How tech will change the future of work

Then came the epiphany. The 43-year-old says he didn't want to stay "hitched" to any single company. "That was also a moment of hubris, in hindsight," he says. Soon after he set off on the new path of "freelancing" , he kept stumbling over multiple hurdles.

His former employers were initially excited about awarding him projects, but were "painfully slow" on payments. Much to his wife's anguish, he dipped into his savings to pay bills. The honeymoon didn't last more than two years: he was back with an IT biggie, fortunately, in a position on a par with the one he had relinquished, but with a 15% lower pay package.

"I felt shortchanged, but I had no choice," he notes and hopes to "make up for the lost time quickly" . Of course, he had lost a lot of time worrying about payments and selling his ideas — time that he could have instead used to build his expertise had he stayed on in the MNC.

In the world that American futurologist Stowe Boyd envisages — say 10 years from now — such executives are destined to be chased by employers like crusaders after the Holy Grail. It is a world in which freelancing will be a hot job. Boyd sees massive realignment of functions that will usher in more flexibility to ensure greater productivity.

In that world — like the uber-cool gadgets of today, like those expensive, intelligent home appliances , like those automatic vehicles that are trundling on Western roads and the drones that are dotting the skies — work, too, will get smarter. Much smarter than it is today.

New dawn for freelancing

In fact, by then, freelancing will be crucial for businesses, avers Boyd. "First, businesses need the flexibility involved in a freelance workforce.

Second, some skills are not required, or afforded, on a full-time basis," he points out. He asks: how often does a small business need to update its logo or website, for example, or hire a senior executive? According to him, in the future, "the design or recruiting skills" aren't needed day-to-day.

Third, in an economy where employers aren't providing many benefits, many people want the independence of freelancing. "It affords them the opportunity to work with a wide range of companies, perhaps to commute less, and to avoid office politics that comes with fulltime work," posits Boyd.

Well, such burnished attributes of work are sexy but a far cry, especially in India and other emerging markets. Microsoft India former director James Joseph knows it only too well. After all, he quit his high-paying job as a go-getter marketing executive at the Redmond, Washington-based company to pursue his passion — to be an entrepreneur and work out of his home-town — knowing very well that there is a trade-off: you can't have both money and happiness that comes from working independently.

While he concedes that foreign companies are much prompter with cheques to freelancers, local companies aren't. "Unless you are prepared for it, waiting for the pay can take a huge toll," he says.

Big data: Revolution at the gates

Last year, General Electric (GE) vowed to increase efficiency and tap future business opportunities by investing $1.5 billion in R&D for what it calls the industrial internet, an "internet of things" among machines. The American conglomerate expects the exercise of "connecting machines with the internet" to potentially eliminate $150 billion in waste across major industries and drive a productivity revolution.

The industrial internet, GE estimates, has the potential to add $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030. According to GE, just 1% increase in efficiency can mean savings of $30 billion in aviation, $66 billion in power generation and $63 billion in healthcare over 15 years.

The concept is pretty simple: every day we create data from everywhere — from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and customer usage patterns from cellphone GPS signals and machines in industry, to name a few.

Companies can mine this "big data" to find trends and potential customers to place ads, do predictive analysis, detect fraud, manage risks, and the like.

Mining big data to arrive at meaningful conclusions will change the way we work forever, says Kenneth Cukier, data editor at The Economist and co-author of the bestselling book Big Data. "Big data will mean for white-collar, professional labour in the 21st century, what machines, automation and the assembly line meant for blue-collar workers in the 20th century.

The algorithm will steal office-workers' jobs just as automation stole the factory-workers' jobs yesterday," he forecasts.

Workforce getting more 3D

Cukier has deep faith in the slogan, "work smart or work cheap", coined by The Economist some 20 years ago. In the work environment of the future, he sees certain job types to be much more in demand in the IT sector than any other.

They include statisticians, data-miners , business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, IT architects and computer scientists and data-visualization artists. "They will be hotter than others, since as the amount of information grows, we currently lack the people and institutions and processes to make sense of it all. So we need to hire experts, the people with specialist skills," he explains.

DJ Patil, data scientist at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Greylock Partners, says a beginning has already been made in examining big data, not just from social networking sites but also from machines. "People are already using big data to take better decisions and improve processes," he told ET Magazine.

Boyd offers his view of the future of how we earn our livelihoods: "The explosion in computing scale, in companion devices [smart phones and tablets] and in cloud computing, will have enormous impact on how business gets done, and how people live their lives," he says emphasizing that the workforce will become even more 3D: distributed, discontinuous and decentralised.

"It's a 'work anywhere, anytime , with anyone' world," he avers. One of the largest challenges is the fourth D: disengagement, he maintains . Over 70% of employees are disengaged at work, and changes in the foundation of our work culture are needed to remedy that, he adds.

Goodbye call centres!

Such sweeping changes at the workscape will alter the way we work not just in the field of IT but in many others as well thanks to them being IT-powered.

But then IT will see the maximum change, futurologists ET Magazine spoke to contend. S Ramadorai, former chief of TCS and now chairman of the National Skills Development Corporation and National Skill Development Agency, believes that conventional maintenance and routine jobs, including call centre jobs, will diminish. "We need to disrupt and continuously value-add the job content. Data analytics , cloud strategy and enablement, front-end device integration, application development on tablets, and cyber security will be hot skills of the future," he prophesies.

According to Ramadorai, all characteristics of the work of the future will hinge on improving productivity. You can't take a chance, he asserts. "Reengineering processes, retooling and collaboration will shape the way we think and work," he says.

Simone Ahuja, author, innovation consultant and founder of Blood Orange , a worldwide marketing and strategy advisory firm, says there is a huge dearth in skilled technology talent globally, even in the US where there aren't enough graduate students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) fields. Over the next decade or two, she sees jobs such as database administrators and user interface designers growing in importance.

