To ask for your help coming up with an AI-proof back up career?

[Haemagoblin]

I work in a research support role in Higher Education. I am a qualified professional, but I have a bad feeling that AI and the current financial crisis in HE, the lack of return on degrees and the general cost of living crisis does not bode well for my career in this area long term. Am currently earning c.£40k pa. Would like to maintain this if at all possible. There's a lot of talk in my sector about upskilling in areas like data analysis, coding etc - but tbh I don't know if there's 20-30 years' mileage in that either given the rate of progress in AI - may be jobs now but give it 5 years and the core tasks will be automated imo.

I'm 40, so if I make a career change I would like it to be long term and therefore AI-proof. I have a humanities degree (well 2 actually!) so outside of my (probably dying) sector, I am not an easy sell. So I'm thinking (a) what can computers never do for us? (b) what still makes decent money? and (c) what am I actually good at?

My first thought is various things around child-rearing (I love being a parent and looking after my little ones' friends). Teaching looks like a crapshoot at the moment though, plus extensive and expensive retraining required. So I wondered about child-minding/nannying. Concerns there are does it pay enough, how difficult is it running your own business/doing tax returns/dealing with government subsidy (I have always been salaried before). Also my DP works from home sometimes and does not enjoy kids as much as me (though would probably prefer it to me being unsalaried!)

Any other ideas? I mean people will always need to eat and I love to cook, but I couldn't make beautiful celebration cakes etc - I'm not at all artistic. I used to work in a pub and loved it, but not enough money in that (esp not these days as drinking and esp drinking out declines).

What else can't the machines take away from us???

you won't get £40k being a nanny unless in london I don't think. In fact you probably wouldn't get that as a start salary in most graduate entry jobs? Which is kind of where you would be starting it sound like. I think you're right though, it'll be jobs that personally interact in caring or teaching for others that'll be the hardest to replicate for AI, but to be good and those and to make your salary requires wanting to do that kind of work, training and experience? Otherwise i can't think really - retraining as a solicitor sounds like something you could achieve, and that profession may be savvy enough to resist AI. Right now though AI is fairly poor at most things and expensive to set up so i wouldn't assume you'll be replaced by AI, although you may be right that higher education is going to continue shrinking.

I have some experience of a similar role - but I'm retired now (lucky me).
Have a think about what aspects of your type of role couldn't easily be automated. Also, can you identify what your personal USP is, and is it transferable?
We used reporting tools which required configuration, data input, data checking, interpretation of reports to underpin recommendations, etc. Is that an area you'd like to move into?
Also, look at the job family descriptors for the grades above you. What skills or experience would you need to develop to maintain or increase your salary? Seems to me that the higher up the grades you are, the more 'management' and strategic skills are needed, which can't easily be replicated by AI.

I am having similar thoughts, so will be following this thread with interest.

So far, all I have come up with is elderly care.

The reporting tools etc is kind of the 'save' that might keep me going another decade or so - I have data analytics skills but they're self taught and dated (gone are the days when being the only person in the office who knew about VLOOKUP and PivotTable in Excel made you look clever!). I need to learn how to code, and to automate feeds and use dashboards like PowerBI. These skills would make me more long term employable, but as I say I fear not for long as fundamentally, AI is heading to a place where you could issue these commands in natural language and (give or take a bit of clarification) AI will be able to do it for you. I think we'll get there sooner than we think!

And yes moving up into management is a possibility, but again with the shrinking of the human resource in HE I think that is going to become a more and more sticky wicket - fewer and fewer people on more and more unstable contracts being expected to do more and more work, with many more direct reports than would have been the case 5 years ago - for the relatively minimal salary uplift that kind of stress isn't worth the candle if you ask me. And the higher up you go the more likely you are to be for the chop when redundancies roll round.

Possibly my wiser course would be to try and monkey-bar on as I am, by hook or by crook, for another 10-20 years, and then when my kids are (hopefully) less financially dependent and the mortgage paid off I can accept a major drop in salary. It's the uncertainty that does for me though, I'm not even directly at risk yet but I worry all the time about how we'd manage if i lost my job.

Again retraining as a solicitor would be ££££. I've thought about accountancy as it seems like it could be a well-paying career I could train for reasonably affordably over time, and it strikes me as quite AI-proof as it requires individuated solutions, understanding and relationship-building. Only trouble is I can think of LITERALLY nothing more boring! But I suppose boring and paid is better than being excitingly destitute 😂

ANOTHER option might be to really lean in to AI, become the person at my work who really knows what it is and how it works and how to leverage it for more efficiency - that expertise is seriously lacking in HE right now and would be extremely valuable. Again, problem is I'm ethically and spiritually opposed to the whole shebang as I feel it is destroying livelihoods and chipping away at the basic stuff of what makes us human 😂but what price a conscience I suppose!

