You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.
According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:
- Virtual Meetings Organizer
who will help employees schedule conferences and set up the required cameras, projection systems, electronic whiteboards, meeting software, audio equipment and related tools - Contract Resource Coordinator
who will bring together the right contract workers for a given project, like a movie producer assembling a cast, camera crew and production team - Information Integrator/Abstractor
who will collect, compile, and index text, data and images so this content can be searched in a variety of ways
It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.
As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.
Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:
- identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
- take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
- ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
- cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
- republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world
Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!
SIGN UP FOR EXCLUSIVE WEEKLY CONTENT 
Caveat Lector: this wanders a bit here and there.
Your Information Integrator/Abstractor sounds a lot like what a librarian does. At least, what I think a librarian does. I just finished my MLS and am looking for a full-time job. I previously worked for about five years as a computer programmer/analyst and before that about ten years in publishing (with some current freelance/small press work). I work part-time as a reference librarian and part-time as a digital library assistant.
I and a lot of other librarians–like Jenny Levine, Jessamyn West, Michael Stephens, and Steven M. Cohen to name a few–are pushing librarians to embrace technology and become experts in information using new technology. It’s not enough anymore to know which books you need to find a particular piece of information, you need to know anywhere and any means to find that particular piece of information. You need to know all the technology that your patrons are using and be able to use it as well as they do.
I’m new to the field so I’m not very well established yet. But I’ll get there. It’s interesting to note that the ALA is predicting that in 10 – 15 years (by your 2020 date) some 80% or higher of the current librarian field will be retired. In addition to people retiring from the field, I think the field will be changing to be something more like the job you describe in your post.
Lots of interesting material on your site. I think many librarians/libraries would serve themselves well to learn more about marketing and even SEO. If people don’t know what services are being offered by their local library, what good does it do how great they are?
There’s a lot for me to still learn. Even though I worked for about five years in computer programming, there is so much I don’t know about technology. I don’t know how to automatically generate an RSS feed (not counting the one blogger makes for me), I barely make use of technorati, don’t know how to make a wiki, have only bare minimum use of ASP.NET, have never made a podcast, have done only the smallest bit of creating metadata for digital objects, etc. etc. etc. But I do know what those things are. And I do know that my patrons are using them.
Some days I feel overwhelmed trying to learn it all. Other days I’m completely energized and soak it up like the proverbial sponge. There is a community out there for me to learn from, to see what they think can be used in/for the library. That will help guide me towards what I need to learn.
See, I wander all over the place. Great site. It’s in my reader so I don’t miss any more.
John Klima