8 Jobs That Will Go Extinct (part 1)

Ira Wolfe, president of Success Performance Solutions and expert in workforce trends, estimated that close to 50 percent of jobs will be extinct within the next 20 years.

1. Utility Company Engineers

Thomas Frey, senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute, believes that the power industry will undergo dramatic changes in response to health and environmental issues. In a blog post, Frey predicted national grids will switch to micro grids to serve large cities and single homes. Power lines and coal plants will be replaced by cleaner technologies, and the role of utility engineers and transportation workers will shift. The good news is that an evolving power industry will initially provide new jobs to support the changes, such as installation crews, a new breed of engineers and more.

2. Delivery and Taxi Drivers

Deliveries of packages might soon be carried out by drones and driverless cars. Amazon is testing drones outdoors after receiving the go-ahead from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), reports The Wall Street Journal. And Frey wrote that driverless cars will replace limo and taxi drivers. He believes the U.S. legislation will agree that these cars are safer options. Delivery dispatchers, traffic monitoring systems, engineers, emergency crews and more will likely replace delivery and taxi drivers.

Google Self Driving Car

3. Some Teachers

Teachers are unlikely to become extinct. However, free online learning is revolutionizing teaching models, wrote Frey. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) currently offers more than 2,000 courses online, and there have been more than 130 million downloads. The Khan Academy offers a similar number of courses, and downloads exceed 100 million. In the future, there might be fewer teachers and professors but more coaches, course designers and learning camps, according to Frey.

Online Class replacing Traditional ones

4. Travel Agents

Savvy sites that allow you to book your own vacation, such as Kayak and Airbnb, cater to the mobile user who prefers speed over personal service from a live representative. Fast Company ranked travel agents No. 5 on its list of the most endangered jobs of 2014, and Staff.com co-founder Rob Rawson wrote in a blog that websites provide a bespoke service that rivals the most efficient human travel agent.

A computer can determine a traveler’s needs, clarify questions via a website and deliver the cheapest or most suitable options quicker than a human travel agent and at a lower cost. Rawson predicted travel agents will no longer be needed by 2025.