Creatives rise up, a new world awaits; just don?t throw your laptops away yet

So when are all you creative types going to rise up, demand higher-paying jobs and get over the line ?I sacrificed a high salary and a long workweek for a better quality of life??

Ward Churchill need not apply. He?s apparently been creative enough for now, and getting paid quite well to do so.

Writer Daniel Pink, in February?s Wired magazine, tells us in ?Revenge of the Right Brain? that the day of the well-compensated knowledge worker ? financial analysts, software engineers, tax attorneys ? is ending as the world moves to global outsourcing and invents new technologies that ?are proving they can outperform human left brains.?

Programmers? jobs are being turned over to machines, legal forms Web sites let us get divorced or create wills with minimum legal help and online stock trades are forcing stockbrokers to become ?advisers.?

?If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn?t swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will,? Pink predicts.

His premise is that we?re all entering the ?Conceptual Age,? where a premium will be placed on the ?right brain? qualities of beauty, spirituality and emotion. High-tech abilities, he predicts, must be supplemented with ?high concept? and ?high touch.?

His article reminded me of last year?s buzz created by the book ?The Rise of the Creative Class.? Business 2.0 magazine then named Boulder and Fort Collins as the No. 1 and No. 2 ?boom villages? that would benefit in this creative age since we?ve long attracted ?idea? employees ? inventors, marketers, multimedia artists.

The Wired piece had me feeling good ? realizing that as a journalist my day was finally arriving. I began daydreaming about the high-end executive office, feet propped up on a mahogany desk, just waiting for those left-brain nerds to call me so I could inform them if their new product was really ?creative? enough.

Then it dawned on me. If all this right-brain-directed future is coming, surely there must be actual evidence that today?s students ? tomorrow?s leaders ? were getting on board with the plan.

My first thought ? creative indeed ?was to ask what University of Colorado undergraduates are studying the most. So what is the most popular undergraduate major is at CU?

Psychology ? fall 2004 enrollment of 1,916.

My feet fell off my desk when I learned the second-largest major is pre-journalism and mass communication. Hasn?t anyone told these 970 students ? all ready to break the next Watergate scandal ? that newspaper circulation is declining?

Surely down this list computer systems or law would show up soon.

Third most popular major ? English. Fourth most popular ? political science.

Finally, coming in at No. 5, was biological sciences. CU is recognized nationally for its strong Molecular Cellular & Developmental Biology program, and some of the area?s most successful biotech ventures trace their roots to this department. Perhaps not all is lost for the left-brainers after all.

CU Computer Science Professor Clayton Lewis took issue ? first of all ?with this entire right brain/left brain debate. ?For some reason,? he says, ?we want to believe that the differences among us are due to genetics, that is, what we are born with, while the fact is that these differences are far less important than those based on what we do with what we have.?
He also isn?t so grim on the future for computer engineers. A great deal of computing work, he says, is the product ?design and implementation? and that takes ?communication between users, designers and builders.

?It?s difficult to ship this kind of work abroad to take advantage of low wages, because the communication problems outweigh the labor cost savings. Some problems are very hard to understand from afar.?

Quickly the image of my mahogany desk changed to Oak Express.

Could it be that tomorrow?s ?creatives? also will need to hone their technical skills?

What do employers want? They, after all, write the paychecks.

Simple, says Lisa Severy, director of Career Services at CU. The five most important qualities that employers seek from new grads are 1) communication skills / verbal and written, 2) honesty and integrity, 3) interpersonal skills, 4) a strong work ethic, and 5) relevant work or internship experience.

?Having a diverse skill set is very marketable,? Severy says. ?If you are working with a student who has a very technical degree, you may encourage them to do an internship that is not as technical. Maybe they need to get involved in a student organization that is a social cause organization.?

My right brain tells me: Jerry, stick to what you know best ? newspapers indeed will survive. But somewhere over in the cobwebs of my techno-deficient left brain, a little voice squeaks out: Maybe you really should figure out how to get your DVD working again? Wouldn?t that be something?

on Facebook on LinkedIn