Emerging and Evolving Occupations: How to Find the Perfect Job

Lately, I’ve been investigating emerging and evolving occupations, which offer exciting new opportunities for people interested in changing careers, returning to the workforce or entering the job market.  I will be devoting the next few blogs to this topic.  These careers are attractive because they’re growing and tend to have more flexible requirements.

What do I mean by emerging occupations?  You might think that they’re all about new technology and computers.  But, that’s only part of the story.  Emerging means anything that arises or comes into existence. It also means to ‘come forth into view, as from concealment.’ These emerging careers form a kind of shadow economy or hidden job market, in that they’re not usually classified or counted by government statistics.

So, these jobs didn’t exist before.  Then, where do these emerging occupations come from?  Of course, some come from new technology.  This includes jobs that come from new fields or inventions, like digital computing or big data. By big data, we mean the collection, processing and analysis of huge quantities of data to discern patterns in buying behavior, risk assessment and management, and so much more.  Big data is generating jobs, such as data miners and analysts.  The digital revolution has created opportunities in digital media- for new types of data storage and retrieval and for new products, such as digital video.  Within digital media, we also find social media–all the ways people are communicating with each other – online and on mobile devices.  The more sophisticated computing has spawned more sophisticate hacking, creating the need for cyber security managers.

In the next blog, I’ll be discussing some other trends, such as demographics, new legislation and new economics responsible for generating a host of other new jobs.