
Emerging Careers
Episode 13 | 26m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
Learn the skills and education you need to succeed in emerging industries.
In this episode, learn the skills and education you need to succeed in these emerging industries, and learn about a resource that helps you identify high-demand and high wage careers. Don’t miss the chance to discover some career opportunities of the future.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
The Career Center is a local public television program presented by Detroit PBS

Emerging Careers
Episode 13 | 26m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
In this episode, learn the skills and education you need to succeed in these emerging industries, and learn about a resource that helps you identify high-demand and high wage careers. Don’t miss the chance to discover some career opportunities of the future.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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From artificial intelligence to autonomous vehicles, the job market is full of exciting new industries.
On the career center, learn the skills and education you need to succeed in these emerging industries and learn about a resource that helps you identify high demand and high wage careers.
Don't miss the chance to discover some career opportunities of the future.
Stay tuned.
- The career Center is made possible by General Motors and by these supporters and by viewers like you.
Thank you.
(electronic music) (indistinct chatter) (school bell rings) - Have you heard of AI?
- Yeah, I guess - Way more often than I used to hear it.
- I've heard of it but I don't really know what it is.
- So AI stands for artificial intelligence and basically it's technology that mimics human intelligence.
In fact, it allows the machine to learn over time through experience.
So it's responsible for personalized search engine results or fraud detection.
It's even involved in autonomous vehicles.
On the flip side though, it is very costly to develop these systems and there tend to be some privacy issues.
In fact, I was just looking at a video from code.org that talks about these privacy issues and how that can impact the future of work.
Let's take a look.
(upbeat electronic music) - I think ethics becomes more important as something becomes more impactful and as AI becomes more impactful the more that we have to think about the ethics of AI.
- Artificial Intelligence is ultimately built by human beings.
Human beings can have very diverse motives for why they make something.
- Unfortunately, there's a huge difference between those that are involved in creating these systems and those that are impacted by these systems.
- So what we really wanna think about long term is where is the society we want to get to and how is technology gonna help enable that?
If we think about that in the long term we have a better chance of getting there than if we just try to develop the technology and then see what happens.
- I have always been extremely inspired by the opportunity that robotics presents to enable us to do work that was too dangerous for humans, not possible for humans, or is done more effectively by a machine.
- There have been millions of jobs that have really transformed because of the introduction of robots or AI, and that will continue to be the case.
- As a result of that, when we design algorithms that are meant to replace people we need to be attentive of how we do that and how we design those systems, so that it respects those people and treats them with dignity.
- When we think about artificial intelligence, we always put people first.
We always think about who is that worker who's trying to get a job done and how can our technology help them?
- What do we do in the long term?
How do we retrain them for another job or another career?
- As human beings, with all of our creativity and passion we're gonna continue to learn how to cooperate with artificial intelligence and have new jobs, have new job descriptions.
- It is really important that technologists kind of have this mantra of ensuring that their innovation is ethical and is beneficial to everyone in society.
- Machine learning requires a lot of true information to be provided to it in order to ultimately deliver a a utility.
This information might be very sensitive to us it might be health related, it might be financial, it might be very, very personal.
- We need to put checks and controls in place like with any technology that it's utilized to benefit us and it is done with accordance to the law.
- There's lots to gain from involving yourself and really understanding the details of how this technology works, given that it's so impactful, given that it is something that will influence your life, and the life of everyone that you love.
- AI is really at this kind of early stage that has this huge potential to do good.
And if you're young right now and you learn this stuff now you could really end up being at the kind of crest of a wave of something that's really important.
- Hi everyone.
My name is Elise Velpash and I am a connected vehicle specialist with the Michigan Department of Transportation.
Have you ever heard about connected and automated vehicles?
Well, maybe not, but I bet you have been in or seen a vehicle that has this technology built in.
Cars today that have dynamic cruise control or lane keeping technology are real life examples of low level automated vehicles.
Automated vehicles are cars that can drive or make decisions for themselves either partially or fully.
What most people don't know is there is something called connected vehicles which are cars that talk to the road, the surrounding infrastructure ,and other vehicles.
Some of you may be wondering why the Michigan Department of Transportation is involved with connected and automated vehicles.
While we do not build cars, we take on the very important role of providing the connection and high quality infrastructure data to be able to communicate in ways that the vehicles will understand.
Can you envision a future where no one has to drive a car but yet you can get wherever you want to go?
That is the future with fully autonomous vehicles and MDOT is here to help us move forward in small steps towards a better, safer future.
Imagine if your car knew if a traffic signal was going to stay green or turn red.
