CareerTech Buzz?

When thinking about your future lifestyle, I consider career management a complement to financial management. One has to do with earned income, and the other with how to manage that income. Over the last decade, consumer FinTech has been a big deal. Mint revolutionizing how we budget expenses. NerdWallet revolutionized how we financially plan. And Betterment revolutionized how we invest. Billions have poured into disrupting the $55 billion personal finance industry. Yet, what startups are leaders in career management? For the average person today, lifetime earned income makes up more than 50 times their lifetime investment income. And, even more important, work takes up roughly a quarter of your time in life. Personal finance only moves the needle for the top 1%; a 5% investment return on $1MM is $50,000 (close to the average income). For the worker making $40,000 / year, increasing that to $50,000 a year is far more impactful than reducing spending by $1,000 or making $200 in investment income. It’s time to start buzz about a new field: CareerTech.

Historically, career management has been undervalued; it didn’t just start with the tech boom. It can be observed over the last half century. Giants like Edward Jones, Smith Barney, and Merrill Lynch became powerhouses in financial planning in the 90s, employing thousands of financial advisors. More recently personal finance celebrities such as Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey amassed millions of followers. Even in schools, “financial literacy” has been hailed as the new hot topic. Who are the leaders in career planning? Where about “career literacy?” They seem to be in the nooks and crannies of society. According to IBIS World, the financial planning industry is more than 4x larger than the career advice industry. Career Advice is primarily limited to government, non-profit, and school initiatives. Times have changed, and we have emerging technologies such machine learning and virtual reality to really bring this field to life.

In the future, career management will be crucial. Will we be prepared when robots take our jobs? McKinsey estimates that 73 million U.S. jobs (half of the jobs today) will be lost to automation by 2030. A 2017 Dell Report estimated that 85% of jobs in 2030 don’t exist yet. These risks are swelling at the same time there is $1.5 trillion in growing student debt and job tenure has steadily declined as we make way for the freelance economy. We have two options: we can let income inequality skyrocket until there is revolution, or we can build CareerTech to help job seekers anticipate changes and prepare for them.

Now is the time to build virtual reality /augmented reality apps showing what a Day In the Life of a Software Engineer is really like. Now is the time to build a robot that gives you interview feedback. Now is the time to launch wearable devices and sensory technology that inform you which sports you have a natural advantage. And now is the time to use artificial intelligence to predict where job openings will be 1,3, and 5 years into the future.

Creighton Taylor, CFA is Harvard Business School graduate, and founder of Guided Compass, an app that uses machine learning to identify the optimal career pathways for individuals.

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Sincerely,

Creighton Taylor,CFA

Founder of Guided Compass