iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

According to an Oxford University analysis, close to half of all jobs will be taken over by robots in the next 25 years. No wonder the press is full of handwringing about how workers will adjust and the best way to prepare the next generation for this A.I.-filled future.

But not everyone is alarmed about the prospect of radical change in the labor market. After all, this has happened before (for instance, when mechanization replaced the vast majority of farmers) and it turned out OK. Plus, a lot of today's jobs are soul-crushingly boring and repetitive. Losing them just might be a blessing. 

Among these optimists are IT service company Cognizant. In a recent report (hat tip to Business Insider for the pointer), the consultancy notes that while creative destruction has always been with us, so has reinvention. Sure, robots will take jobs away, but they'll also create new ones.

What will these new gigs look like exactly? The report imagines detailed job ads for 21 future careers that Cognizant thinks may emerge in the next 10 years.

When preparing students to be ready for the future, the focus often is on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. But, in a podcast with employees from Google, Pinterest and Twitter, EdSurge found that those in the tech industry believe students need skills beyond just technical expertise.

“I think the one thing to keep in mind is that it’s impossible to say what technical skills people are going to need in 10 or 20 years,” says Ryan Greenberg, a software engineer at Twitter. “I think that necessary job skills actually have to be a little bit higher level than specific technology.”

We gathered four key takeaways from what Greenberg, Google for Education program manager Drea Alphonso and Pinterest software engineer Trisha Quan say are the best skills future-ready students can have.