Tomorrow’s jobs p2 - Military Transition - Military Times EDGE

Someone out there is getting paid to design widgets for cell phones.

“That job didn’t exist a few years ago, and yet to anticipate it, you only needed to ask a simple question: What are people going to want to do in the future with this tool that they can’t do now?”

That’s Josh Calder, who asks such questions daily. As an analyst with Social Technologies, a “foresight consulting” firm in Washington, D.C., he looks into the future, where your cool civilian job awaits.

A cool job is the one where, when you mention it at a cocktail party, people stop and listen. It used to be astronaut — maybe race car driver. Tomorrow’s cutting-edge careers will come from a number of fields: health care, the environment, technology. Calder says they’ll share a common trait. They’ll grow out of a real need, the kind of need that drives deep social change. Undoubtedly, they’ll be cool.

“There is no such thing as a diet ‘trend.’ There are only diet fads, and you need to know the difference,” Calder said. To separate potentially seismic trends from fads, he advises scoping out lists such as the ones put out by the World Future Society, a think tank that ponders how social and technological developments are shaping the future.

“Then ask yourself, how do my interests and abilities interact with these trends that are supposed to be changing the future?”

Robotics

Retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph W. Dyer asked himself just that question when he retired in 2003 after 34 years in uniform. His predecessors had gone to firms such as Boeing and Northrup Grumman, “but I was looking to have more fun,” Dyer said.

Today he whoops it up as president of the Government and Industrial Robots Division at iRobot. The company’s high-end machines disarm improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its popular consumer model, Roomba, vacuums floors.

“I’ve always been a little geeky, always interested in technology,” Dyer said. “I wanted to find the 21st-century equivalent of the Apple computer in the 1980s — the company that had the potential to change the way we fight, the way we live, the way we care for our seniors, all of those things. I looked at all the technologies and became the convinced that the robot’s time had arrived.”

Besides, robots were his surest route to a cool job. “I don’t know one damn thing about biogenetics, and I knew I would be seriously dead by the time nanotechnology blossomed,” he said.

Want in? An engineering background helps, but it’s not the only route. Building a robot is a complex business involving administrators, testers, assembly workers and more. Your logistics skills, for instance, can be a hot commodity in organizing all those interconnected efforts.

• Get started: The Robotic Industries Association maintains an industry information bank and career center.

Green industries

Having all wreaked our fair share of havoc on the planet, we now can go to work breathing new life into it. Government is going to be pumping billions into sustainable initiatives in the coming years, while industry increasingly goes green as a way to save money and conserve resources.

What does it mean to you? The Center for American Progress think tank suggests a few possibilities.

Be a wind farmer. Construction workers, truck drivers, machinists and environmental engineers will be needed to harvest turbine energy.

Green a building. Carpenters, roofers, heating and air conditioning specialists, and specially trained building inspectors will have jobs retrofitting buildings with new, energy-efficient fixtures and systems, even putting living landscapes on roofs.

Make new gas. Chemical engineers, agricultural workers and a slew of others throughout the chain of production will be involved in developing the next wave of biofuels.

These are real careers, and they are coming soon. The center reports that New York City is scheduled to have 1,700 hybrid-electric buses on its roads by 2010.

• Get started: The National Association of Environmental Professionals tracks career opportunities. Specialized academic programs also are a way in, such as the sustainability program at the Michigan State University School of Packaging.

Aging services

From 1946 to 1964, about 77 million baby boomers were born. They have annual spending power of a trillion dollars. Tomorrow’s hottest jobs will focus on the health and welfare of this generation, said Athan G. Bezaitis, a spokesperson for the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology.

The school just started a master’s program in aging services to help prepare people for jobs in such high-growth areas as services for people with disabilities, home health care services, geriatric care management, research and related fields.

Adults older than 65 are expected to make up 12 percent of the world population by 2030. Careers in geriatrics are going to encompass more than just care. There will be new technologies arising every day, new challenges that demand creative minds. Top players will seek out degrees in the field, along with some amount of hands-on experience among aging populations.

