The 100 careers of the future shaping Industry 4.0

Santo Domingo, DR.

For the general director of the National Institute of Technical Vocational Training (Infotep), Rafael Santos Badía, this entity is preparing itself with “new clothes” to intervene in this revolution 4.0 with competence, efficiency, and answers to the labor market.

For this reason, when interviewed by Listín Diario, Santos Badía shows one of his greatest desires: not to graduate millions of Dominicans with up to two or three Infotep degrees but without jobs. Given this reality, the training institution is promoting 100 careers of the future. Therefore, the national market is really starting to demand and where there will be more opportunities for the people.

Among these training careers, the ones that stand out the most and are now gaining momentum due to the lessons that companies have learned from the pandemic are software development, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, data science, and interactive simulations, and video games.

Other areas of the future that Infotep will now promote with greater rigor after the technological advances that the world has had, of which the Dominican Republic has not been left behind, are the construction and repair of drones, maintenance of biomedical equipment, automation, and industrial robotics and alternative renewable energies.

However, according to Santos Badía, the orange economy, that is, the economy of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, requires careers in the Dominican Republic such as hotel reception and online accommodation, tourism management and marketing, and restaurants and gastro-tourism 4.0 companies, where people are already looking for special and individualized services, not group services.

Santos Badía, in his conversation with this media, values that beyond the careers that are thought to be of the not-so-distant future, others will require great preparation and migration. For example, a traditional car mechanic will have to learn about the maintenance of electric cars because, in several years, the vehicles with which he works daily will eventually be junk.

The head of Infotep highlights that other areas are pushing towards what scientists have called “industry 4.0”, far removed from the forms of production of the past, such as mechatronics, robotics, electromedicine, cloud servers, agrometeorology, agromatics, and agrobotics. These last three are technologies in which people should be educated about agricultural issues so that Infotep will provide these training actions.

“The new and modern industry is demanding robot programmers, people who speak another language apart from their native language, logistics personnel are in demand, and even the most elementary things require other types of workers,” said Santos Badía.

The Cyber era
Two areas that Santos Badia understands will guide the development of the Dominican Republic and which Infotep is approaching are cyber-lawyers and cybersecurity.

The entity’s representative understands that legal professionals who are operatives or law consultants will not be needed in the future, so knowledge of “cyber-lawyers” will be needed.

In addition, he foresees that in a few years, banks will no longer have physical offices but will be completely virtual, so cybersecurity is a subject that from now on will require many workers, in addition to caretakers and programmers of robots, virtual assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, and Siri.

More 4.0 training
Santos Badía says that new technicians are also being required for the healthcare industry in digital learning for nurses, digital health management, food safety, nanomedicine, telemedicine, drone controllers applied to healthcare, and remote nutrition and dietetics.

One area that has been affected by technology and the new times is administration. Therefore, Infotep will offer new careers in digitizing business processes and file communication, digital leadership, and drone pilot controllers applied to productivity.

As for commerce, the most palpable changes in professional technical education will be reflected with new approaches to careers such as e-commerce, digital entrepreneurs, marketing for artists, digital coaching, growth hacker, social network trend analyst, and the internet for promotion and sale of works of art.

“This new era of knowledge is worth, but technicians are also needed for the circular industry that involves reusing what is already used and that means recycling, not sending many used items to landfills that we can reuse and there is the field of artificial intelligence,” reports Santos Badía.

Niche
These new training actions are expected to impact people between the ages of 16 and 45, who will have the skills required for future jobs.

In addition, Santos Badía points out that since the young people who study traditional careers at Infotep are mainly from the lower and middle classes, with these new careers, also the students with greater economic possibilities could be interested in receiving teaching at this institute.