2019 will bring the continued monetisation of mothering. The following professions will continue to expand and, indeed, to proliferate: coaching, mentoring, advising, navigating, alongside multiple variations on teaching – early educators, adult educators, para-educators and ever more specialised tutors. Enabling others to reach their full potential, or, if you prefer, growing human capital, is the lifeblood of what Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, calls “talentism”.
Consider the explosion of coaching, which used to be the province of the athletic field and the theatre. According to the International Federation of Coaching, coaches partner “with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential." Executive coaches, leadership coaches and career coaches all cater to different parts of the business market.
An equally fast-growing sector is lifestyle coaching of many different kinds, from nutrition to transitions. As defined by the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, the largest nutrition institute in the US, a health coach is “a wellness authority and supportive mentor who motivates individuals to cultivate positive health choices.” Translation: a friendly nutrition expert who will help hold you to your diet. Or, in maternal terms, ensure that you eat right. A subsidiary business is the certification of health coaches; the Health Coach Institute claims that health coaching is a $6bn industry in the US that will grow to $8bn by 2022, and offers a six-month certification. Doctors increasingly partner with health coaches to nudge patients into healthier habits.
Education coaches also abound. A future of lifelong learning will mean a demand for lifelong teaching, as workers must continually “reskill” to new job or task requirements. Guild Education is a Denver-based startup working with Fortune 1000 companies to transform traditional tuition reimbursement programs into “grow your future workforce” centres.
The model depends on education coaches who will work with each employee to develop a personalised education plan, mixing and matching courses from a variety of colleges and universities, and provide support to help ensure completion. Tech can help teach in many different ways, but we will still essentially need someone to ensure that we do our homework.
Another expanding job category is navigation, not on roads or water, but through complex systems. A random search for navigator on the job site Simply Hired turns up “career navigator, member navigator, patient navigator, housing navigator and veteran navigator.” Goodwill Industries, a non-profit that helps train job-seekers, says that its employees are much more likely to complete the steps necessary to finish school or get a better job when they have a navigator at their side finding a path through a thicket of forms, regulations and benefits.
Parenting is a process of investing in others – your children – in ways that include teaching, discipline, inspiration, guiding, connecting, supporting and knowing when and how to let go to let them succeed on their own. They know, as athletes and singers have long known, that achieving peak performance requires constant coaching with steady feedback.
Coaching, navigating, advising and similar jobs will also benefit from the addition of technology – whether it is big data letting an education coach or adviser know when a student is showing signs of incipient drop-out, or bio-feedback telling a health coach how to advise a client on trigger foods or times of day when her blood sugar drops. This growing tech dimension makes these jobs more attractive to men; indeed; it is noteworthy that coach and navigator suggest more traditionally masculine roles than teacher or health aide. And, sad but still true, the more men in the sector, the better the pay.
In 2019, as artificial intelligence and robotics eat up more and more routine jobs, the idea of a talent economy in which humans invest in other humans will become increasingly attractive. Our job, though, will be to make it gender neutral, both at home and at work. Let’s call it “parenting for pay”.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the President and CEO of the thinktank New America
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
