THOSE INVISIBLE FUTURE JOBS 

During my 50 seminars staged around the world every year, the single most asked question from parents is "What should my kids do to survive in the future?"

Let's not kid ourselves, parents know their children are not getting the education today that will prepare them for the world of tomorrow. Today's parents left school with a armamentarium of skills to serve them in the industrial age. Today's kids are even more aware, yet confusion, dispair, apathy and frustration abound. What to do? My suggestion: get them into something you have never heard about before.

Today everything that is important is invisible. Just like the auto industrial age. Those things just didn't exist. Yet look at how they flourished prior to the fall of the industrial age.

So look for fields that no school trains them for -- where the ground floor is not only open, but is a gaping excavation hole. Let them get in now before it builds up to a 100-storey building that requires too much skill and too much capital to approach. Where do you find these "Invisibles"? Let me tell you about one.

Have you heard about "Desktop" publishing? This computer-aided system allows large companies, medium-sized businesses, small entrepreneurs and individuals to do on their dest at home what formerly was done by highly skilled workers in print shops. It is completely revolutionizing the way printed documents are handled. But this is not what I mean. This industry is now visible. Five years ago even the phrase didn't exist. Today the ground floor of this new industry is already too crowded. The visionary ones that saw the potential here have already established their niche.

Look for something at the cutting edge that hasn't hit the public perception as yet. One such opportunity, in my opinion, is "Disktop Video". You have all seen how the VCR (Videocassette Recorder) has changed our lives and lifestyles and created another method of learning at home. Well, desktop video, will make desktop publishing look like a small footprint in the sands of time.

Desktop publishing, allowed me to type my column like the printer did.

Desktop video lets me show it to you.

Think of the implications. A detailed stationary picture, can now be activated to move. I can add voice, male, female, robotic or animal. I can adjust timing, add graphics or fades. I can wipe, dissolve, push, reveal, revert or stretch. In wide-angle or zoom. I can pan, truck, crane or lasso. I can make grass or graphs grow while you wait. With a device called a chromatron or with the appropriate video card all this can be transferred to your VCR. In color if you have a Macintosh II. Movie-making skills that once required five years of training to become a Disney animator, can now be acquired in a week with a Macintosh computer and a software program called Videoworks II. This is one of the new creativity -- and home and business productivity -- tools that will allow you to expand abilities you never know you possessed. You can be a hollywood mogul in a week.

What this does is move "Motion Pictures" from the movie set to your desk. You can now make business presentations, animated "Slide Shows", multi-media storyboards, educational movies, point-of-sale displays, music videos, entertaining animations or - and this is alot of work and requires much storage capacity - a full length movie. Then you can send it anywhere in the world, via modem, over ordinary telephone lines !!! (Watch television for two upcoming shows with this type of state-of-the-art technique. They are called "Jems" and "The Visionaries").

What this means is that another "New Industry" is about to blossom. One that anyone can enter, now, and on the ground floor. If you want your kids to be more than hamburger-flippers both you -and they -- have to learn to dare. (After all, do you want them to stay at home until they are 30?) can you both make this jump, now?

If all the foregoing seems like a foreign language at least you may have learned something. You now know how people who couldn't read or write felt during the industrial age. Further Information: "Video Works II", Macromind Inc., 1028 W. Wolfram St., Chicago, IL 60657. Phone (312) 871-0987 or through your local computer store via Broderbund Software Distributor. "Chromatron" is available through:

Howard Gold or Richard McKenzie, Bech-Tech, Claremont Hotel, 41 Tunnel Road, Berkeley, CA 94705. Phone: (415) 548-4054.

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