How Could Your Career Change?

Choosing the next step in your career has always been tough, in an exciting kind of way. So many different futures are laid out in front of you, like bush trails on a misty morning where you can’t see all the way through to the end. Is it all downhill, or are you about to spend the next half hour climbing steps (metaphorically of course) for a bit of an average view?  

There might be a few positive signs that make certain pathways look exciting, like what you’re interested in, what you’re good at, or what your parents or career advisors have chatted about with you. But one of the hardest parts is thinking about what that job might look like in the future, especially when AI is spreading like crazy at the moment. What if you could crunch the numbers to help make your future feel a little clearer? 

The University of New England has collaborated with Accenture, one of the largest consulting firms in the world (think of them as business experts) to create a new tool that analysis thousands of jobs to see how they’re going to change over the next 10 years.  

They took a look at over 3000 different career choices – from the creative industry, through to trades, STEM and more, and combined it with official sources like the ABS and the O*NET Database to break down all of those jobs into their individual tasks, and see where the economy’s probably going to move in the next few years. The cool thing is regular people like you and I can look at these predictions for free! 

If your eyes maybe started to glaze over in the past couple of sentences, don’t worry – that's the last time I’ll talk about how the stats work. The important thing to remember is this tool has a pretty good handle on the different jobs out there, and how they could change in 10 years. 

Let’s look at a couple examples. While writing for Year13 is awesome, sometimes I dream of trading it all in for a simple life repairing bicycles. Believe it or not, you can select ‘bicycle repairer’ as a profession in this report to see how it’ll change.  

Once I put in my chosen career, and my education level, the site generated a report for me, telling me that in 5 years' time, the job’s going to change by around 25%. The good news is that all the stuff I'm not interested in for my fantasy job will decrease over time. I can use AI to handle stuff like managing shipping information, doing bookkeeping and general admin, which means I get more time to focus on stuff like building relationships with my future clients, marketing my workshop online, and actually repairing bikes. Pretty cool, right? It even told me how much wages were expected to change in 10 years compared to the average, and how many more jobs there will be in that field. 

Obvs for me this was more of a daydream than an actual look, but if you’re still mulling over what you’d like to do for uni, the Future of Work Report is a great place to get started. 

The University of New England aren’t just pros at making groundbreaking career reports and tools – they're experts in education too. They combine their focus on the future and groundbreaking research (such as this tool) with nearly 100 years’ experience in teaching skills and knowledge to young people just like you to help them thrive in our modern age. Plus, they’re the only Australian public university awarded the maximum 5 stars for Overall experience 18 years in a row (Good Universities Guide, 2024). 

So, if you’re planning your future, make sure you check out the University of New England, and their amazing Future of Work tool!