Both Joseph and Ahuja feel opportunities abound for new or highly specialized jobs in health care, retail, aerospace, social media and so on. Boyd agrees. Cukier says the list is much longer. Futurologists are betting on other sectors, too, and they include nanotechnology, telemedicine, biotechnology, sustainable agriculture and non-invasive architecture, environmental conservation, gender laws, renewable energy, mobile banking, anti-pollution technologies, food technology, 3D printing, and nuclear science.

To validate their argument, they offer a very likely scenario: research into anti-pollution technologies to clean up dirt-infested , highly polluted rivers is sure to rise, and the process will throw up new job categories, they insist.

There are concerns galore, yet they also offer scope for new functions. Overdependence on fossil fuels can't go on. Similarly, gender crimes are increasingly coming under the radar, even in the Third World — and they need to be checked in time.

Now, across the world, the healthcare burden is rising alongside a shortage of the number of doctors. Dartmouth University professor and author Vijay Govindarajan says telemedicine — cost-effective , long-distance treatment — is fast emerging as a solution. In fact, public health consultants are expected to be much wanted.

Live well, shop in style...

Futurologists such as UK-based Ian Pearson and others vouch for a spurt in jobs across various sectors thanks to disciplines such as nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation.

Ahuja says that in countries where the population is ageing rapidly such as the US, Japan, several European countries — and even in some Indian states — both elderly care and the study of the diseases of the old, gerontology, will be an attractive proposition. In an interview with ET Magazine before he became RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan had said that nursing — in its specialized form — will endure any recession thanks to its ever-growing demand.

According to Pearson, with more mental illnesses being reported (especially in countries such as India where any effort to take medical recourse attracts ridicule in most parts) and with stress-related ailments on the rise, specialised therapists and counsellors will be in huge demand. He talks of a relatively new branch of treatment of schizophrenia — avatar therapy, a computer-based system to control the voice of the hallucinations of schizophrenics — gaining in popularity.

Meanwhile, in retail, massive automation is expected to make many jobs redundant and many others more lucrative. Burgeoning e-retail trade will create greater requirement for logistical support, including warehouses, delivery services, support staff and those who specialise in cyber law and commerce. Retail will also see what many people call fast growth of 'mass customized' products — for instance, a pair of shoes that can be customized by scanning the customer's foot at the time of purchase and later produced using 3D-printer technology.

Similarly, with more people taking up high-endurance sports, there will be a spike in need for sports-gear makers of all kinds as well as for expert instructors. Alongside, there will be a greater need for electronically enhanced sport training. Futurologists also forecast computer-game coaches, lifestyle consultants, environmental lawyers, holiday specialists and so on to strike it rich as their jobs get hotter than ever. Joseph sees "doers" such as masons, plumbers, electricians and domestic helps to be far more organized , finding themselves in well-paid careers.

Driving easy, flying easy-peasy

With the clamour for energy efficiency expected to only reach a crescendo, with emission laws likely to be far more stringent and with customer preferences laying emphasis on ease of driving, automakers will have to invest a lot more in designing smart vehicles and technologies.

Here's where the designer engineer comes in. Joseph, who has closely followed the job category for long, says design engineering is a core engineering discipline not limited to automobiles alone, but also cuts across all streams of engineering: civil construction, aerospace, defence, infrastructure, hardware and software. "It will be a hot function of the future," he says.

Craig Jenks, president, Airline/Aircraft Projects, says there is danger though: entrepreneurs often get short-changed , even in the US. However, thanks to them, new business opportunities emerge, he observes. "The US can still [thankfully] produce someone like Elon Musk, successful in both the private space launch business and in the electric car business.

Indian entrepreneurs have done extraordinarily well, often outside of India," he adds. As regards the airline industry, he says the focus will shift towards making productivity gains — and in creating jobs to serve that purpose.

"Productivity gains are absolutely critical to bringing down airline costs and fares," he says. Industry experts say that some of the jobs that are expected to be hot in the aerospace segment include those who man actual passenger experience (which requires a senior officer to experience actual passenger travel, across economy, business and first classes), profit analysts and those who manage cultural translation following mergers of airlines from diverse business backgrounds.

Course correction

Across sectors, argues Boyd, decision-making and operational innovation have moved to the edges of the company. It will continue to stay so, he insists, triggering changes in the functions of executives. "Every company has an edge, where people in the company are in contact with clients, partners, and the greater marketplace.

The impact of thinking about business on a social instead of industrial level is significant. Instead of envisioning the business operating like a machine — orders taken, products manufactured and delivered — it can be viewed as a network of conversations, as [English thinker and anthropologist] Gregory Bateson suggested," he says.

He goes on: "The situation is stark. The notion of five-year planning cycles won't hold up in a world of rapid change. It is less a question of top execs yielding autonomy to individuals and groups: it's finding ways to eliminate delay and taking action at the edge of the company instead of asking for a decision from the central authorities."

Implosion of social media

Celebrities, the high and mighty and wannabes alike, are going to zealously pursue experts who manage their social-media handles . Related job categories will include social-media marketing, PR and customer support.

Marketing professors, analysts and consultants who understand the demand of a younger and highly wired generation will find themselves more relevant, too. Among others, entertainment — for all age categories — is sure to spawn new jobs categories and higher demand for existing ones. Gaming software developers, animators, graphic designers and visualizers will find themselves in extremely gainful careers.

Boyd has no doubts that social-media jobs are meant to be really hot. "Perhaps we are overestimating its role and impact in the near term and underestimating it in the long term. That's the general rule with new forms of communication," he says, reiterating that work of the future will be much smarter. And much quieter.