Our lives are made up of quickly evolving moments, where change and reinvention are indented in every segment of society, and that does not exclude the working world. As soon as we get accustomed to one reality, we are immediately thrown into a new one. Jobs are changing, that´s a fact.
If the television, dial phone, or cinema were some of the trademarks of 20th-century society, already by the 1990s, the picture started to change. It was suddenly the dawn of the internet, and slowly but assuredly, this new thing–this new way to connect with someone on the other corner of the world–became our most normal way of life, an integral part of our every day.
And not even a full two decades into the new millennia, into the 21st century, things are already evolving, and at a much faster pace than ever before. For instance, several decades ago it took a business more than 50 years to undergo a cycle from birth to death. In fact, everything went more slowly; even if it was apparent a particular company was to cease its existence, it was still a process that took a significant amount of time, perhaps three, five, or seven years. Nowadays, this can happen overnight.
People were also trained to occupy the same job positions for their entire lives. If your parents had received an education to work at a bank, it is likely they held the same job in that bank for most of their adulthood. But as times changed, and as everything turns so much faster these days, so did the job arena change. The internet has enabled a real evolution–it has furiously advanced the spectrum of available opportunities in every nook and cranny. Presumably under one condition – the sacred connection to the internet.
So, how have we advanced? What are some of the newest and hottest jobs, trending worldwide right now?
Blogging: Writing and Video, a curious case of self-employment
Forget about the library as the place where we once used to go and soak new knowledge by reading books. Libraries have changed on their own right; as venues, they can seemingly look like a type of co-working space, where, a person, potentially a blog-owner, goes to quickly review a book before preparing a post for their readership online. Not necessarily, though.
The only requirements for this particular job is a speedy internet connection, a video camera and a great deal of zest. Bloggers have become the go-to people for random tidbits about food, books, places to visit, to every makeup trend and more. People would engage on virtually any topic on the internet. In this sense, some content-creators became masters of the specific topics they wrote about.
Initiatives such as TripAdvisor have cast a shadow on traditional travel documentaries that inform people on exciting landmarks to be seen in foreign countries. Pages such as Brain Pickings offer a substantial review of contents and books that you would usually never pick up yourself. Running a web project, per se, has become a career that people have self-created, and as it shows, it is lucrative enough to do at home!
Even if you are not running a web project on your own, the chances are, if you are a wordsmith, you may end up freelancing for a client. But the array of jobs at any of the existent freelancing platforms is far from limited to only writers or bloggers.
Employers today consider hiring a freelancer for almost any task that can possibly be outsourced or delegated through an online agreement. Some of the most lucrative opportunities are for programmers, graphic designers, photographers, and virtual assistants, to name a few. The internet functions as an umbrella for this entire online ecosystem of millions of employers and employees who have established a contract via freelancing platforms.
For the moment, statistics show that at least 50 million Americans are working independently. According to Upwork, freelancers are expected to become the U.S workforce majority in less than a decade, with almost 50% of millennial workers already pursuing contracts as freelancers.
The number of people getting engaged in the freelancing world is accordingly growing in Iceland as well.
From Inventors to Entrepreneurs: Einstein to Zuckerberg
As advancements have been made in every field, we have further come to witness also the evolution of profiles we praise in public. Back in the day, it was figures such as Einstein who helped us ponder deeply in the laws of physics and enabled our more profound understanding of the universe. Today, it is figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, an entrepreneur who has changed society by helping social media go mainstream. Today, platforms such as Facebook do not impose any barriers on how we can connect online. And while managing and administrating social media pages has now become a job profile on its own term, don’t forget that on the other side of your favorite social media site there is a workforce of 25,000 people that keeps Facebook going (thus also creating work for you if you are a social media manager).
Today, more than ever it seems there are no limits what we can do and how much we can earn by engaging ourselves in work online, be that blogging, an entrepreneurship idea or something else. And Iceland is also part of that new exciting working world. While it is still a country best recognized for its natural beauty and as a popular destination to visit as a tourist, Icelanders have as well used their intellect and intuition to build many excellent ventures, including amazing domestic startups such as CCP, Össur, Marel, Plain Vanilla and many more.
Icelandic startups are flourishing–indeed, and in case you are looking for a small but no less significant Silicon Valley in the north of the Atlantic, don’t forget that Iceland has created job opportunities for its population and abroad.