English for Teachers/Unit 3
Unit 3
CAREERS
Comprehensive Reading
Careers for the Future
Choosing a career is difficult. Everyone wants a doctor, lawyer, or other professional in the family. Unskilled laborers, such as ditch-diggers, do not have popular jobs. New careers, however, are being created as society industrializes. These are technical careers.
Machines are being used more and more. Repairman for these machines are going to be needed. T.V., automobile, and computer repairmen are already in demand in Korea. People in technical careers are going to have high-paying and interesting jobs.
Professional careers are now overcrowded. In the future, professional people will be needed but competition for the few jobs is going to be rougher. We do not know the future. However, new professional jobs are going to be created. Teaching technical skills, for example, is going to be one of them.
Society is always going to need skilled and unskilled manual laborers for factory and construction work. In the United States some skilled laborers earn more money than teachers. This is because manual labor is unpopular. The U.S. has a manual labor shortage while it has much unemployment in other jobs.
Manual labor, too is undergoing change. It is changing from unskilled to skilled labor. Automation replaces men with machines, but it also creates new jobs. For example, ditch-diggers are unnecessary in an industrialized society. This is because bulldozers do more work much faster. The bulldozer driver was trained at a technical school and often earns more money than a teacher.
While you are choosing a career, think about these questions: Is your job going to be needed in the future? Is it going to be replaced by a machine? Is a professional career really for you?