Jobs of the future, Part Four: the Curator

Continuing Sophie Deen’s series around jobs of the future, we come to the Curator. I’ve talked about the Curator before – seven years ago in fact – and it’s a role that replaces the CIO. It is all about curating the multiverse of providers, platforms and possibilities in the ecosystem of the network we live in today. Sophie calls this the Synthesist, but we are both getting at the same thing.

The Curator does not specialise in one area but appraises, analyses, discusses, explains, introduces, negotiates and partners with all of the companies and people that can add value to their offer. It’s the opposite of a specialist as the specialities are now delegated to AI and robots. Robots handle the boring bits whilst humans handle the big problems with big-picture thinkers who can curate and synthesize the complete system.

This means that, by 2050, most jobs mix multiple skills. Many people will have multiple careers in different areas to become a curator as, after all, they will need to understand the complete ecosystem to get that role. The key focus will be to solve the unsolvable; find the big questions and work out the big answers; dealing with the unknown and making it known. The Curator will be the one connecting the dots to make sure that the company stays ahead of the curve. As Sophie puts it, they will be a:

• Multidisciplinary problem solver
• Linking random ideas into breakthroughs
• Translating between specialists and disciplines
• Adapting quickly to new tech

The thing is, to achieve this, the Curator needs to have multi-domain critical thinking, constant curiosity, learning and unlearning agility, strong communication skills and creativity in combining ideas from different areas.

The real question is how many Curators do you need? Think about it. Today, we have a CEO, a CFO, a CIO, a COO, a CPO … a C for everything. Tomorrow, the implication is no C’s related to a function; only C’s related to a direction.

The Curator has no speciality; they are primarily an arbitrator, collaborator and relationship manager. They look at big problems and work out how to bring people and technologies together to solve them. In fact, interestingly, this means that a future company could be created by a single Curator.

For some time, I’ve forecast that a trillion-dollar company could be created by one person sitting in their bedroom curating apps, APIs and AI. How far away are we from this? Well, some would say we are here today.