Future proofing ideas (for kids)

How to earn when everything is being outsourced

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

A while back I threw my hat into the ring to become a non-exec board member. For those not familiar with the concept, this is a group of people who oversee the running of an organisation, helping to steer the ship and keep an eye on the finances, mostly.

I did the training, which was encouraged by my employer at the time, and got selected for the board of a London-based disability charity. My motivation was partly being told “There aren’t enough women on boards,” partly “this could future proof my retirement years by giving me skills to transition to a paid board position,” but mostly “I’ve worked for some questionable companies and this might help balance the karma.”

(By questionable, I mean pharma, oil and tobacco. When you work for an ad agency you don’t have the luxury of choosing the accounts you work on until you become quite senior. I also worked in banking, which is arguably questionable too, but hey, everyone needs money, and I made it my mission while I was there to be the Good Guy.)

What I didn’t realise was that board positions are often hard to land, so I got lucky landing a gig immediately. A few people who did the training alongside me were unsuccessful despite being, I thought, far more qualified than me.

Anyway, I recently attended one of our regular board meetings and was saddened to hear that the frontline workers at the charity would often find people who needed proper help. Our workers would alert a social worker at the relevant local authority and wait for an update. The problem is that the updates were slow to arrive, if they arrived at all, because the local authorities are so short of social workers.

Whether this is a retention issue, a shortage of trained people, or something else, I couldn’t guess for sure. But it occurred to me that if you have school age children and you’re worrying about what they’ll do with their lives in future, anything that supports people in the real world and can’t be replaced by “AI” is where they should be focusing their efforts.

Roles that will always need humans to do them (this is not an exhaustive list):

Hands-on care and crisis work

• Midwifery

• Paramedics and emergency response

• Addiction counselling

• Domestic violence advocacy

• Foster care and adoption support

• Reflexology

• Podiatry, osteopathy etc (actually, all the body parts that require a specialism)

• Physical therapy

• Vets!

Trades requiring physical judgement

• Plumbing, electrical work, heating/ventilation/air-conditioning (anything that involves diagnosing a physical problem in a real-world space)

• Skilled building restoration and conservation work

• Builders, roofers, flooring installers, window fitters, cabinetmakers, bricklayers and tilers

• Gardeners and landscapers

Personal care and grooming

• Hairdressing and barbering

• Beauty therapy

• Nail technicians

• Massage therapy (although there are now ‘hands off’ massage beds I doubt they’re as good as a human!)

• Tattoo artistry

Trust and negotiation heavy roles

• Mediation and conflict resolution

• Diplomats and foreign service roles

• Hospice and funeral work (funeral direction and celebrancy, for example)

• Wedding celebrancy (although maybe a celebrant robot will be rolled out?)

Roles that need a human to be accountable

• Safeguarding officers

• Coroners and forensic pathologists

• Foster carers, adoption panel assessors

• Wealth management and financial advisors

• Forensic accountancy

• Actuaries signing off on regulated decisions

• Compliance and risk officers

• Turnaround, transformation and restructuring specialists (negotiation skills in a crisis)

Skilled improvisation

• Live event and theatre production (things going wrong in real time, needing a human to fix it fast)

• Search and rescue

I wonder if boards will need humans in future. Maybe all the variables for any scenario will be fed into an LLM, and the decisions we’d normally debate as a group to reach agreement will be delivered in seconds. If that happens, my retirement plan might need a rethink. I wonder how long it takes to train as a death doula?

(I just looked it up: from foundation to diploma it’s two years. I could barely handle dealing with my cat’s body recently. I’m not sure I could do that for a person.)

If you do a job that’s future proof, let us know what it is and how long it took you to start earning money from it. Hit reply if you got this via email, or drop it in the comments below.