A theme has been emerging at boosst HQ in our annual planning meetings this year, and it has nothing to do with markets. Clients in their 50s and 60s – people whose own plans are in great shape – are increasingly worried about their children.
Just this past fortnight we’ve heard:
“I just don’t know how they will forge a career.”
“The graduate scheme they were planning to apply for no longer exists.”
The real question here is: “will my kids be okay in a working world that AI is reshaping faster than anyone expected?”
It is a fair question. Entry-level roles in law, accountancy, consulting, software, and media – the traditional first rungs of a professional career – are precisely the tasks that current AI systems handle pretty well. Many large employers have visibly shrunk their graduate intakes. A 22-year-old today is entering a jobs market that parents cannot map for them, because nobody has been here before. When a client tells us their son or daughter feels lost, that feeling is not a failure of ambition or effort. The ground really is moving.
What history tells us – and what it doesn’t
Regular readers will know we have written before about the railways, the internet, and AI – the recurring pattern in which a transformative technology arrives, capital floods in, predictions run wild, and the world of work is rearranged. Every previous wave destroyed categories of work that once looked permanent, and every previous wave created work that nobody could have named in advance. In 1995 there was no such job as a social media manager, an app developer, or a cloud architect. Our investment philosophy is built on faith in human ingenuity – the belief that people wake up every day and solve problems, adapt, and build – and nothing about AI has shaken that belief. If anything, the demand for people who can work with these tools, govern them, secure them, and point them at genuinely useful problems is growing faster than it can be filled.
But while “it worked out for the loom weavers’ grandchildren” is true at the level of economies and decades. It is not much help to a 22-year-old deciding what to do this September. The historical view tells us the destination is likely to be fine. It says nothing about the route. And the route is exactly where a young person needs help.
The boosst lens: plan the life, then choose the work
Our whole approach to money rests on a simple ordering: plan before portfolio. Understand the life you want first, then arrange the resources to fund it. We think the same ordering applies to careers, and it applies with more force when the working world is uncertain. The wrong response to AI is to guess which single job will be “safe” and sprint towards it – that is the careers equivalent of stock-picking. The better response is the one we build into every financial plan: a wider surface area. Skills that transfer. A willingness to move between roles and industries. Decisions made from evidence rather than headlines. You cannot predict the future of work, but you can prepare for it.
There is also a bigger truth hiding inside this worry, and it is one we care about deeply. A typical career is roughly 80,000 hours long – 40 years, 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week. It is one of the largest single allocations of time a person will ever make, and in our experience work quietly provides much of a person’s purpose, relationships, and sense of achievement. So the question facing the next generation is not just “which jobs will survive AI?” It is the same question we ask clients about their money: what is all of this for? A career chosen deliberately, around meaning as well as income, is more resilient than one chosen by default – because the person holding it has reasons to adapt rather than just a salary to protect.
A resource worth knowing about: 80,000 Hours
That figure – 80,000 hours – is not ours. It is the name of a non-profit I have been following for a little while and we want to draw some attention to their work.
80,000 Hours was co-founded in Oxford in 2011 by William MacAskill, a moral philosopher who was for many years an associate professor at Oxford University and whose books Doing Good Better and What We Owe The Future have shaped how a generation thinks about using time and money well. The organisation exists to answer one question with proper rigour: given that your career is about 80,000 hours of your one life, how do you spend them on work that is meaningful, valuable, and suited to you? They have spent well over a decade researching exactly that, and everything they produce is free.
In recent years their research has increasingly focused on AI – both the risks it poses and the enormous range of careers emerging around it. Their AI careers hub at 80000hours.org/ai is one of the clearest explanations we have found of how this technology may reshape work, written for intelligent non-specialists. It is worth saying plainly that their perspective is their own: they believe AI is the defining challenge of this generation, and their advice leans towards careers that help steer it well – in policy, research, security, governance, and the organisations building and regulating these systems. You do not have to share every conclusion to find the thinking valuable. We would say the same about any good research.
For a young person – or a parent wanting to help one – three things they offer stand out.
Their careers research. Their career reviews are detailed, evidence-based write-ups of career paths with a future – what the work involves, who suits it, how to get in. Many of the roles profiled did not exist ten years ago, which is rather the point. Their job board leans towards US-based AI roles, though some are UK-based, and even where a specific listing is across the Atlantic, it is a useful window into the kinds of organisations now hiring – and an invitation to seek out their UK equivalents.
Instant, tailored advice. They have built a career advisory chat tool at app.80000hours.org, drawing on their decade-plus of careers research. A user can ask it anything about their situation, and can upload their CV for advice tailored to their actual experience rather than generic tips. For a young person staring at a job market that no longer resembles the one their university careers service described, this is a remarkably low-friction place to start – free, immediate, and grounded in real research.
A real human, for free. For those who want to go deeper, 80,000 Hours offers free one-to-one advising with a member of their team – a genuine conversation about someone’s options, applied for at 80000hours.org/speak-with-us. They have guided thousands of people through career changes. There is no charge and no catch; they are a non-profit whose entire purpose is helping people use their working lives well.
For parents who want to understand the landscape themselves before recommending anything, MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future is a thoughtful, readable case for taking the long view of the decades ahead, and 80,000 Hours maintains its own curated reading list of the best books and papers on AI and its implications on their website. None of it requires a technical background.
What this means for your plan
If you are a boosst client with children in their 20s or 30s, we would gently suggest two things.
The first costs nothing: share the resources above. We think these tools work best with a simple share. A link to a free chat tool or an application for free one-to-one advice is a very different gift from an opinion about what somebody ought to do with their life!
The second belongs in your annual planning meeting. Careers that start later, follow a less linear path, or involve retraining are increasingly normal. Supporting a child through that period – a contribution to a course or a bridge through a career change – is exactly the kind of decision a financial plan exists to test. For many families we support, the reality is that their plan can enable this with some comfort – so just ask us. We would much rather model it with you than have you wonder about the ‘ifs and buts’ of helping your next generation.
In summary
The working world your children are entering will not look like yours. Ours didn’t look like our parents’, and theirs didn’t look like their parents’ either.
What has never changed is that people who choose their work deliberately – with good evidence, a long horizon, and a clear sense of what matters to them – tend to be okay in any version of the future. That is a planning problem, and planning problems are solvable.
If this has been on your mind, or you would like to talk through how supporting the next generation fits within your own plan, please speak to your lead planner.