FILE PHOTO: An employee hiring sign with a QR code is seen in a window of a business in Arlington
PARENTS of today’s kindergarteners should think about prodding them towards a career in the medical field.
Those are the findings of the latest Bloomberg’s MLIV Pulse survey with 678 respondents. Nearly 40% said that children currently in elementary school will be best off with a job in healthcare if they want to avoid being displaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
Jobs in the medical field often involve much more human-to-human interaction, which for now seem hard to replace with generative AI programmes like ChatGPT.
Demographic trends may also be supporting the idea that becoming a doctor or a nurse will be a wiser choice for the youngest generation: Economists forecast massive demand for healthcare workers as the population ages in the United States and worldwide.
Investors have a different recommendation for those graduating from high school.
Those students will be best off pursuing a career in tech, despite recent layoffs at Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Alphabet.
Tech savviness is seen as ever more important in a world increasingly influenced by digital platforms, even as some worry AI may pose a threat to some entry level jobs.
“The highest paying jobs were so clearly in the finance sector for two or three decades, and now tech is really competitive with that – they’re kind of neck and neck,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice-president of human resources consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Even with the rise of AI, he expects tech and finance to remain among the most lucrative careers for the next 20 or 30 years. “I don’t see that going away,” he said.
Some 52% of 556 professional investors said that technology is the way to go for high school students. Among 122 retail investors, 48% voted for tech.
Recent hiring trends support the results. While the current downturn has hit both Big Tech and Silicon Valley startups hard, recruiters in traditional industries – from carmakers to the federal government have rushed to snap up laid-off tech talent and new grads.
These days, every company is a tech company, as the saying goes.
Part of the perception that the grass is greener in Silicon Valley may also stem from the way that tech has transformed the inner workings of Wall Street.
“There are lots of people who have brilliant financial minds, and yet they can’t put into effect a trading strategy without relying on serious programmers to come in and actually implement it because it’s moved past human beings in some ways,” said Challenger.
“I can see why they feel that threat.”
As for the potential impact of AI on Wall Street, only 12% said finance would be the best career option for today’s kindergarteners.
While a previous MLIV Pulse survey found that most finance professionals were confident AI won’t replace them in the next three years, that confidence appears to falter over a longer time horizon.
A recent Goldman Sachs Group report estimated that some 300 million full-time jobs worldwide may soon be affected by AI automation.
Significant layoffs as UBS Group absorbed Credit Suisse Group, as well as earlier job-cut announcements from Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, likely made the respondents lukewarm about careers in finance.
The KBW Bank Index is down about 18% year to date, compared with the S&P 500 being up over 7%.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is up about 20%. — Bloomberg
