Gaining skills is just a matter of effort nowadays as everything anyone needs to learn to do pretty much anything is of course just clicks away.

I think that's the real change that needs to be addressed...self directed learning should be the future, and the need for formal education is dying

Except that while you do that, you still need to provide for your family.

I mean... nobody is saying its easy, but its easier and more possible to do it today than what it used to be.

>I'm curious how much protectionism is necessary at home to maintain necessary levels of belief in the future.

For the people who are actually issuing credit I would say very little is necessary.

Programming, obviously.

Sure, but what kind of programming? Web and Java developers are a dime-a-dozen. Sure there are different levels of skill within those specific fields, but you're never short for developers who know those things.

Now Machine Learning or AI or even potentially low-level programming. Those are some areas where knowledge could be _extremely_ lucrative in the near (10-15 years) future.

Short answer: "scripting"

Longer answer: programming isn't necessarily a job where you build things. I'd argue it's more generally about communicating with and controlling computers. And computers are increasingly where our lives are spent and/or tracked.

I learned to program when I was relatively young, and I've spent my whole life witnessing people doing mundane tasks that a script could have easily automated away. It's everywhere: doctors' secretaries copying forms, grocery clerks scanning through shelves, office workers manually editing excel documents, etc. The reason these tasks remain un-automated is because programmers don't do these jobs; programming is considered a profession rather than a basic skill. I showed my friend's secretary how to easily automate a task she spent hours a week on, but she felt like the solution was foreign and rejected it. That one script could have made freed up 100s of hours a year to do other things, but she didn't get it.

In a world where business people are looking to "disrupt" a lot of jobs through automation and consolidation, I think there's room for people to help automate away parts of their own jobs and share in the wealth (with more free or recreational time). I believe this is how a lot of people will keep jobs in the next 20+ years.