Trends Affecting The Job Market

I have divided this article into 2 sections: The first section concentrates on current trends that will create employment opportunities for the fresh graduate.

The second section provides pointers for a fresh graduate who wants to be an independent consultant. This decision may have been influenced by the greater acceptance of tele-working and outsourcing.

Current Trends

1) Look Beyond Your Country

There are emerging markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that may welcome fresh techno- preneurial graduates. A good example is India. As sourced from Rajat Gupta’s Creating Indian Entrepreneurs in India Today, a recent McKinsey & Company-Nasscom report estimates that India needs at least 8,000 new businesses to achieve its target of building a $ 87 billion IT sector by 2008. Similarly, in the next decade, there will be about 110-130 million Indian citizens searching for jobs and this figure includes about 80-100 million fresh job-seekers.

2) Opportunities in the Wireless Mobile Market

The wireless mobile market is set to explode and this will provide fresh graduates with exciting job opportunities. According to Will Daugherty’s The Growth of Wireless Mobile in Business 2.0, there will be 3 waves of mobile data services. The first wave is linked wireless access to existing information and data applications. The current second wave takes advantage of wireless-specific functionality. The third wave will bring rich graphics, video, real-time multiplayer games.

3) Growth in the Intellectual Property and Patents Market

Patents prevent competitors using the same technology and serve as effective barriers to entry for many established organisations. The IP and patents market will be a good source of employment for graduates who have the foresight of developing products that are unique and have a potential market demand. This point is reinforced by Tim Watts in E-commerce Boom: A troubling test of patents in 1998-99, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued 12,779 computer-related and data-processing patents, an increase of 45% over the previous year; 1595 were related to the internet, an increase of 230%. Overall, patents in the US are now being issued at a staggering 10,000 every three weeks. Patents are also central to the debate on the appropriate valuation method for intellectual capital.

4) Natural Capitalism

In the book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution , by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, explores the lucrative opportunities for businesses in an era of approaching environmental limits. Natural Capitalism describes a future in which business and environmental interests increasingly overlap, and in which businesses can better satisfy their customers' needs, increase profits, and help solve environmental problems all at the same time.

Natural capital refers to the natural resources and ecosystem services that make possible all economic activity. These services are of immense economic value; some are literally priceless, since they have no known substitutes. Yet current business practices typically fail to take into account the value of these assets - which is rising with their scarcity.

5) Life Science Industry

According to David James in Strategy: 'Life sciences'is the way, several industry sectors will merge as a result of the biotechnology revolution. Chemicals, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, food processing and energy will become the 'life sciences' category. Currently, 12 countries are creating 95% of all technology patents. As the populations of developed economies age, and their markets become saturated and mature, multinational corporations have been faced with three options: find new markets in the emerging world, dramatically reduce costs or find new products to stimulate new demand. The term ‘civic scientist’ is coined and is in reference to a scientist who disinterestedly makes his expertise available to further the welfare of the country.

6) Explosion of Information

As sourced from the University of California’s Berkeley School of Information Management and System (SIMS) report "How Much Information?" Professors Hal Varian and Peter Lyman analysed industry and governmental reports for production of information in terms of paper, film, optical and magnetic data.

Among some of their findings:

• The direct accessible "surface" Web consists of about 2.5bn documents and is growing at a rate of 7.3m pages per day.
• Counting the "surface" Web with the "deep" Web of connected databases, intranet sites and dynamic pages, there are about 550bn documents, and 95% is publicly accessible.

They have also highlighted 3 emerging trends:

• They termed "the democratization of data" because currently, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and have it transmitted through the Internet.
• Print accounts for only a fraction of the total information storage.
• The dominance of digital information and its rapid growth.

Part 2: consider being an independent consultant

This article copyright © Colin Ong Tau Shien. All rights reserved.

Mr. Colin Ong TS is the Director of MR=MC Consulting Pte Ltd (www.mrmc.com.sg) which specializes in Corporate Training, Career Guidance and HR Content Producing. He is also the Vice-President (Operations) of the ASEAN Training Network (www.aseantraining.net) and a public speaker. He is also the copyright owner of the B2F2B Model.