Betting on the future, pt 1: Career guidance is more valuable than Huck Finn

In this two-part post I'll argue for why it isn't sufficient to just prepare kids for college. We also must guide them toward careers that have some hope of surviving and thriving in the 21st-century.

When my seniors wrapped up their college application essays I figured it would be a good time to talk to them about the realities of 21st-century careers. Which careers will survive? Which will die out in the next 10-15 years? Not the typical lesson plan for an English teacher, but most English teachers don't have nine years of experience in high-tech startups.

To get their thought processes started I argued that pharmacists won't survive. Awkwardly, a number of my students were planning on pursuing pharmacy in college. They were not pleased.

Betting on the future, pt2: Why pharmacists are doomed

In part 2 we explore why pharmacists are doomed in the 21st-century and in doing so get some clues for how to predict if a career is likely to survive the coming decades.

Previous: Part 1: Career guidance is more valuable than Huck Finn

Pharmacists are doomed. Well, at least in the United States. Rather than take my word for it, take a look at an article that was just published by Slate's primary technology writer, Farhad Manjoo: "Will robots steal your job?"

In it Manjoo argues that "Pharmacists will be some of the first highly skilled professionals who'll lose their jobs to machines." What I thought would be 5-10 years down the line already seems to be here; the pharmacists that he interviewed said "that the computers keep getting better, and that today's best robotic pharmacists are faster and less prone to error than the best human pharmacists." Whatever technology hurdles there are--hardware pill picking robots; reliable, exhaustive drug interaction databases--seem to have already been solved.

What is it about pharmacy or any other profession that makes it vulnerable? Manjoo articulates the factors quite well: