How today’s five-year-old children will shape tomorrow’s IT workers

Social media is ruining kids’ brains. Smartphone screens are destroying children’s eyesight. Video games are turning teenagers violent. Artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate most career paths for today’s youth.

When it comes to the future of technology, there’s never a shortage of bad news about how it might affect kids and teenagers across the globe.

However, for Generation Alpha – the first cohort of youngsters to be born entirely in the 21st century – tech and digital is now integral to every second of their lives. Today’s five-year-olds will begin their education having never known a time when they weren’t hyperconnected. A majority will grow up as the most technologically advanced and digitally driven teenagers ever, entering adulthood with the IT skills and knowledge to transform our societies forever in ways we still can’t imagine.

Sean Reddington, CEO of Thrive, a learning technology company, dropped out of school at 16. The business he founded just five years ago is now worth £150m and works with hundreds of global companies including McVitie’s, Volvo, Vodafone, and Burger King.

He believes today’s five-year-olds will only succeed in the world of IT – and beyond – if schools, colleges, and universities “prioritize” coding and digital literacy as early as possible, making them “as fundamental as reading and math”.

“As technology evolves, educational institutions must adopt an agile approach to curriculum development, constantly updating their content and teaching methods to reflect new ways of learning and working,” he explains.

Nurturing online safety and cyber security awareness will also be crucial, Reddington adds, especially given they are “already fluent in the language of swipes and taps”.

“By fostering both digital literacy and creativity, we can empower the next generation to navigate the digital landscape as responsible creators and critical thinkers,” he advises. 

Encouraging ethical thinking

Three decades ago, five-year-old kids had no concept of the internet, smartphones, and tablets. Now the same age group would never be able to imagine life without them, connecting their lives to apps, digital tools, and information and entertainment on-demand.

It’s for this reason that Mark Standen, director of technology at recruiters S&You Technology, suggests kids as young as five right now will have a pivotal role in developing the “use of ethical and responsible” technology solutions. Further widespread transformation through AI and automation will certainly affect that, meaning the IT workers of the future will have to understand all areas of tech.

Standen describes this as “the ability to have interdisciplinary collaboration” and says that as tech skills continue to increase “in value and reliance”, IT roles will need to be more strategic and innovative in their thinking.

“The digital behavior of children today is already having a profound impact on working lives, and this is only going to increase,” he says. ”The blurring of lines between work/life boundaries, expectations when it comes to responsiveness, the need for digital resilience, and enhanced collaborations are all happening now and will all need to be facilitated by employers in the future too.”

Continuous learning is another important factor. No longer will today’s kids need to be pigeon-holed in one specific area of study or skill. They will grow up having learning materials readily available in a variety of long and short forms - whether that’s YouTube, TikTok, or some other platform that is yet to be invented. It has never been easier for educational content to be tailored and disseminated to a young audience.

Gert-Jan Wijman, general manager EMEA at integration platform Celigo, describes these youngsters as “digital natives”, and those in work today as “digital immigrants”.

“These children are growing up immersed in next-generation technology. Within 15 years, we’ll be seeing a workforce born into a world post- digital transformation,” he explains.

“They will grow up using Alexa to control their homes, and ChatGPT to support their homework. Where Millennials might have dabbled in HTML and learned to make a webpage banner scroll, today’s youth will be programming robots for household chores and building LLMs.”

Understanding future expectations

As coding, AI, and IoT become commonplace skills for Generation Alpha, Wijman argues future IT workers from this cohort will quickly take innovation to new heights.

“The next generation of coders, represented by today’s five-year-olds, will have the skills to push digital technology further than Gen Y and Z,” he says.

“The digital-first generation has the power to fuel business innovation across all sectors. True digital transformation goes beyond just improving internal processes; it changes the products and services companies offer.”

Given this age group will be designing and creating for those like them, Wijman suggests this also offers the ability to understand the “expectations of customers and society”.

He adds: “The future generation will be key in shaping demand and driving organizations to innovate and adapt to the changing digital landscape.”

For many experts working across technology right now, watching today’s children and young people emerge as tomorrow’s IT workers will be the trigger for making all of us more cyber-resilient online. For example, the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, brought in a few years ago, requires tech companies to give children a high level of privacy by design and default.

As young people grow up with such tools being commonplace in their lives, the belief is they will go on to become their future custodians.

The IT worker of 2040

It’s clear that many ‘technology of tomorrow’ predictions have not always been right, or even come close to reality. “Unfortunately, history has taught us that the promises are so far yet to deliver the machine-powered utopia that humans have been envisaging for decades,” explains Matt Ellison, cyber security consultant at Corelight.

“If we look historically at how the individual roles of IT workers have changed, it is more accurate to say that new technology has typically accelerated existing processes and procedures,” he explains, “without fundamentally changing existing roles, while also introducing new roles.

“IT workers will likely continue to become increasingly dependent on working remotely through video conferencing, remote access tools, and AI assistants to complete tasks on their behalf. The majority of roles will still have the same underlying tasks; developing new technologies, selling those technologies, deploying and supporting them, and using and managing them,” he argues.

Ellison points to the iPhone as an example. Put that into the hands of today’s five-year-olds and it would feel practically ancient in its construction and design. It’s why he feels Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality is a much more future-defining driver for how they will interact with the world.

And then, of course, there is artificial intelligence.Today’s workforce has lived through the early days of hype and fear-mongering and is now tasked with navigating the likes of smart assistants and ChatGPT. However, the five-year- olds of today will enter a workplace where AI touches almost every part of IT.

Ellison adds AI, specifically LLM technologies, are already “normalized into many aspects of IT” today, even if they don’t always do the best job. “How we improve that situation, while also addressing the moral and ethical challenges, will really define just how different IT workers’ roles will be in [the] future.”