However, what these prospective studies demonstrate is that the world of work is only changing very slowly. Behind the shocking figure “60% of the jobs of 2030 do not yet exist”, according to Cécile Jolly, there are two biases. On the one hand, some of these new jobs will be very low in terms of headcount and will therefore not structurally change the nature of the professional world. On the other hand, the number of trades created from scratch is extremely marginal. “A job is a set of tasks and professional practices that are constantly evolving and rearranging. In fact, all jobs are changing all the time, but very few of them disappear completely or emerge from scratch,” summarizes Cécile Jolly. For example, “a secretary today does not perform the same tasks as a stenodactylographer did in the 1950s. But it remains an extremely important support profession, which still exists and which has not changed its objective.” In the same way, future technological transformations will lead many jobs to transform without distorting them. So it seems that many more revolutions are being planned on the world of work than there will be in fact.

So if the world of work is so slow to change, why is the EY study cited so much? What does this figure mean? According to Cécile Jolly, our alarmist and urgent discourse on the transformation of professions would come from “our uncertainty and our feeling of vertiginous acceleration in the face of digital and climate transitions”. She also recalls that we have been worried about the imminent transformation of our professions for decades, without the world of work having changed in depth: “while we were talking about the artificial intelligence revolution as early as the 1970s, all the social and economic applications of artificial intelligence have still not been reached today”.

Here, Cécile Jolly touches on a feeling widely shared by students and professors alike, who are worried about the proven ecological, social and democratic upheavals in the years to come. Among them, Pia Benguigui, a Master student at Sciences Po and president of the French Student Network for Sustainable Development (REFEDD), resigns herself: “there will be major climate changes, and society is not ready to welcome them or to be resilient in the face of them”. This feeling is shared by 85% of students who say they are “worried or very worried” about climate change issues. This generalized eco-anxiety is paralyzing for more than one. “I can't project myself beyond my student life or my first jobs because I don't know what the world will be like in 10 years,” says Victor Godinot, a Master student in engineering school.

The feeling of uncertainty among students, exacerbated by the health crisis, explains their increasingly pressing need to be better equipped to be able to face the world that awaits them. Quite naturally, it is to their establishment that their demands are directed. “I have the impression that my training integrates environmental issues in a marginal way and not in their global dimension” explains Pia Benguigui. Like him, 69% of students want to be better trained in environmental issues (national consultation conducted by REFEDD in 2020). 65% of them believe that all courses should integrate these issues. 30,000 have signed the manifesto “For an Ecological Alarm Clock” to challenge their school on the lack of training in these subjects. According to Pia, all higher education courses should include “a common base with basic scientific, historical and sociological studies to understand the mechanisms of global warming”, but also “a prospective part, so as not to learn a profession that will be obsolete in 10 years”.

What if the heart of the problem lay precisely in the fact that we expect the school to train us for jobs? This is the belief of Denis Boissin: “This model is over! Today, we are training in skills that can be mobilized in new jobs.” Alberto Alemanno, professor at HEC Paris and founder of the Good Lobby, also challenges “the postulate that schools must prepare for the world of work”. Why not embrace the uncertainty of which we are the victims in order to rethink the core of our training? According to him, the school must “transmit qualities, tools, expertise, socio-cultural and economic sensitivities. It is no longer a question of training a lawyer or a notary but a citizen who is able to adapt in a constantly changing world.”

Conclusion: let's not waste time trying to guess the jobs of tomorrow that are still non-existent and abstract, but let's prepare students to face future crises that have proven themselves. Isn't the challenge ultimately about teaching the future at school? The challenge is incongruous, but yet taken up by many NGOs around the world. In the United States, based on the observation that “the school offers few practical tools to students to help them understand their role in building the future”, the NGO Teach the Future believes that “by teaching the future, we can (...) prepare students to face uncertainty and challenges”. In Italy, the Impactscool association joined forces with the Italian Ministry of Education to introduce more than 35,000 students and teachers to prospective pedagogy. While these initiatives are unparalleled in France, some professors are trying to integrate foresight into their courses. Challenged by the rapid emergence of new jobs such as that of “community manager” among his alumni students, Denis Boissin, professor and deputy director of the Grande École program at Skema Business School, offers his students, as part of a course, to create a subject that does not yet exist but which will have become essential in 15 years. A way for them to arm themselves for the educational and professional revolutions to come.
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*study “The profession revolution” conducted by Ernst & Young in 2018