“Some of these business colonies will be virtual; some of them will be physical, or a combination of both,” he says.
“But the way they will work is they’ll have a project manager in place that will bring in the projects and people will go there to pick up piecemeal work, and these projects could be really short term projects for an hour or two, or they could be lengthy projects that might last for the next six months to a year.”
Frey says some of the business colonies will be structured around particular areas such as nano tech, biotech, games development and IT, or large corporations could experiment by setting up their own business colonies.
Outside of the corporate walls, large corporations will staff the colonies with one or two project managers and then they will essentially lob projects over the corporate walls into the colony.
Frey predicts people in the colony will scramble around to get the work done and send it back and wait for the next incoming project.
“So this type of structure tends to be much more free formed and for a lot of people it’ll be disconcerting because you won’t have your career path that you can map out like you did in the past,” he says.
“But people that are good at this will excel in it and it doesn’t mean that all jobs are going to go away, it’ll just mean that there is relatively more of this and relatively fewer long-term hiring positions out there.”
3. The rise of software programming
Frey tips programming, coding and apps to be the areas of growth in the future.
“Being a good coder, being able to write code for different programming languages, all of the projections are that there’s going to be a severe shortage for many number of years,” he says.
Frey says many big corporations have their day-to-day operations written in very old code even though there are around 8,000 computer programming languages out there.
“The people that have been maintaining this old code for the major corporations are starting to retire and the young people coming out of college don’t understand this old code,” he says.
“So a lot of companies are going to be making the decision to rewrite everything.”
Frey says “all the young people coming out of college” want to write mobile apps for smartphones particularly after Instagram sold for a billion dollars.
The area will also be bolstered by a lot of government agencies looking to rewrite some of their processes as well as non-profits and other small businesses looking for a competitive advantage.
“The whole software area is extremely hot right now,” he says.
Frey also highlights as a growth area “big data” which is his term for amassing more and more of the huge amounts of information that we can pull out of the internet, and figuring out what to do with that and how to use it in effective ways.
“So just in the United States alone McKinsey is saying that we need another 150,000 to 200,000 big data analysts and data miners and people that can do data modelling and those types of things,” he says.
In addition to that we need over a million managers and analysts that work with the managers to figure what all this data means.
4. Three-dimensional printing
In the future Frey says 3D printing is going to be used in “just about everything”.
On the drawing board at the moment is printing clothing with 3D printers, which Frey says will be a “really hot industry”.
“If you can imagine going into a retail store and going into this device and having your body scanned in, then they have perfect measurements of your body and you could actually print out perfectly fitting clothing that will fit you instantly in whatever fabric or whatever colours you want,” he says.
