The Jobs Our Kids Will Have Probably Don’t Exist Yet
And the skills that will matter no matter what those jobs turn out to be.
I went to school to be a TV journalist. I knew I wanted to be on camera. I studied the craft, learned the format, and understood the path: get hired by a network affiliate, work my way up, earn my spot in front of a camera that someone else owned.
Nobody told me that one day, someone would build an audience of millions by recording themselves talking in their car. Or that a person with a decent microphone and something real to say could start a podcast from their home office and reach more listeners than most regional radio stations. Or that “content creator” would become a legitimate career path, built entirely outside the institutions I thought were the only way in.
The DIY economy didn’t just create new jobs. It made the gatekeepers optional. And nobody predicted it: not the journalism schools, not the networks, not the people already working in the industry.
We are in that kind of moment again. Except faster, and bigger, and this time we can see it coming.
The Anthropic labor market report released this week (March 2026) confirmed what many of us working in AI already sense: the gap between what AI can theoretically do and what it’s actually doing today is still enormous. But that gap is closing.
And the kids who will feel it most are not necessarily the youngest ones. They’re the ones in middle and high school right now, entering the workforce right in the middle of the transition.
There’s one more layer that doesn’t get talked about enough. Those older kids won’t just be navigating a changing job market. They’ll be entering a workforce where entry-level roles are being defined by people who aren’t sure those roles should exist at all. A lot of managers and executives right now have looked at what AI can do and concluded: we don’t need junior people to do that anymore. They’re not wrong that the old version of those jobs is changing. But many haven’t yet figured out what the new version looks like. So the people responsible for hiring entry-level talent are operating from an incomplete map. And it’s your kid’s generation that will have to help draw it.
Two Different Relationships With AI
Younger kids (the ones still in elementary school) will grow up as AI natives. By the time they enter the workforce, working with AI will feel as natural as using a search engine feels to us today. They won’t remember a time before it. The adaptation will have already happened.
Today’s older kids have a harder road. They’re old enough to know how things used to work, but young enough that the world will be completely different by the time they graduate. They won’t just be adapting to AI — they’ll be the ones figuring out what the new jobs even are. They’re the generation that has to build the map while walking the territory.
That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to think carefully about what we’re actually preparing them for.
The Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet
We tend to talk about AI and jobs in terms of what will be lost. That’s understandable because, well, change is unnerving, and the headlines are designed to alarm (I know this. I went to journalism school). But every major technology shift in history has also created work that nobody could have predicted.
The internet didn’t just replace jobs. It created entire industries: social media management, UX design, SEO, app development, e-commerce logistics, digital marketing, cybersecurity. None of those fields existed in any meaningful way when I was in school. The people who built those careers weren’t following a roadmap. They were curious, adaptable, and willing to figure things out as they went.
AI will do the same thing. We will need people who can:
Train, audit, and correct AI systems
Design the human-AI workflows inside organizations
Translate AI outputs into decisions that require human judgment
Build trust between AI systems and the people who use them
Create the frameworks, policies, and ethics that govern how AI operates
Do work that AI makes possible but couldn’t do alone
We don’t have names for most of these roles yet. We’re still making them up. And that means the kids who will thrive will be the ones who learned how to learn, how to question, and how to direct tools toward their own goals.
What About Hands-On Careers?
There’s something reassuring in the Anthropic data for families thinking about trades and hands-on careers: the jobs with zero AI exposure are the ones requiring physical presence. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, mechanics, construction workers, healthcare aides. No large language model is showing up to rewire your house.
But here’s the thing, that doesn’t mean AI is irrelevant to these careers. It means the relationship looks different.
A plumber who can use AI to diagnose a problem faster, generate a materials estimate on the spot, communicate clearly with clients, and run the business side of their work more efficiently, that plumber has an advantage over one who can’t. An electrician who uses AI to stay current on code updates, troubleshoot unusual situations, and manage scheduling won’t be replaced by AI. They’ll be better at their job because of it.
And remember, most of those clients probably used AI to diagnose their problem before calling in the “fixers.”
The hands-on careers aren’t being disrupted, they’re being upgraded. The ones who will struggle are the ones who refuse to learn how to use the tool. The ones who thrive will be the ones who stay irreplaceable in the physical world while using AI to handle everything around it.
If your kid is drawn to working with their hands, that instinct is worth honoring.
So What Skills Actually Matter?
This is the question I come back to constantly both in my professional career and at home, where I’m figuring it out alongside my own kids.
The skills that hold their value across every version of the future aren’t the ones you’d find on a job description. They’re the ones that make someone genuinely hard to replace:
Knowing when to question a confident answer
AI is very good at sounding certain. It will give you an answer in a calm, authoritative voice whether it’s right or wrong. The kids who learn early that confidence isn’t the same as accuracy, and who develop the habit of pushing back, will have an edge in every context where AI is involved. Which will be almost every context.
Directing, not just accepting
There’s a meaningful difference between a kid who asks AI for an answer and a kid who uses AI to execute their own vision. The second kid is practicing leadership. They’re learning to articulate what they want, evaluate what they get, and keep refining until it’s right. That’s the Idea → AI → Play framework in action — and it matters because it keeps the child in the driver’s seat rather than the passenger seat.
Creativity that starts before AI gets involved
The most valuable thing a person can bring to an AI-augmented world is an original idea. AI can help execute, refine, expand, and improve. But the spark — the “I want to make something that doesn’t exist yet” — still has to come from a human. Kids who practice generating ideas, who build things with their hands, who tell stories and make things and ask “what if” questions, are developing something AI cannot replicate.
Persistence through ambiguity
The jobs that will matter in ten years don’t have clear instructions yet. The people who will build them will have to be comfortable not knowing, trying things, failing, and trying differently. That’s not a skill you learn from a worksheet. It’s a skill you build by actually doing things. By making something and watching it not work, then figuring out why.
Human judgment in the loop
Empathy, ethics, contextual awareness, the ability to read a room, these are no longer soft skills. In an AI-saturated world, they’re differentiators. The person who can take an AI output and ask “but is this right for this person, in this situation, given what I know about them?” is providing something no model can.
What You Can Do Right Now
You don’t need to enroll your kid in an AI course. You don’t need to become an expert. You just need to shift how you talk about the future with them — and how you use AI with them when the opportunities come up naturally.
For younger kids: use AI together on creative projects and let them direct the process. Ask “what do you want it to do?” before you type anything. Let them see that their idea drives the tool, not the other way around.
For older kids: have honest conversations about the transition they’re going to live through. Talk about the jobs that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Ask them what problems they see in the world that don’t have good solutions yet. That question is more useful career preparation than most curricula.
For all kids: normalize questioning AI. When it gets something wrong — and it will — treat that as a teaching moment, not a malfunction. “AI was confident and wrong. How did you know to push back? What did you notice?” Those questions build the habit of critical thinking that will serve them in any future.
The Map Doesn’t Exist Yet. That’s Actually Okay.
The most honest thing I can tell you is that nobody knows exactly what the workforce looks like in fifteen years. Anyone who tells you they do is out of touch.
What we do know is that the kids who will be okay are not necessarily the ones who learn the right technical skills at the right moment. They’re the ones who know how to direct tools toward their own goals, who trust their own thinking, who push back when something doesn’t add up, and who stay curious when the answers aren’t clear.
Those aren’t AI skills. They’re human skills. And you’ve been building them with your kids since before any of this started.
The influencers didn’t know they were going to be influencers. They just kept making things.
Keep making things.