Content We Love: “Yeah my son, he’s a… umm… He works in China!”

LinkedIn takes a peek at some of the modern working world’s most misunderstood jobs

From Oct. 30, 2015 – http://en.prnasia.com/story/134861-0.shtml

I’ve been at my current job for just short of a year, yet only last month did my grandma actually ask me, ‘so what is it you do Timothy (she always calls me Timothy)? Like, what are your day to day duties?’

As an editor working for a news agency that was started in 1954, and is a subsidiary of a company founded in 1918 by the then UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, I luckily have a job that is at least reasonably easy to relate to a British woman born in 1927. According to an October press release distributed by business-oriented social network LinkedIn however, not all of us have such an easy time explaining to our elders where it is we go for roughly 45 hours a week.

The release in question actually only focuses on around 500 workers and their parents in Singapore, but the idea is symbolic of the rapid changes witnessed by the current workforce compared to that of previous generations. Since UBM began in the aftermath of WWI, it’s fair to say the world has changed in one or two noticeable ways. As societies change, the roles the people within these societies play naturally evolve as a matter of course, and this is perhaps no more evident than in the jobs we undertake and the new positions we create.

To use examples from the LinkedIn release, how many of you know what a UI Designer is, ‘cause 72% of the Singaporean parents interviewed didn’t, and only once I’d Googled what UI stands for was I able to hazard a guess myself. I also couldn’t have told you off the top off my head what an actuary was either. In fact I just read what it was and I’ve already forgotten. Around half of the top ten are jobs that definitely didn’t exist in 1954, mostly because they’re related to computers and computery stuff. Fashion designer and veterinarian though, come on Singapore, don’t you people dress your pets!?

As far as press releases go, this one is a nice example of a good release that doesn’t follow the conventional format, and as much as we advocate a certain structure it would be nice if more of them stuck in the memory and stood out from the crowd. A little joke and some nice alliteration in the headline draws you in, and the content is easy for most of the LinkedIn generation to relate to.

It’s also all in the name of a good cause – the Bring in Your Parents Day (BIYP) initiative – that aims to bridge the ever-widening gap of understanding between generations. We might need to employ a few more data scientists to see whether or not it works though.