What Do I Tell My Kids?
By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group
A good friend called me a few months ago. He is a caring parent, the kind who thinks hard about his kids and worries about them the right way. His son was an accounting major, and for years that felt like a safe bet. Accountants have good careers. Everyone knows that... or knew that. But somewhere recently his son had started to wonder whether any of that was still true. He could not envision a productive future in a world potentially being taken over by AI. My friend did not know what to tell his son, and he asked if I would speak with him, not just as his dad's friend, but as a coach with some perspective.
I said yes. But I also knew I did not have a perfect answer.
I am not an economist, a futurist, or a workforce researcher. I am a coach, a former PwC partner, and someone who reads a lot. So take what follows not as expert advice, but as one sensible person trying to think clearly about a question a lot of parents are carrying right now.
The Anxiety Is Real, But It May Be Misdirected
Most of the worry I hear centers on a specific question: is my child studying the right thing? Will their major still lead somewhere? I understand the instinct, but I think it sends us looking in the wrong direction.
The research backs up what I believe from experience: the skills that hold their value through disruption are the deeply human ones. Critical thinking. Communication. The ability to work with other people under pressure. These are not being replaced. If anything, they are becoming harder to find and more important to have. The job a young person does in ten years may look nothing like what they trained for. The underlying ability to think, adapt, and connect with people will still be what separates the ones who thrive.
The Subjects We Dismissed May Be the Ones That Last
I was an English Literature major. I chose it largely because I could not figure out my future, and that was long before personal computers, let alone AI. Reading literature, studying history, taking electives in psychology, religion, art, music, philosophy and economics gave me a foundation. I did not consciously set out to build it. They were subjects that interested me. They taught me how to think, how to understand people, and how to keep learning when the world changed around me.
So, that is what I told my friend's son. Accounting and finance are not going away. But the accountant who also understands human behavior, who can communicate clearly, who can read a room and ask the right questions, that person is going to be fine. The skill is not the major. The skill is what you built along the way.
AI can process the data. It still cannot decide which problems are worth caring about, or understand the human motivations underneath every economic decision. That still requires a person.
Agility Matters More Than the Right Answer
The parents I talk with want a roadmap. I understand that. But the more useful frame is agility over certainty. The ability to keep learning, to pivot when the environment shifts, to bring judgment to a situation a model cannot fully navigate, that is what will matter most.
AI literacy belongs in this conversation too. Knowing how to work with these tools, how to evaluate what they produce, and how to direct them toward a problem is becoming part of how professional work gets done. That is learnable. It does not require a technical degree. It requires curiosity.
Focus on Who You Are Becoming
There is something else worth saying, and it is less about career strategy than about how we are living with all of this.
The anxiety parents feel on behalf of their kids is real. But some of it is driven by a pace of change that nobody can fully see ahead of. Spending too much energy trying to optimize for a job market that does not exist yet is not the best use of anyone's time. What I told my friend's son, and what I tell my own kids, is this: focus on becoming someone worth knowing. Build the foundational things, the ability to think, to communicate, to understand people, to handle uncertainty without falling apart.
The accounting major who also understands people will be fine. The history student who learns to think rigorously will be fine. The kid who stays curious and does not panic when the map changes will be very fine.
The best preparation I know of is not a specific major. It is a certain kind of person.
Note on privacy: The names and identifying details in this, and all of my articles, have been changed. The experiences described are drawn from multiple client engagements over the course of my career and do not represent any single individual.