• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, April 9, 2025

Will you steer your kids toward the media business?

At a recent event, I engaged in a roundtable conversation about what career paths we could suggest for our children to guarantee them a fruitful future. 

My parents never mentioned anything specific for me career-wise. When I was a kid, I decided to either be in media or become a meteorologist.  I stayed away from science and focused on the storytelling, so media it became. Thankfully, I have been halfway decent at it. 

For many generations, children adopted similar paths as their parents, but I don’t think I would ask that for my kids, and many of the people I spoke with felt the same.  The issue is, simply, that media has become partisan, sowing the seeds of discontent. Plus media creation and development are at risk from AI.  At a later date, I will explore what that means, but for now, let’s assume it makes sense.  So what should we steer our children toward instead?

Some of the people in that room spoke of guiding their kids toward jobs that can’t be easily replaced by AI. What I took away from the conversation was the idea of suggesting my children look toward what I’ll call the “white collar-ification of blue-collar jobs.” 

Some were steering their kids toward construction, plumbing, or electrical work.  Some were thinking of doctors and health care.  Some were looking at auto maintenance or mechanical engineering.  Each of these are skilled roles that are far more difficult to replace with AI.  These are jobs that will likely always be needed, but the underlying conversation was whether you could leverage technology to do these jobs more effectively.  I found this line of thinking to be fascinating.

If you’ve ever done a remodel or built a house, you know skilled craftspeople are immensely valuable, but the way they conduct their businesses often leaves room to improve. Customer communications, project management, and the ability to stay on budget are difficult, and it’s rare to find a craftsperson who is also a solid businessperson. 

This is where the conversation was heading:  How can you create a more scalable business leveraging technology to allow craftspeople to practice their craft?  In the case of healthcare, how can you use technology to better manage patient wellness, so they can avoid getting sick rather than simply trying to deal with symptoms? AI can have a dramatic impact if put to work as a tool to augment rather than replace cursory functions.

I love the media business, but I worry that its future will be dramatically different from anything that came before.  So much of what it entails is being automated for clickbait and AI training data, that I’m not sure I would steer my kids to a career in media.  Instead, I want them to think of ways AI can be used to augment their desired paths, rather than replace the functions that make up the backbone of the industry. 

Of course, I might be completely wrong and maybe the media world will find its way and steer back toward something that can make the world a better place just by the sheer injection of creativity.  Maybe there’s some hope in there?