Preparing for the industries that don’t exist

In 1999, the then Clinton administration Education Secretary, Richard Riley, said: “We are currently preparing children for jobs that don’t yet exist…”

Last week’s COSBOA conference in Brisbane showed another aspect to that statement; in the next decade most businesses will be operating in industries that don’t yet exist and all organisations will be using technologies yet to be thought of.

The day’s conference sessions reflected this with the topics consistently looking at technology; for instance, discussions on taxation came around to e-tax and the marketing forums spent a lot of time on eCommerce and social media.

In many ways, the emphasis on social media is a bit unfortunate because these tools are really yesterday’s news; Twitter has been available for three years, Facebook for six and blogs since the establishment of the World Wide Web in 1993.

The mobile internet, location based services and augmented reality are the current frontier as described by Ben White, Optus’ Director of Strategy and Corporate Development, in his keynote to the conference.

Darren Alexander of Launceston based company Autech emphasised this change in a later forum by describing how his business has evolved over 10 years and where technology was taking regional commerce. If you doubt the value of the National Broadband Network, have a chat to Darren sometime.

Also on that technology panel Mike O’Hagan of mini movers described how outsourcing and crowdsourcing have changed his, and others, businesses. This is something we’ve covered previously and discussed how this presents challenges to many established businesses.

While this means we’re in a great era of great opportunity, it’s also a time where the slow movers will fall by the wayside. When nearly 50% of businesses don’t have a website and where retailers are ignoring their customers moving online, you can’t help but think many of these enterprises are heralding their own doom.

On a national level this is clear as well. While I’ll leave the commentary on the politicians’ COSBOA promises to others, it should be pointed out that accelerated depreciation and small business ministers in cabinet are nice, but without an overhaul of the tax system that puts investment in businesses and innovation on the same footing as passive investments like housing and shares then Australia’s investment structure is going to remain unbalanced and much of our business and intellectual potential is going to go untapped.

Australia’s national obsession with property and our dependence on raw commodity exports to finance a private debt habit put us in the same position as the business without a website. We need to be thinking properly about the future and equipping ourselves with the skills to deal with tomorrow’s technologies and the 21st Century world economy.

While in our own lives and businesses we can’t change national policy, we can prepare for the changes by being aware of the trends, experimenting with them and making the financial and management investment in today’s tools that are creating tomorrow’s industries.

Are you prepared to be part of the future?

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Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3,000 subscribers.