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people you work for.
    The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that by 2015, 60 percent of new jobs will require skills that only 20 percent of the population currently has. So how do you know which skills you’ll need in the future? Hard to say exactly, but there are some current trends that will give you some basic direction:
    THE SKILLS GAP.    Despite some of the highest unemployment rates in fifty years, there are currently three million job openings in this country. 1 In fact, a recent survey by the ManpowerGroup found that 52 percent of U.S. companies have trouble filling jobs. The most difficult jobs to fill? College-level positions in engineering, accounting and finance, and IT. According to Manpower, the biggest problem is that too many applicants lack the hard skills they need to do the job. Clearly we need more college grads in this country, but the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce projects that demand for college-educated workers will outpace supply in the U.S. by over 300,000 per year. So who’s going to fill those jobs? Workers in India, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, and Asia, where engineers are valued as much as doctors and where young people are flocking to acquire the skills needed to work in the new economy. To give you a sense of how important engineers are these days, in September 2009, when unemployment was nearly 10 percent—its highest level in decades—the rate for engineers was 6.4 percent. 2 And as I write this, the nationwide unemployment rate is over 7 percent—but for engineers, it’s under 2 percent. 3
    GLOBALIZATION.    Remember the 300,000-jobs-per-year gap I mentioned just a second ago—all those jobs that are going overseas. The news only gets worse. According to Knight Frank Research, and Citi Private Bank’s Wealth Report, by 2050, India will bump China out of the number one spot on the list of the world’s biggest economies. By then, the U.S. will have been out of first place for thirty years.
    AUTOMATION.    All around the world and in every industry, machines are doing jobs that used to be done by people. Just think of the self-checkout lines at stores where you scan your own items, run your own credit card, and bag your stuff. That used to be someone’s job, and this gets us to one of the main points of this chapter: It’s not enough to simply adapt to change. You need to find a way to become invaluable, a way to ensure that you’re doing things that can’t be automated. That means keeping up with trends and everything else that could affect the job you’re in and the one you’d like to be in. It means making yourself an expert today but always learning new skills that will make you an expert tomorrow. In some cases, you might have to change jobs—it’s hard to predict which of today’s seemingly essential skills will be completely unnecessary tomorrow.
    AVERAGE IS OVER.    Here’s a great quote from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius.” Being average won’t get you noticed. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in. As I said above, you need to find a way to make a unique contribution, add value, and stand out. That’s the only way to survive.
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    T he days of working at a company for twenty years with no worries about job security and retiring with a nice pension are long gone. And so is loyalty to one’s employer. Today, the trend is toward collaborative environments and hiring people who can work