It could let you know if you need to slow down in order to make a single light or a series of lights helping you to drive safer as well as saving gas and ultimately reducing our carbon footprint.
Now imagine if your car could tell you if someone was going to run a red light in front of you.
It could warn you to stop potentially saving your life or the lives of others.
These technologies will also bring accessibility and mobility to all.
In the past, people may have had their mobility options limited by their age or their physical or intellectual capabilities.
However, automated vehicles have the potential to allow persons with disabilities to no longer feel limited in their transportation options.
MDOT is driven by the idea that no one should have to be in a car crash.
No one should have to feel unsafe on the road.
We look forward to a better tomorrow, one where there are no deaths on our roads, one we're driving is for all people regardless of capabilities, and one we're driving is the environmentally safe decision.
- Don't be startled if you see a car on the road without a driver.
The age of autonomous vehicles is upon us and companies like main mobility are propelling it forward.
Today I'm in Ann Arbor, Michigan to take this exciting career for a test drive.
Wow.
Thank you for having me here first off.
- Sure.
Yeah, we're glad you're here.
- Yeah, well, so all this stuff looks amazing and really really interesting, but I have no idea what any of it does.
- We have some cool toys here for sure.
You are surrounded by our autonomous vehicles here at May Mobility.
This is our vehicle lab.
- Wow, amazing.
So who is May Mobility?
- May Mobility is an autonomous vehicle technology company.
The cars that you see here in the lab are the ones that we build.
For our business model, we think a lot about transforming cities and giving people the opportunity to ride in these vehicles safely to where they need to go.
- Why is this such an exciting field to be in right now?
- For me, I think about autonomous vehicles and deploying them at scale as the moonshot of our generation, if you will.
Autonomous driving, believe it or not, is actually harder than landing on the moon in terms of the like computational problem, the engineering effort that goes into it.
At the end of the day, we believe that our vehicles that are self-driving can make the world safer, greener, and more accessible.
Today, if you are someone with a disability it may be hard for you to get around.
You have to rely on other people, right?
And when you use an autonomous vehicle service you don't need at least someone to drive you around.
The car's gonna do that for you.
And what we're really proud of here at May is that we were also one of the first in our industry to launch an ADA accessible wheelchair friendly vehicle.
And we provide that service today in a couple of cities already.
- So tell me a little bit about these cars.
Like what do they do, how do they work?
- Of course.
So there are a lot of sensors that enable the operation of these vehicles in an efficient and safe manner.
There are combinations of radars and cameras throughout the whole vehicle.
Here we can see a radar.
- Yeah, I saw some cameras somewhere over there.
- Exactly.
There is a combination of lidar and cameras on every corner of the vehicle and one of the main reasons we have them on, for example the corners, is so that we don't have any blind spots when we are driving.
Here in this corner, we have another radar and as I mentioned the radar will allow us to understand how fast are other vehicles moving.
Whereas a lidar allows us to understand a little bit more of the what is the shape, what is the size of these objects.
And a little bit more towards the front of the car, we can see a combination of cameras and another lidar.
And that specific one allows us to better understand our environment and helps with something called localization.
- As a startup that's pushing the boundaries of technology, I wanted to know where all this effort is headed.
Will we be zipping around in driverless cars anytime soon?
If I'm interested in getting into this what does the future look like?
- As the technology matures, it'll become a little bit more apparent.
What are the use cases that benefit society?
And I think that that's the key area that I would like May Mobility to see occupying more.
For example, making sure that these services can better coexist with the everyday life of people.
For example, the idea of car ownership is no longer top of mind.
So I can also see how that will have some impact in for example, how cities are planned.
- Yeah, I love that 'cuz I have a car and I hate everything about it, paying for it.
So it's a great idea.
- Yes, yes, definitely having autonomous vehicle services that have a specific mission to bridge transportation needs, bring equity to communities.
I think that that will foster a lot of positive change.
- It really seems to me like this could be great for communities that are underserved.
- Exactly.
That's the whole point.
And that's where we want to tailor our efforts in making sure that everyone in different communities has access to multiple opportunities.
- Yeah, I love that.
We've seen how a vehicle gathers information about its surroundings, but how does it use that data to navigate the various scenarios it will encounter?
May Mobility has a team devoted to teaching the cars how to think for themselves.
- See cars moving, see what's going on here - Oh it points the cars?
- Yeah, those are cars.
It says same time, data is the most important part.
This is the data driven work.
We are collecting data, we are working around with the data, we are understanding the data, we are analyzing them and eventually we are evaluating and improving our system using the data.
So data is the key.
For humans, it's really natural to capture the information understanding the information around us naturally.
