Hello,
I have a question about disappearing jobs in the future.
My future goal is being a designer and now I’m majoring in product, visual, editorial, motion graphic design. Even though, someone say that the several areas of design will be gone in a few years later, I hope to be a designer for my life.
Do you have any recommendations about what I should choose the specific design area for my future?
If someone found a way to see into the future and predict which jobs were going to disappear and which ones would stick around, that person would make a ton of money.
The short version is no, there’s no way to “future-proof” your choice. Every career decision comes with some amount of risk - the company you choose to work for could go under, your division could be closed, you could get laid off, robots could learn to do your job, immigration policies in your field could change, companies could outsource your labor, etc. Or, on the other side, your field could see a crazy explosion of innovation and/or money and/or a shortage of workers. There are some indicators for fields that will grow and fields that may be replaced by robots, but it’s not foolproof.
Most people who have long, successful careers learn to be agile over the course of those careers - they learn new skills and knowledge and make themselves indispensable to their fields/industries. When you decide what you want to do in college, you’re not necessarily deciding what you’ll want to do for your life. You may think that’s what you want to do forever now - and then in 3 or 5 or 10 years, your desires and needs may change! That’s just life. So I’d say think about the more short-to-medium-term future in terms of what kind of design do you enjoy the most and do you see yourself enjoying for a couple years? Then when you are in your first post-college role, you can acquire new skills that will help prepare you for your next role/career.
More to the point, I don’t see design going away any time soon. That’s something that’s kind of hard to get a robot to do well. Even with the rise of pre-designed websites and templates (like Squarespace), you still need designers to put together the initial design.