Emerging social, economic, and technology trends are changing the traditional models of work and careers as we have known them. Going ahead, these forces will significantly impact how, when, where, and by whom the work of the future will be executed, and result in work ‘travelling’ to people instead of the other way round.

1. Insights
The Future of Work and Careers
- Girish Khanzode, Naveen Bakshi
Emerging social, economic and technology trends are changing the traditional models of work and careers we have known
in the past. Going ahead, these forces will significantly impact how, when, where and by whom the work of the future
will be carried out and result in work travelling towards people instead of the other way round. We will witness creative
destruction of jobs as current jobs give way to new opportunities. Companies and professionals that understand these
trends and make strategic changes will be tomorrow’s winners.
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2. Advances in connectivity, collaboration and networks are
blurring the boundaries between work and personal life and
Technology enabling dynamic and global collaboration amongst employees,
Trends contractors, customers, suppliers and partners. This will
accelerate innovation and disrupt business performance.
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3. Enterprise Collaboration
The new model of social interactions using collaboration technologies has made it easier for
individuals to stay connected with friends, relatives and peers. It has also enabled businesses to share
knowledge within the organization, with suppliers, partners and customers. The enterprise social
network has a huge advantage, namely the ability to preserve work knowledge, team interactions,
decisions, work artifacts and processes even after an employee is gone.
In time, collaborative social exchanges will speed up the development of new ideas and innovation
by enabling sharing across the length and breadth of the organization.
Ubiquitous Cloud
The Cloud has made it possible for employees to work from any place, any time and using any
device as long as they have connectivity. Its pay-as-you-go model has done away with the need for
expensive investment in technology infrastructure, and encouraged innovation. A cloud computing
model providing low cost storage, processing and availability, supported by broadband networks,
smartphones and collaboration networks will foster global collaboration and create new models
of working.
Mobility
The number of mobile subscribers will touch 6.5 billion by the end of 2012. Worldwide mobile data
traffic will exceed 130 Exabyte by 2020 due to new devices connected to the Internet. Smartphones
are growing four times faster than the overall mobile phone market and will become primary devices
for work, education and health.
Employees will increasingly use personal mobile devices like smartphones, PDAs and tablets
equipped with social networking capabilities to communicate with coworkers and customers. Their
companies will have to support these devices on corporate networks.
Virtualization
Technologies facilitating easier virtualization and governance of data, video and other network
traffic for mobile workforces will allow workers to access corporate IT applications and operating
systems securely in any workplace environment and over any network. It will enable workers to
remain connected and enable organizations to launch work from home programs.
This will accelerate the trend of moving work to low cost sites and result in the creation of regional
pockets of expertise. These regions will act like a magnet for skilled professionals of the relevant
industries.
Automation
Recent advances in robotics, software and algorithms will result in repetitive or fairly well structured
work becoming fully or partially automated. For example, robots can today install solar panels or
clean floors. Software can perform some tasks – like analyzing images or understanding speech –
more proficiently than ever before. Specialized versions of virtual assistants such as Siri are being
deployed in customer facing functions.
We will see more automation in assembly lines, investment decisions, complex legal processes, and
logistics to reduce workforce needs. Many middle layer transactional jobs will disappear. However,
high-wage, high-skill jobs will continue to grow. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7 of
the 10 fastest-growing new job categories between 2009 and 2011 were related to computers or
software.
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4. Economic
Trends
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5. Digital Freelancing
A new trend of online freelancing wherein skilled workers from all
over the world collaborate online with other experts will intensify.
Its growth will create a mainstream talent pool that companies
will be able to tap for urgent jobs, to delegate non-core work, to
fulfill temporary requirement or acquire niche skills.
Online employment is now a $1B industry. The growth of digital
freelancing can be gauged from the fact that one of its leaders,
eLance is growing 50% annually and has facilitated more than
US$ 175 million in annual earnings for freelancers.
Knowledge Economy
Since more economies are becoming knowledge driven, the
need for workers to have appropriate skills to deliver work in
this new world will be on the rise and a growing number of jobs
will require a significantly complex set of interdisciplinary skills.
As more and more work becomes knowledge driven, new
generation workers who can deliver a complex set of tasks and
use their tacit knowledge will be increasingly preferred. Already,
this segment of workers is growing 2.5 times faster than the
transactional workforce.
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6. Social/Demographic
Trends
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7. Ageing Workforce
As 77 million Baby Boomers (aged 44 to 62) retire, only 48 million from Generation X
will take their place, to create a knowledge and experience vacuum. Organizations
stand to lose tacit valuable knowledge (which is more than 40% for a typical
company) to retirement.
Although ageing is a developed world issue at present, even emerging economies
will experience similar problems in future. Advances in healthcare will increase
longevity to beyond 100 years. This will result in many older people working beyond
retirement age, either full time or otherwise, provided their companies support
them with the right assistive technologies and policies.
Changing demographics will result in four distinct generations with different values,
beliefs and expectations working side by side at the workplace. This will create new
management challenges for companies.
Generation Y
The tech-savvy hyper connected millennial generation has a different mindset
compared to earlier generations, prefers collaborative problem solving, and
wants to use “personal” technologies at work. Gen Y expects continuous learning,
feedback, and higher responsibilities. By 2020, this generation will constitute half
of the global workforce.