But thinking about the little kid.
They're trying to learn how to walk, how to run, how to interact with flowers and floors.
They have to process in the brain and we are trying to help the vehicle to understand, okay, what you need to do if there is a little bump on the road, right?
What do you usually react to if there's a human?
And you probably have to react to that differently.
So that's how we use the data to train the vehicle.
Ultimately ,the goal of the autonomous driving cars for May is we are trying to help the community and the people who really need this transportation services and save their time and save their, solve their problems.
So we are helping the vehicle and the vehicle can helping humans and helping in the end.
- Helping people.
I love it.
It's a win win for everyone.
- Yes, that's the goal.
And that's the dream for a lot of people here.
- The team at May Mobility is rethinking the way we move by bringing AVS to communities across the US.
If the idea of driverless cars becoming an integrated, accessible, and safe mode of transportation revs your engine this could be the career for you.
- When you think of yourselves 10 years from now what sort of lifestyles do you imagine having?
- I would like to know that I'm living comfortably and securely.
- I wanna travel.
- Vacation at least twice a year.
- All right, so the careers that you've been thinking about will they support these lifestyles that you're mentioning?
- Um?
- Probably?
- Never really thought about it.
- So it is really important not only to think about the careers that you want, but also whether or not the career will support the lifestyle that you want as well.
- What do you mean?
- Well, it's important to choose a job that will take care of your wants and your needs.
- But how will we find out?
- Right.
When we have a guest speaker, the teacher tells us not to ask how much they make.
- There are actually resources available that can give you that information.
One of them is called the Occupational Outlook Handbook and it's by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In it, it talks about hundreds of different jobs and gives you information on what types of experience or education you need to enter into that field.
And it even tells you something about median pay.
- It's a handbook.
So where do we buy it?
- You don't have to buy it.
It's actually free and it's online.
And there's even an app that you can download.
And there are other resources too.
This one's called Michigan's Hot 50.
- Hmm, I've never heard of that.
- You know, we actually talked to someone named Jason Palmer it's his office that puts this together.
Let's take a look.
(upbeat electronic music) - We're the official, you know, one stop shop for all the data you see on the labor market and you know the population.
So when you read about the unemployment rate, that's us.
When you hear about jobs that are in demand, that's us too.
So really, we cover a lot of ground, we do a lot of work.
We have the Hot 50, it's a poster.
It should be in many of the schools around the state.
It's also a flyer.
So students should be using this when they're talking with their parents or their counselors or their friends.
What this product does is it identifies high demand, high wage jobs in the state and it also cuts off jobs that pay below a median wage.
Now, you know, the 51st job is not a bad job but we have to cut the list off somewhere.
So what those jobs are intended to do is tell people, you know, give them an idea of where the future demand will be.
The career outlook is just a different take on the hot jobs list instead of just taking the 50 jobs in the state that are high demand, high, high wage.
This is also looking at jobs that are high demand high wage, but by different training levels.
So you can look at the Bachelor's degrees, you can look at the, you know, you know the Associate's degrees.
So it allows, it's a great tool for students who want to sit down and look at, you know, what are the hot jobs for the level of training that I want to get?
We find that when we work with people who may have barriers to work if all they see is the hot 50 that could be a limiting list for them.
They might feel they, you know, they can't and don't want those jobs.
So what this allows someone to do is look at what are the in-demand jobs that don't require a college degree, that don't require any training beyond high school.
And it still gives them some guide, you know, some guidance on what jobs are out there.
One thing that I would encourage students to do with this data is look for some jobs on these lists that they like, that they think would be fun and reach out to employers to see what a day in the life is like.
And then working with their schools on things like apprenticeships or, you know, on the job training.
If they're doing a four year experience, you know, exploring an internship or you know, other ways that get them in the workplace doing the work so they can apply the skills they're learning in school to those, to the jobs that they want to do.
(upbeat music) - Back when I was a kid driving up north you see those big, almost windmills.
I used to call 'em the time, but wind turbines, you know seem so small so far away, but they're really huge.
You know, how do I work on those things?
- Typically the wind industry's broken down into travel and non-travel roles.
So if you're a traveler, you typically you would be doing either installation like building a new wind farm or some sort of like blade repair responsibilities for like a wind technician that wakes up and goes to work at a wind farm.
And would probably include everything from kind of communicating with the owner of the wind farm, answering the phone and answering emails, monitoring the park, the data.
And then there's the typical mechanical and maintenance type tasks, daily service schedules, climbing the machines, and replacing things such as oil or filters and things like that.
- This is probably the most hands-on classical sort of training I've had.
