Why being open minded is the best skill as tradition gets disrupted

Sitoyo Lopokoiyit Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, Chief Financial Services Officer at Safaricom PLC. Today’s world is very different from the one I walked into after leaving high school about 25 years ago. A recent estimate by the World Economic Forum shows that more than six of every ten children getting into primary school today will work in careers that do not exist today.   In 1994, many of jobs or employers today did not exist. Since then, there has been a tremendous change driven by technology resulting in thousands of new careers. Take my employer Safaricom, for instance, who came into existence six years after my high school years, in 2000. While still a relatively young firm at only 18 years of existence, the telco today employs more than 5, 500 people directly and over half a million Kenyans indirectly. It is almost impossible to believe there was a time Kenya did not have its now ubiquitous mobile money agents. For Generation Z, the Internet and this mobile money platform are ordinary, every-day concepts that have been part of their lives ever since they were young. For those born in the early eighties or earlier, these are things that came to existence in their adulthood. This means that they are behaviours that had to be consciously learnt. What this means is that if you are a young person trying to plan your future career, keeping an open mind is more important than deciding what to study in university or college. SEE ALSO :How we can protect the hope our young people have in our nation
Even for careers that have existed beyond the last century, it does pay to be curious. For instance, we have one of the largest team of lawyers in the country. These lawyers do not spend their time working on cases or going to court, but rather ensure the smooth operation of a telecommunications and financial services company from a legal perspective. It is evident that even for these so-called traditional careers, an opportunity exists for them to be applied in new ways. It is also proof that what you study in college should not be a limitation of what you do in the future.  How then do you prepare for such an uncertain world? If your future job does not exist today, how do you go about taking a university course that prepares you for it? The thing with education is that it is less about acquiring specific skills, but more of a map of how to navigate life. It is a blueprint for life. While the grades you get in school are important, the knowledge that you get can be applied to your life in ways that you may never imagine. David Epstein, in the highly rated book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, found that the most successful people tend to be those who know a few things about many things, rather than those who only know everything about one thing. SEE ALSO :It is now possible to live 150 years
These ‘generalists’ tend to take advantage of their youth to know as much as possible. As a student, you may not love biology, but some knowledge on evolution is an advantage for a career in strategy, yet this is more of a management role that has little to do with plants and animals, save for the animal called man. Companies like my own are today recruiting for roles such as User Interface and User Experience Designers, Data Scientists, Cloud Engineers, and Cyber Security experts. These are jobs that barely existed in our country three years ago.  Yet, these barely exist as courses in university today. The future of work is less about a degree and more about skills, meaning that knowledge in one field can be very beneficial in another. What is emerging is that all skills that you have acquired so far, and that you acquire in the future are an asset. For those in high school or college who are yet to settle on a career, going for a course that mirrors your interests is a good starting point. As a young adult, strive to make education a starting point rather than a boundary that fences in your ambitions. There is a lot of benefit to be gained in all kinds of knowledge, but it takes the right kind of attitude to do it. Keeping an open mind and being ready to learn as much as you can are therefore the most important skills you can have in your life. Prepare, not for the right job, but for the future. Then, and only then, the job will follow. The writer is the Chief Financial Services Officer, Safaricom PLC   hashtag@standardmedia.co.ke