotcoms with 39% of all venture-capital investments distributed to internet companies.[1]
Then it all exploded. Nearly 50% of dotcom sites were operating at a loss, resulting in their filing for bankruptcy.[2] Emblematic of the dotcom bubble was Pets.com with losses of approximately $147 million in the first three quarters of 2000.[3] A simple sock puppet with button eyes, flailing arms, Timex watch around its neck, and stick microphone became the company’s mascot and advertising schtick, appearing in a Super Bowl ad and on ABC’s Good Morning America, Nightline, and other high-profile placements.
The flimsiness of the sock puppet mirrored the vulnerability of early dotcoms, ultimately making them a questionable investment and risky place to work. But like all leaps in technology—including the transition from the horse and buggy to cars—weaker endeavors collapsed, strong ones persisted, and attractive and breakthrough ventures were acquired.
Thirty years later, not only has the internet matured, but the technology of the 1990’s is indistinguishable, replaced by sturdy, resilient, and durable capabilities that aren’t going to burst like the dotcom balloon, but flourish. Most of these capabilities are an evolution, a maturation of an idea that was initially an impossibility.
In the early 2000’s, I worked for a marketing agency that supported the supercomputing industry. At the time, building supercomputers with commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software was the vogue. I didn’t internalize the concept until I attended a supercomputer conference in Texas. In the center of the show floor was a battalion of engineers, surrounded by a hundred or so racks filled with servers, connected with seemingly miles of cables, fastidiously zip-tied together.
Cables extended from the supercomputer to exhibitors’ booths, enabling them to showcase their applications. Today, my palm-sized smartphone—countless iterations from “brick” cell phones—has similar processing power and astonishing capabilities, making it possible to stream movies and music, snap photos, and videos, access the internet and email using touch or voice, order and pay at a tap of finger, set notifications, and efficiently drive from point A to point B.
This interconnectivity, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI), associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is a fundamental change in the way people live, work, and relate to each other. Like the Third Industrial Revolution, which marked the transition from mechanical and analog to digital, it accelerates opportunities, creating jobs that go beyond science fiction to roles that were unimaginable just ten years ago.
The maturation of AI has and will continue to unleash a cyclone of applications. Generative AI, which creates, improves, and personalizes content, including text, audio files, images, program code, and structured data. These capabilities are dramatically transforming logistics, facial identification and verification systems, diagnostic imaging, analytics, programming, and even marketing by predicting how target audiences will respond to messaging and promotions.
From an everyday process improvement perspective, no code and low code development platforms help teams customize their processes and apps with minimum help from often overwhelmed IT teams. Its “drag and drop” approach accelerates time-to-value and transformation. An off shoot is the extensive availability of integrated tools, for every industry, that simplifies development and subsequent analytics, customer relationship management, task tracking, knowledge management, communications, file storage, security, and countless other practices.
Further empowering companies is off-the-shelf, essentially plug-and-play technologies, targeted to broad and niche industries that optimize operations, increasing efficiencies, automating, amplifying, and accelerating what’s possible. Consider how the retail experience is evolving with kiosks, mobile point-of-sale (POS) devices, and real-time inventory management that enables associates to verify whether an item is in stock and location, such as at another store.
Equally reinforcing the longevity of today’s companies and associated jobs is the ability to leverage the cloud, increasing security, agility, time-to-market, and reducing in-house IT investments. As-a-service isn’t a flash-in-the-pan, but the ongoing paradigm for services, platform, infrastructure, and “anything” (XaaS).
All these technologies, from the edge to the cloud, illuminate the most essential (and pervasive) profession: Security and privacy. “It’s a Cyber Pandemic,” recently declared Newsweek, citing, more than 70 million Americans are hit by cybercrimes every year and not a day goes by when there isn’t a stream of major attacks against government agencies, companies, and individuals.[4] Protecting computers, networks, data, endpoints, cloud, users, applications, and sensitive information is a $112.07 billion industry, expected to reach $200.07 billion by 2027.[5]
The durability of today’s and tomorrow’s jobs are equally tied to meeting the needs of individuals. This includes applications used on the job to automate repetitive tasks, simplify planning and scheduling, and more easily engage with colleagues, affiliates, customers, patients, and students. And it extends to homes, schools, and public places with breakthrough products, services, and applications that help individuals grow their skills, improve their health and wellbeing, access entertainment, reinforce their security, safety, and privacy, and easily interact with others.
I think about the Pets.com sock puppet frequently, having watched outwardly sturdy companies collapse overnight, during the dotcom bubble. And now, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds, companies are simultaneously innovating as they scramble to see who comes out on top with employees sometimes playing “musical chairs” as they switch jobs and companies or regrettably get laid-off.
Even so, I’m optimistic about the sturdiness and longevity of the jobs of the future. Afterall, the need for human ingenuity, resolve, and foresight will increase as technology is used to solve tough challenges and improve the lives of organizations, enterprises, and individuals.
[1] The Dotcom Bubble Burst (2000), International Banker, September 29, 2021
[3] 10 big dot.com flops, CNN Money, 2010
[4] New Hackers Outwit All Efforts to Stop Them: “It’s a Cyber Pandemic,” Newsletter, January 18, 2023
[5] Security Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027, imarc
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