Rise of Women in Workforce
The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that women make up more than two-thirds
of employees in 10 out of 15 job categories that are likely to grow the fastest in the
next few years. As women constitute a higher percentage of the workforce, they
will prefer job opportunities with flexible work policies to enable them perform
their dual duties towards work and family.
Success
Strategies
for Future Workers In the coming decade, workers will see traditional careers being replaced by
new areas of opportunity. Physical presence will no longer be the measure of
productivity. As work will travel to them, their residence location will not be a barrier
to choose the work they are passionate about. These workers will see outdated
hierarchies and fancy titles crumble.
Automation and other advances will see the world moving from the information
age to the conceptual one. Left-brain skills will continue to be necessary, but will
not suffice.
The ability to network, collaborate with dispersed teams, think creatively, grasp
abstract concepts, and create a personal brand will be critical success factors.
Workers of the future will need to become specialists in more than one area.
Although generalists will still exist, their compensation will stagnate.
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8. New Technology
Opportunities
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9. Emergence of new models of work and the need for new type of workers will give
rise to a new set of technologies to help companies operate in the new world. This
opportunity for technology companies will primarily be in the following areas:
• Next generation Knowledge Management Systems that capture and
share the knowledge of experts using new types of data like videos and
interactions. These will automatically provide relevant information to
new workers based on the context in addition to leveraging smart search
technologies.
• Enterprise collaboration software, communication tools and social
networking applications that encourage employee interactions; work
allocation, tracking, measurement and execution from any device.
• Hi-definition advanced video-conferencing capabilities from multiple
devices that eliminate the need to travel for work.
• Avatars and virtual worlds for a virtual global existence wherein work is
completely virtual and remote. These will support devices residing in the
developed world to be controlled via Internet from the emerging one, to
bring cost advantage.
• Specialized virtual assistants (software algorithmic agents) for mundane
tasks such as customer support, which parse a user’s question and craft an
answer by plugging relevant data to create a set of readymade replies.
• Enterprise mobility applications.
• Robots for mechanical tasks. For example fly-like small robots to secure
homes and buildings
• Cognitive assistants for professionals that help organize daily tasks, filter
information flows, prioritize commitments, and manage work and life.
• New work measurement technologies that provide statistics about the
quantity of work that a remote worker has put in along with measures for
privacy control.
• New performance measurement tools with dynamic goals that can collect
measurement data by scanning the enterprise collaboration network to
improve quality of evaluation and avoid recency bias.
• Innovation management tools to foster and reward the culture of innovation.
• Hiring tools to: attract and connect to millennials at their hangouts, identify
potential candidates; track and provide complete visibility to all participants
during the entire hiring process, in real-time.
• eLearning tools for anywhere anytime learning
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10. Recommendations
for Companies
Companies of the future will need to compete for skilled talent in order to win in the new world driven
by innovation as the critical differentiator. They will need to focus on quality rather than numbers to
meet the demands of new work. Some suggestions are listed below:
• Latest tools, policies and application deployments that cater to demands of the ‘bring your own
device to work’ culture and satisfy the expectations of better mobility support and improved
collaborative application experience. This will enable employees to work wherever, whenever, and
take charge of their life and work. This initiative is important since millennials say that technology
is vital to their employer selection.
• Customizable choices for career paths, benefits, work arrangements, contracts and skill building
programs to help retain the best talent by addressing individualistic aspirations in new generation
employees.
• Mentoring programs with seniors for opportunities to learn, retool and reinvent.
• Flexible work policies to attract new generation male and female workers.
• Ideation systems that capture innovation ideas from employees and reward the best ones.
• New performance evaluation practices that value employees based on their ability to create
intellectual capital and innovate. Performance evaluation with dynamic goals to ensure that
evaluation is aligned to the work performed and the workforce to organizational needs.
• CSR activities promoting sustainable practices and community welfare, visible in social media to
attract the younger, environmentally conscious generations.
• Encouragement for employees to build online identities as individual brands, through blogs,
participation in online forums, and professional profiles on sites like LinkedIn.
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11. About the Authors
Girish Khanzode
Products & Platforms Innovator for Futuristic Technologies, Infosys
Girish is a veteran in Enterprise Software Product design and
development with more than 20 years of professional experience.
He has built and led large product engineering teams to deliver
highly complex products in multiple domains, covering entire
product life cycle. Currently, he is engaged in innovating and
building the next generation products and platforms in emerging
new technology areas like Enterprise Data Security and Privacy,
Collaboration technologies, Digital Workplace, Social Analytics,
Smart Cities, Big Data and Internet of Things. Girish holds M.
Tech. degree in Computer Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in
Electrical Engineering.
Naveen Bakshi
Principal and Head, Digital Consumer Institute, Centre of Innovation
for Tomorrow’s Enterprise, Infosys Labs
Naveen leads the Digital consumer Institute at Infosys, where he
helps enterprises to understand the ever changing demographic
of Digital Consumers and advises on how they need to transform
to cater to their needs. Naveen has around 16 years of experience
in various areas of IT particularly focused on Product Management,
BPM and understanding user needs.
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12. About Infosys
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© 2012 Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India. Infosys believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Infosys acknowledges
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