As if trying to figure out what you want to do for a living wasn’t already hard enough, the advancement of technology and rapidly changing global job market has made choosing a career path even more difficult. Jobs that were once guaranteed money-makers in Nigeria may now be moving closer and closer towards extinction.
Here are 5 that’ll likely evolve or go extinct in the future.
1. Travel Agent
Being a travel agent used to be so much fun! You’d spend your days scouring for flight deals and helping people plan amazing adventures. Now, thanks to sites like Jovago and Travelstart, people have become their own travel agents and if they still need advice, they head to well-known travel blogs and review sites like TripAdvisor for first hand information.
2. Cashier
Whether you’re buying groceries or picking up a dress, long line ups at the cash desk are soon to be a thing of the past. In foreign countries, most grocery and big box stores have already installed self check-out stations, and they are definitely going to be used globally in no time.
With it, you’ll be able to go in a store, pick out what you want, pay for it on your mobile phone and head out the door without ever having to speak or interact with anyone. There’s also the rise of ecommerce, a lot of offline retails stores are settling online, with shoppers serving themselves.
3. Bank Teller
In the past, stepping into a bank was like a nightmare as a result of the crowd it hosts daily. But With the rise and rise of FinTech, physical banks are gradually phasing out.
The last time you went to talk to a bank teller was most likely when you were opening an account, changing money or asking about insurance or investments. In May, we heard of Ecobank closing 74 branches, proving the once enviable banking profession might be going into extinction soon.
Mobile banking has come a long way in the last few years and it’s only getting better. Plus, if you don’t know, some banks now enable you to make deposits via ATM machines.
4. Journalism
Journalism is dying fast. With technology, almost everyone is turning into a journalist, so a career in journalism may not really need formal education anymore. The Internet has rendered traditional broadcasting and print journalism virtually to the background.
Nobody wants to buy a newspaper when they can read the news on their phones. And by the time the 9 o’clock news comes up at night, chances are that its already all over the Internet. Journalism would not go extinct, but would evolve from the traditional one we used to know to what is called, digital journalism.
5. Printers and Publishers
Publishing and printing, at least in the old-fashioned sense, is an endangered industry. Technology has brought it to the digital realm, and we’ve seen the aftermath in declining newspaper readership and the rise of e-books.
We’ll always publish books and periodicals, but the folks who have been trained in the old ways of producing them are likely to find themselves out of a job in the near future.
