What kind of work will there be in future?

Many research institutes and economic groups have produced extensive visions regarding the ‘Future of Work’. I will share a few interesting lines in a while. However, these visions were all written prior to the arrival of Covid-19 – and, at least for some time, they need to be reassessed.

We are facing lockdowns, social distancing, work from home, consumer behavior changes, business closures, lay-offs, increases in poverty, companies being on survival mode… Companies are not hiring (with the exception of the few large tech companies  dominating the world) and our BPOs, cash is kept for survival and a least temporarily not being made available for training of employees or for the development of potential employees through dual-tech, apprenticeship or internship.

If you are a K-12 student or a new college graduate and you read the news in Wednesday’s papers ‘1 million young workers at risk of losing jobs in the Philippines’, how desperate will you get in finding a job? How do we help these young people? How do we get the message across to them that there is a future for them? How do we bridge the situation today with so many young people trying to find learning opportunities and jobs with the exciting opportunities the ‘Future of Work’ is expected to offer?

Let’s look at the impact of new technologies that are shaping the way we work. These impacts will be felt in a variety of ways:

From Just-in-Time to Proactive Contextual Computing

We’ll move from time-consuming foreground computing to ambient, proactive, contextual computing. This means that our smart, wearable systems will negotiate with embedded sensor networks and pervasive information to process patterns of our activities, patterns of places where we work, and perform tasks on our behalf.

From Formal to Emergent and Cooperative Organizational Structures

New cooperation technologies, including social software and peer-to-peer architecture, will enable us to move from working in small co-located and formally aligned clusters of enterprise workgroups to larger, loosely coupled, ad hoc networks of mobile colleagues. In this new structure, we will work virtually in distributed teams cooperating on specific tasks and projects together in real time. Upon task completion, these teams will dissolve and reform in new arrangements based on the next task.

From Desk-Bound to Ubiquitous Displays

We are growing closer to a world where interaction with displays will be seamless and ubiquitous. As we move through our workspaces, our mobile personal information artifacts will be capable of seamlessly projecting a personal, common digital workspace on nearby ambient displays, on desktops, in meeting rooms and public spaces, on wearable displays, and on dashboard screens.

From Real World to Virtual World Interaction

Through a combination of pervasive connectivity, abundant computational resources, and new graphic- and media-rich telecommunications, we will be able to stay in continuous contact with colleagues and share work tasks seamlessly in both virtual and physical spaces, regardless of location. As we see the emergence of new real worlds that combine the fluid social interactivity of applications like Second Life with the spatial integrity and veracity of Google Earth, we’ll be able to meet, share data, and work together with new graphical visualizations and simulations.

What about some crazy potential job titles?

•Collective Intelligence Officer

•Amplification Engineer

•Data Ecologist

•Chief Visualization Officer

•Junior Catalyst

•Affinity Agent

•Biocitizen Liaison.

Exciting? We will have to look at short-term, mid-term and long-term steps to become part of future work requirements.Today, we are at the intersection of work and technology!!!

Feedback is more than appreciated; contact me at [email protected]