• Get started: Universities are the best place, with a range of degree programs, some in specialized areas such as geriatric nutrition and others more broad based, such as the University of Southern California’s master’s degree in aging services.

Disease control

Marcia Patrick was serving in the Army Nurse Corps in May 1982 when she saw her first case of AIDS. She didn’t know what it was — nobody did. “People were dying left and right, and we did not even know how it was transmitted. Was it in the air? Was it in handshakes?”

That experience got her hooked on infection control, and when she retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1992, she stayed with the career. Now she’s director of infection prevention and control at MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, Wash.

“I never dreamed of going into infection control,” Patrick recalled. Spurred on by her early encounter with AIDS, she sought out education from colleagues, classes and hands-on experience, soon becoming an expert in one of the fastest-growing areas of medicine.

Technology is getting better, Patrick said, which makes it possible to track, contain and understand infections better than ever before. At the same time, viruses in an increasingly globalized world can cross borders just as easily as we can. The practice known as epidemiology works hand in hand with infection control to ensure the next plague is nipped in the bud.

Nursing is one way in. A range of courses and degree programs at universities nationwide also offer a point of entry. Whatever one’s level of experience, it helps to be around those who know the ropes. “Probably the best way to get into it is to find an organization that is adding staff and where there is already a core program with people who know what is going on,” Patrick said.

• Get started: Consider a nursing degree — you’ll likely need one — and then head to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology whose certification offers a way into the field.

Biotech

Cool and cutting edge? Yeah, that would be biotech, the industry that has created more than 200 new therapies and vaccines, addressing everything from cancer to diabetes to HIV/AIDS, according to BIO, the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

Things are happening here, with more than 400 biotech drug products and vaccines currently in clinical trials targeting more than 200 diseases. Cutting-edge work includes DNA fingerprinting, a biotech process that has vastly improved criminal investigation and forensic medicine.

Biotech isn’t just about treating people. Agricultural biotechnology helps us produce more food, use fewer pesticides and keep food healthy, according to BIO.

The field needs cell culture technicians and cloning technicians. Professionals work in regulatory affairs and patent law. You could be a cell biologist or, BIO notes, a brewmaster.

Schooling is the starting point, with general and specialized programs to be found in practically every major university.

• Get started: In addition to the Biotechnology Industry Organization virtually every major university offers a biotech program, from the master’s degree at Columbia University to the University of California Davis biotech program.

More places to look

While a job may have a high “cocktail party” factor, definitions of cool may vary, said Bryan Zawikoski, general manager in the military transition division at international recruiting firm Lucas Group.

Zawikoski left the Air Force as a first lieutenant after 17 years in uniform. In the Air Force, he was an ICBM launch control officer. “It may sound really cool, but I sat in a concrete capsule 150 feet underground baby-sitting nuclear missiles. It was hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror,” he said.

His point: Don’t assume the hottest jobs are to be found in the headline industries.

“The lower-tech the product, the higher-tech the process. For example, one of the highest-tech processes I have seen was a high-speed diaper manufacturing line,” he said. “You have to do it fast, you have to do it well, and you have to do it right. So there can be a misperception out there about ‘cool’ and which industries have the coolest jobs.”

Some things are certain, he said. Automotive innovation. Wind and solar energy. Medical technologies. They are cutting-edge today, and they are here to stay. Still, the big-name players are not necessarily the place to go for jobs with panache.

“The problem with the high-profile companies like Google and Microsoft is that these companies get tens of thousands of applications,” Zawikoski said. That makes it hard to get in the door.

The job you want may be flying under their radar.

“To a large degree, it may be more exciting to work for a smaller company, because what you do can have more impact,” Zawikoski said. “These aren’t the companies that are spending a lot on advertising or sending out a lot of press releases, but a lot of the most exciting work is going on there.”