20 Jobs That Didn’t Exist 20 Years Ago

1. Blogger

“This career, where you essentially handle every aspect of your website, that’s purely your opinion and take on things, is a millennial phenomenon, and a fast-growing one at that.”
—Aanchal Sukhija, Blogger

2. Social media Manager
With absolutely no social media in the picture, a job creating and managing content for it was a non-entity. Now, knowing the right thing to Tweet and Insta-post makes you a major money-maker.

3. SEO specialist
Optimising views and hits in a digital world by ensuring all the right keywords are in place for a post is a concept that was unheard of....as little as 15 years ago!

4. Web designer

5. Instagram Artists
The fine artist meets its inevitable digital fate in this medium-based art-creation form. It isn’t enough to be good if you aren’t both relevant and shareable!

6. Educational consultants
In a dog-eat-dog scenario, where everyone has access to info, prepping for a competitive future can be scary. Enter an EC: your guide to getting the college and career you want.

7. Uber drivers

Remember when booking a cab meant walking up to your local taxi stand and bargaining for the best fare? All that changed with the uber drivers.

8. Life coach
Two decades ago, the term ‘coach’ came with simpler prefixes, like ‘football’ and ‘swim’. Now, though, people make a comfortable living guiding the privileged and stressed of the world through their taxing day-to-day.

9. Selfie Stick manufacturer
Invented in 2014, this Time magazine Best 25 Inventions of the Year nominee created jobs for a number of suppliers and manufacturers, who rake in big moolah making just this one thing. Go, narcissism!

10. Sustainability expert
Circa 1996, global warming was simply a party joke to most. Now, the need for someone to tell you how to make your homes, businesses, and cities greener is all too real.

11. Millenial expert
They’re hired to make companies more youth-compatible. Their job? To know the likes, dislikes, habits, and lifestyles of the most consumer-driven generation to date.

12. Air nanny

This genius concept has airlines hiring people to attend to passengers' childrens' needs, so the parents can have a good flight. Talk about a full-service airline!

13. Digital marketer 

“You have to account for the personal preferences and habits of every online user—it’s more targeted in its approach than any kind of print marketing.”
—Vinita Sonny Abraham,
Assistant Marketing Manager, CanSupport

14. App developer 

The most cutting-edge phone of 1996 (the Motorola StarTAC) had calculator-size digits and an antenna. So no, there would’ve been no place for the creators of Candy Crush and Swiggy.

15. Genetic counsellor
Chalk it up to a simpler time, but the need for this specialisation (training people to catch out the risk to an unborn child of an inherited disorder) has only been recognised recently.

16. Green building architects
For the reasons we mentioned in profession #10, a new cult of architects, who can build eco-friendly buildings, are more and more in demand.

17. Medical Marijuana Cultivators

18. Zumba instructor
This form of dance became popular only in the late ’90s, created accidentally by Alberto ‘Beto’ Perez when he realised he’d forgotten his tape for an aerobics class and improvised to non-traditional salsa music. This happy mistake led to a dance cult that took over the world, and people who took it up for a living!

19. Full-time Netflix viewer

Yes, this is a real thing. The content streaming company hires people to watch stuff and tag it—try finding a 1996 equivalent!

20. Youtube content creators
Because if YouTube itself was only born a decade ago, its content (that gives tonnes of web series creators’ and vloggers’ lives meaning) could only have followed suit after.