Welcome to tomorrow’s world – today

South Australian industry is changing at a prolific rate, with new start-ups and technologies changing the way we do business – and creating exciting career opportunities both now and into the future

Future career opportunities are changing

South Australian industry is changing at a prolific rate, with new start-ups and technologies changing the way we do business – and creating exciting career opportunities both now and into the future

Space. Defence. Augmented reality. Cyber security. South Australia is witnessing a once-in-a-generation revolution that positions the state as the catalyst foe change in innovation and technology, a position further augmented by the recent announcement of the arrival of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Lab into Adelaide’s Lot Fourteen, a big data laboratory that will drive economic planning and investment and help to create jobs of the future.

And while the next two or three decades will witness a burst of technology that will give rise to careers that are as yet inconceivable – think neuromarketing, holographics and bio-identity – it’s South Australia’s existing businesses that are changing not just the world we live in today but also creating the jobs of tomorrow.

“A lot of emerging industries are the old industries that have just been disrupted,” says Zrinka Tokic, program director of The University of Adelaide’s Australian E-Challenge and ThincLab International, an incubator program that offers assistance to local start-ups. “We’re just adding technology or other components to industries that have been around for lifetimes. In agriculture, a team has recently designed software that attaches to the back of a tractor to detect weeds so the pesticide goes not over the whole paddock but just on those specific weeds using AI technology. Holden may be gone but we’re still involved in the car industry, building race and solar cars. The education sector is changing in the way we offer education, who we offer to and where. It’s now online and more global.”

The rate at which technology is opening up in South Australia is facilitating the growth in both today’s industries and those yet to come. “There’s a faster connection between supply and demand, and we are getting a lot of really interesting companies being formed around that, in areas such as eCommerce, agtech, health and medical research,” Tokic says.

Tokic predicts that the presence of MIT’s Living Lab in South Australia will spur projects, innovations, and collaborations, both public and private, in the state, strengthening Adelaide’s standing as the focal point for research and innovation. At Adelaide University, she is already witnessing exciting innovation in areas such as farming and food technology.

“Food innovation is huge,” she says. “We’re printing 3D vegetables and implanting them with medicines older people have to take every day, so we're achieving two things at once: our patients are getting both their nutrition and vital medication via pureed food that looks like a vegetable.

“Food innovator could absolutely be a job of the future and could cover logistics, science, chemistry, software engineering – it depends which problem you’re trying to solve.

“We’re also seeing new methods of farming that produce more rapid or better results, better fruit and vegetables, meeting resource scarcity problems that are going to come up in the future. Vertical farming is becoming a huge thing ... there’s a lot happening and that’s where it’s getting interesting.”

Founding faculty director of the MIT Connection Science Research Initiative Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland also predicts exciting future career opportunities in already established areas in South Australia, such as health, finance and defence. “South Australia has an enormous expertise in health,” he says. “There’s a need to translate that into actual delivery to people and there’s a great business opportunity there, as well as in finance – not just for the local but also the South Asian region. The key there is South Australia has one of the most trustworthy governments around. You have your politics but compared, to most businesses in South Asia, you guys are a shining star.”

“The other obvious opportunity for growth is the defence industry, with new wireless technology that gets into sensors and devices. In a sense, it’s taking the big areas of investment that tend to be government funded and conventional in their outlook and then extending that view and that technology using start-ups.”

With entrepreneurship the current buzz word in South Australia, thanks in part to Lot Fourteen and the government’s appointment of the state’s first Chief Entrepreneur, Tokic agrees that forging your own career path is going to be a major model for employment over the next few decades. And this message of finding your own employment and creating your own future is being delivered even to our youngest members of society.

“We’ll see more entrepreneur programs in early childhood learning,” she says. “We started teaching entrepreneurship in high schools five years ago and had to sell it hard – now it’s absolutely a must. Entrepreneurship wasn’t a word people felt comfortable with; now it’s so hot and they want it in every single curriculum. Students don’t have to think, ‘I have to finish my job and get a degree in this particular industry’ but ‘What can I create, what suits me, what do I want to do?’. They’re taking control of their own careers.”

With South Australian industry changing, developing and progressing at such a prolific rate, it is impossible to predict exactly what jobs of the future will look like, but Tokic sees many

more medical innovations and jobs around major problems like climate change and resources such as water and food. “It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen: I wouldn’t have though space would be coming to South Australia and now it is a major part of the state’s future,” she says. “But I think social enterprises and anything technology related are going to be important. People are really interested in saving the world and protecting what we have, driving change and making it better. Our popular categories have been social enterprise and climate response around sustainability and clean energy.”

Prof Pentland also sees technological advancements and expertise as key players in South Australia’s jobs and industries of the future but stresses there is also another important element to a state’s economic success – and it’s one that we already have in abundance.

“It’s fundamentally about people, not the technology,” he says. “Sure, you need expertise in the technology but also in delivery. In health care, it’s things like, how can you reform nursing to be better, can you reform home health care to be better? That’s not a technology question, that’s a people question.

“In finance, that’s about, how do you help connect prospective businesses with the finance they need to succeed? It’s not some big number thing, necessarily; it’s really more about understanding governance and what makes businesses succeed.

“You have to be careful not to think of it all as technology, because it’s not. Technology enables or opens up opportunities, but the opportunities are about people: they are not about the technology.”

The people factor also resonates with Kostas Mavromaras, director of the Future of Employment and Skills Research Centre at The University of Adelaide, who foresees skills such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, cognitive flexibility, judgment and decision making, and creativity being the key to South Australia’s success in adapting to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “Businesses used to have a five-year plan; now, if anything, they have a one-year plan,” he says. “That tells us we shouldn’t be trying to plan in a very specific way but instead laying down principles from a very early age, teaching people to think for themselves, preparing them to handle change quickly, to be flexible. Then the education will not only come at school and post-school – it will also come in the workplace.”

Those workplaces of the future, Mavromaras predicts, will cover areas such as science and engineering, health, information and communications technology, protective services – and, of course big data, heralded by the arrival of MIT. But, while South Australia will obviously reap the benefits of welcoming MIT to the state, for Mavromaras, it is undoubtedly a two-way street. “It’s good that MIT is coming over – it’s confirmation that South Australia is doing the right thing,” he says. “The US is leading the way internationally in terms of data and the use of data research, and MIT is among the leaders, so we’re getting one of the best from the best. It’s affirmation that what we’re doing in South Australia at Lot Fourteen is right. But I think MIT coming here is going to be good for them, too – there’s some really good, strong local talent here.”

The future’s bright – the future’s here.

Originally published as Welcome to tomorrow’s world – today