Career Spotlight: Automotive Futurist
Because technology moves at such an incredibly rapid pace these days, people need to have their fingers directly on the pulse of new trends, new designs and new innovations all the time. If you end up on the tail end of a trend you could have caught at the beginning and cashed in on, you’re going to be pretty red in the face. Having the knowledge of what’s going to become popular in the next few months is essential if you want to be a market leader. This is especially true in the automotive world, as things move incredibly fast and automakers who aren’t hopping on trends like hybrid vehicles or camera-equipped cars when they’re just bubbling up are going to be late to the game and probably just perceived as a copycat.
What is an Automotive Futurist?
It turns out there’s actually a career centred on looking towards the future and spotting trends before they pop. As an automotive futurist, you’ll be scouring news sources, talking to industry leaders and analyzing the way trends have been rising and falling to anticipate what the next big thing will be. Far more complicated than just taking mechanic courses in Toronto, becoming an automotive futurist depends on your ability to properly identify what’s going to be popular in a couple of months. In other words, you need to know enough about trends and popularity that you can tell when a certain technology, word or idea has the potential to go viral and get in on the ground floor before it does. Hybrid cars are a great example of a trend that started off small and insignificant, but had the potential to go wild – which they eventually did.
It’s one of the most intense and intriguing automotive careers in Toronto right now as you have to not only have a great sense of where the industry is heading, but you also a great grasp on where it’s been and what has worked in the past. Past trends can tell you a lot about the future – not just in the sense that something that was popular twenty years ago could make a comeback, but also the typical lifecycle of a trend and the specific ideas or concepts that made it go viral.
Check out this long but informative video of Ford’s automotive futurist, Sheryl Connelly.
Automotive training in Toronto is a great step towards becoming an automotive futurist. To know which automotive trends are going to explode, you definitely need an intricate knowledge of vehicles. It’s also very important to have a strong background in public relations and marketing, as you’ll not only need to be able to talk the talk, but analyze and interpret advertising campaigns, press releases and newspaper articles as sources for emerging trends.
With the proper training in both automotive technology and media, you could be the one highlighting trends and preparing automotive companies for the onslaught of popular ideas just waiting to be capitalized on.
