Jonathan Grudin, a principal researcher at Microsoft, said he was optimistic about the future of work as long as people learned technological<br />skills: “People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, and technology is already central.”<br />But the third of respondents who were pessimistic about the future of education reform said it won’t matter if there are no jobs to train for.<br />Consider it part of your job description to keep learning, many respondents said<br />— learn new skills on the job, take classes, teach yourself new things.<br />Pew Research Center and Elon University surveyed 1,408 people who work in technology<br />and education to find out if they think new schooling will emerge in the next decade to successfully train workers for the future.<br />How to Prepare for an Automated Future -<br />Get the Upshot in your Inbox<br />We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take,<br />but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers.<br />At universities, “people learn how to approach new things, ask questions<br />and find answers, deal with new situations,” wrote Uta Russmann, a professor of communications at the FHWien University of Applied Sciences in Vienna.<br />“Many of the ‘skills’ that will be needed are more like personality characteristics, like curiosity, or social skills<br />that require enculturation to take hold,” wrote Stowe Boyd, managing director of Another Voice, which provides research on the new economy.