Social Work?

Not all of it is child protection, there is Early Help/ Family support/ children with disabilities type roles and also wide range of roles for social work with adults.

There's a few different training routes and some of them are paid - my local authority takes people on as social care workers on around £30kpa and from there they can apply to do a degree apprenticeship in social work and be paid to qualify as a social worker.

It's competitive but with your background and experience you would be a good candidate.

If I were you I’d lean in to it while also learning more about Power BI and how to read data across the organisation to simplify and automate things. AI stuff is still rudimentary at most levels - it’s basic Generative AI packaged up well in corporate speak - not hard to become knowledgable on it if there’s a gap right now

(I’m an analyst in a huge financial services firm using AI daily by the way)

I'd look into the trades if you have any interest or aptitude. It will be hard to automate going into peoples houses and fixing their plumbing. And that work will always be needed.

Both the accounting and legal professions will be impacted by AI - more of the junior grunt work will be done easily by computers. You will still need the more senior skills and experience but if your concern is about AI I wouldn’t start at the bottom end of either profession.

All physical trades, all/any physical work, that requires interacting with real people will be safe.

Anything done on a laptop will be effected.

The hardest jobs to automate are the ones that require non-repetitive physical interaction. So any kind of office work has its days numbered.

Jobs like building, plumbing, locksmiths are relatively safe. AI alone can't replace humans because every job is different. AI needs to be paired with robotics to create a machine that can get into the same tight spaces a person can and make judgements on the fly. A robot that can clamber into the space under my sink and change the piping without making a huge mess is a long way off - especially a robot that is cheaper than paying a human.

Caring is another one - people will find it hard to accept robotic carers until they are indistinguishable from real people. That's a fair way off.

Other than that, there aren't many jobs. Professional footballer maybe, will be a while before people pay a subscription to watch robots kicking a ball about. Low level military roles (the cannon fodder level rather than anything higher up) and the police are probably relatively safe too because they require people on the front line to take down a threat.

Tax consultancy is a lot more interesting than standard accountancy and you can train for it in the same was as for an accountancy qualification. I suspect that it will be more AI proof than audit.

I would do this. I'm assuming you don't have ethical issues against using computers? They destroyed millions of jobs.

But new ones came along. Just as they will with AI and GAI. Lean in to it. Become an expert in it for your sector.

This. Use the skills you already have, OP, and the knowledge and experience you have of your sector.

Back in the day, OP, it was the typists who could embrace word processing who kept, and enhanced, their jobs.

I'm not UK based, but where I live - which had a big tech industry - codimg is being taken over by AI. In fact I was just discussing this with another parent recently, that he is starting to see huge job reductions in his industry, mainly coding.

So I wouldn't head in that direction.

AI is only as good as the information it's been given.

This is interesting lying about AIs coding ability

https://techfundingnews.com/fake-it-till-you-unicorn-builder-ais-natasha-was-never-ai-just-700-indian-coders-behind-the-curtain/

Same as the Luddites opposing mechanisation of manufacturing, theoretically it all frees up people to do more interesting things that AI can't do, we will see. I remember the start of AI, or thinking/learning computers they were called back in the 1980s, taken a good while to get this far.

Well the Luddites sort of had a point at the time - the issue with AI 'freeing up time' is that people still need jobs to feed their families! I don't think we should embrace technology that will actually make life worse for most people just because it makes more profit for the few in our increasingly unequal society. Not until we at least have a watertight system of fair taxation and a universal basic income.

They did but where would we be now if they had stopped progress? Mass poverty and child labour continuing in the name of feeding their families. Where will the future be with or without the new technologies? We don't know, that's the dilemma, a fork in the road, but technological progress seems inevitable. And for things like diagnostic test of tissue samples it's fantastic, once taught AI doesn't make mistakes can work all day (and night if required) doing repetitive boring work that requires great skill. The danger is who programs it to do what.

AI is the next industrial revolution, the next computers, the next internet. There's no point whinging about it. Lean in!

AI won’t take your jobs, the people who know how to use it will. Use of basic AI is reasonably widespread but truly getting to grips with its wide range of functions and being able to leverage that is a skill in short supply. Lean in and leverage it

Well, to be fair, AI will take lots of jobs. But new jobs will arise by being able to use AI well. Just as happened with computers.

Funeral director
Gardener
Plumber
Electrician
Elderly care
Animal care
Construction

I’m a midwife and hoping AI can’t take my job - you could look at nurse / midwife / social care training?