It was nice to actually be shown a way of doing things specifically with the electricity side and the mathematics calculations with that.
Like, I had no idea.
I knew there was a way, but I had no idea of how to do it as well as the repelling and climbing and rescuing and all that stuff.
I'd never done any of that stuff before but you know I kind of just gravitates to it.
- The teams tend to be so isolated that first responders and ambulance can be, you know, long time before they arrive in an emergency.
So we do a lot of that training here.
We get hands on with all the different equipment, make sure the students get just adequate repetitions, climbing, building the muscle memory the confidence in their skills.
We have a seven month wind certificate.
On completion of that you'll have a your OSHA 10 safety training, CPR first aid, AED training, some electrical training and a wind specific like working at heights certificate, which are kind of the basic requirements to get into the wind industry.
And then we also offer an 18 month Associate's program.
So if it's, if you're taking the wind program it would be an energy Associate's degree which encompasses like wind, energy, other renewables.
As far as advice for students, there's certain things like the safety, the hydraulics, electrical, mechanical that you can focus on.
Physical fitness, problem solving critical thinking, communication, these are all skills that somebody could work on.
- Challenge yourself.
There's gonna be a couple different ways of doing things and don't be afraid to be the first or just attempt and challenge yourself.
Do things that put you outta your comfort zone 'cuz that's gonna be the best way to learn.
(upbeat music) - Did you ever hear anyone use the phrase think outside the box?
When talking about an approach to a problem at hand, thinking outside the box is all about looking at a problem or situation in a different way so we're not limited by the constraints set by the box.
Creativity is what gives us the ability to think differently about that box.
So how is it connected to school, work, and life?
We're about to take a deep dive into this 21st century skill to find out.
- Hi, I'm Andrea Pisani.
I work with students every day to help them explore their passions and make great futures for themselves.
Creativity is the ability to come up with ideas, solutions, and perspectives that are original, meaningful, and innovative.
It's often associated with the arts such as painting and music, but it can also be applied to any field when problem solving or creating something new.
Professionals in all industries use creativity to develop innovative solutions, create new products, and grow.
For instance, in the technology industry, software engineers use creativity to develop innovative applications and technologies.
In the advertising and marketing industry, creative professionals use creativity to develop campaigns that excite and engage audiences.
As you can see, creativity comes in many forms and has lots of different applications.
Let's take a look at some characteristics that creative thinkers demonstrate.
When you're curious, you're open to new ideas and new perspectives and you're more likely to challenge previously accepted beliefs.
This curiosity fosters a mindset that encourages creativity by promoting exploration and learning.
Open-mindedness is another trait that creative thinkers tend to have.
People who are open-minded are more likely to consider various points of view which can lead to new insights.
Open-minded people also tend to be flexible in their thinking which enables them to see new opportunities for expression.
Imagination is another trait typical of creative thinkers.
Imagination is important because it allows people to see and think beyond what is known and actively seek opportunities to explore new ideas.
Now here's an exercise you can do to practice creative problem solving.
The next time you're faced with a problem try the six hats technique.
This technique developed by Dr. Edward De Bono encourages you to look at a problem from six different perspectives.
Each color hat represents an approach to solving problems.
First, the white hat, look at the situation and ask yourself what do the facts tell me?
Next the red hat, think about your challenge and ask yourself, what do my feelings tell me?
Now the yellow hat, think about the same problem and ask which elements of the solution will work?
Then the black hat, which elements will not work?
Green hat, ask yourself what are some alternative solutions?
Finally, the blue hat.
What is the best overall solution to this issue?
The beauty of this technique is it allows you to generate more solutions than you would have if you'd only considered one or two viewpoints.
Above all else, be confident and don't be afraid to try something new and unconventional.
We've talked a lot about different careers, any big takeaways?
- There's a job for everything and it's really important to research exactly what you'd want to do.
- The 21st century skills play a huge part in any job whether it's leadership skills or communication skills.
- Being financially stable doesn't have to mean that you're stuck with a boring job.
There's plenty of interesting careers out there.
- Speaking of interesting, any interest in the careers we talked about today?
Artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles?
- I mean, I'd have to research it more.
- No, not really.
- Yeah, I mean like we're gonna hear more about it in the future.
I'd like to learn more.
- It's great to keep an open mind about these things so whether it's something that you wanna learn more about or if you know right away that it's not something you're interested in it's good to get exposed to that and to learn new things.
And if you'd like to learn more about emerging careers visit our website at myfutureofwork.org/emerging.
There you'll find videos, resources and more.
See you next time.
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The Career Center is a local public television program presented by Detroit PBS