5 Insanely Important Jobs (We're Running Out Of People For)

It's not as simple as moving everything onto a more modern infrastructure. At this point, the financial system is so intertwined with its COBOL roots that it would be like trying to simultaneously replace all of your veins with fiber optics. A switchover is theoretically possible, but if something goes wrong, the financial data for millions of people could vanish.

Since it would be impractical to make everyone temporarily withdraw all of their money until the problem is fixed, geriatric programmers are making good money running firms that specialize in COBOL. Meanwhile, the industry is rushing to train young programmers (and rehire the old guys they fired because they thought their skills were obsolete). Further compounding the problem is that programmers of the original COBOL systems rarely wrote handbooks, and deciphering someone else's computer code 40 years later is like trying to communicate an elaborate sexual fantasy via slide whistles.

And it's not only banking. NASA once desperately needed to find programmers who knew Fortran to communicate with their Voyager probes. These are by no means insurmountable problems, so don't panic and put all of your money in Dogecoins tomorrow. But it's kind of like suddenly discovering that we have to teach thousands of people Latin to prevent the English language book industry from collapsing.

We need oncologists more than ever, and that's a problem, since burnout is taking a serious toll on that profession. We're estimated to be short 2,500 to 4,000 oncologists by 2020. The burnout can be physical -- you're constantly required to stay up to date on lab results, deal with sudden calls from patients at all hours of the day, and fight for settlements with insurance companies -- but there's also the emotional exhaustion of forming close bonds with suffering patients, having to break difficult news to them, and in some cases, watching them die.

We need to increase the number of America's oncologists by an estimated 40 percent by 2025 merely to keep up with the need. Improving medical care is going to make us better at surviving other diseases, which means more people are going to be confronting nature's final boss. To close the gap between the high retirement rates and new trainees entering the field, we'll need hundreds more people to enter oncology programs each year. And we're currently losing them hand over fist. So if you're getting ready for med school and have no issues with emotionally crushing situations, we've found a promising career for you.

OK, but isn't that the whole point of deporting undocumented immigrants? To free up jobs for unemployed citizens? In theory, yes ... but not enough Americans looking for work want to get into farming. It's exhausting, physical labor with long hours in harsh weather. One farm started offering Americans $20 an hour, but still couldn't retain workers. 401(k)s? Health insurance? Generous bonuses? None of it makes up for the fact that the work blows, despite what Stardew Valley told you about the appeal of quitting your office job to live in the country.

With demand vastly exceeding supply, farmers have had to rethink what they can afford to grow and harvest. Nuts, for example, can be harvested by machines, but peaches require the delicate touch of a human. But replacing human labor with machines means that only a minuscule fraction of employees will be needed in the future. So an entire industry will up and vanish, and then we'll have to think of some new problem to blame immigrants for.

That means factory work, machine maintenance, melting Terminators in giant vats of liquid metal, etc. Up to two million of those jobs will go unfilled over the next decade just because people aren't trained for them. We're literally running out of people who know how to make things that aren't Minecraft videos and snarky Tweets. Do you remember Trump saying that he wanted to bring good jobs back from overseas? Factory CEOs turned around and told him that those jobs are already here, but vacant.

Why the shortage? Well, corporations cracked down on unions, which lowered wages and led to the perception that manufacturing jobs, even skilled ones, were boring, repetitive positions for lower-class bozos. So colleges started de-emphasizing manufacturing skill sets, and graduates in relevant fields, like mechanics and engineering, started dropping accordingly. The industry is turning to automation, but factories still need employees to install and maintain those machines, and even those employees are missing.

If you're a cartoonish conservative stereotype loudly wondering why "America doesn't build things anymore," it's not because of them lousy foreigners. It's because corporations neglected those jobs, and now nobody wants to do them anymore.

The result was a whopping 500 percent increase in the amount of flight time required before you can pilot a passenger or cargo plane. That's great from a safety standpoint. The more experienced the better, right? But the unfortunate side effect is that it's turned people away from wanting to become pilots in the first place. Those new requirements, and the north of $100,000 price tag that comes along with all that education and training, make simply becoming an accountant and buying a flight simulator look a lot more appealing.

Boeing predicts that over 600,000 pilots are going to be needed over the next 20 years to fill a demand that's already forced one regional airline into bankruptcy. The aviation industry is trying to respond by offering increased pay and sign-on bonuses, but that's mucking things up for another industry that needs pilots: the military. In 2017, the Air Force announced a "national aircrew crisis" which left them 1,555 pilots short of what they need, and the best thing you can say about that is that Top Gun 2 might actually be topical.

Check out Dwayne's Facebook and Twitter accounts, where you can see the famous musicians he interviews for Revue Magazine. T.W. would like you to consider checking out the International Committee of the Red Cross. They do pretty cool stuff. Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs.

It's not, NOT worth your time to learn COBOL, here's a beginner's book.

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