In future, the technology in your pocket – or around your neck, on your wall or in clothes you wear – will allow you to plug yourself in to work or play whenever and wherever you choose. Being at work will mean being available to meet virtually with a client or colleague.

But as machines become intelligent and are able to make decisions, will flesh-and-blood employees become disposable? In this brave new world of work, what skills will keep you in demand? We asked the experts to give us their predictions.

Concentrate on the smart stuff.
You’ll no longer be able to feel a certain sense of satisfaction at ticking off those easy-to-complete chores on your to-do list because a machine will be doing them for you, says Clive Sawkins, the director of unified communications and collaboration at Cisco Systems.

“Technology in the future will allow you to focus on the core issues to drive business and add significant value.” Best get to grips with the hard stuff such as strategy and the increasing demand for personalised products, then.

A call for engineers

The rapid advance in mobile technology can only act to increase the demand for tech-savvy graduates

Background

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Relax, people will always count.
“If you imagine a world where technology is doing all the processing – an extreme environment in which machines are more intelligent than human beings and are just doing everything all the time – what you get is that you are in the people business,” says Lesley Gavin, a futurologist at BT.

That workplace is all about creativity, innovation and collaboration, she says. “Because we are in a global economy there is a lot of cross-cultural collaboration happening and that will increase quite dramatically.” Team-building skills and emotional and cultural intelligence will be valued highly, she says. But then you’d expect a human to say that, wouldn’t you?

It’s all about who you know.
The smart cookies will use technology to build networks of trusted relationships, Gavin says. “The best companies are going to recognise that there has been a power shift from the employer to the employee because the future is about trusted relationships,” she says.

“The employee’s trusted relationships are their [own] trusted relationships and it’s a unique selling point... it can’t be taken from them.” The next generation of social networking sites, such as Facebook and A Small World, are likely to merge with the virtual world, such as Second Life, and be three-dimensional, she predicts.

Hope for tech turnips.
Reading the manual to get the most of the technology that you use should become a thing of the past sooner rather than later, Sawkins says. Interfaces will quickly become much more intuitive. “I don’t think that suddenly everyone is going to have to turn into an IT guru – quite the opposite,” he says. That’s not to say that gadget users will be able to opt out completely. “You are going to have to navigate the applications better and understand how to use them.” Rats.

The good news for geeks.As new technologies are brought out more and more quickly, those with specialist technical knowledge will be able to command a high fee for their services, according to Peter Lockhart, the future technology manager at Siemens UK. But don’t get too comfortable in the driving seat. “They will almost be like Premiership football players – their careers will be quite short. You will have to constantly reskill yourself.”

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