7 Ways Your Career Will Change in 2013

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Your career is about to undergo a revolution...whether you like it or not. The world of work is changing and workers in every industry will be affected.

Saba, a New York-based provider of cloud-based learning management and talent management for organizations, offers the following predictions of what changes workers can expect to see during the rest of the year (if they haven't started seeing them already):

• The move to hyper-specialization — Work will become more of a tradable asset. There will be more independent contractors and freelancers who hyper-specialize in addition to regular employees with generalized know-how. Moreover, companies increasingly will rely on crowdsourcing to secure skills and services, allocate tasks and complete projects.
• Content increasingly going social and HD — People will increasingly consume information from an expanding range of content types. These will include HD video streaming, live news feeds, documents and VoIP. There  also will be an increased demand for platforms that deliver the desired content globally. These include live Web meetings, webinars and interactive virtual classrooms optimized for low-bandwidth networks.
• Heightened power of people networks — Employees, partners and customers will increasingly leverage social enterprise platforms to collaborate, innovate, receive instant feedback and learn, all better than ever. Organizations need to remove the boundaries of the enterprise in order to really understand and leverage the collective intelligence and collaborative effectiveness.
• Increased demand for leaders everywhere — The continued globalization and increased growth in emerging markets will require companies to look for and develop international leaders at a greater rate. Companies will need professionals with global awareness, fluency, corporate acumen and cultural understanding. Technology is the key to enabling organizations, regardless of size, to perform business worldwide.
• Social, real-time collaboration and gamification joining the enterprise —These applications will become the fabric and inherent capability of many enterprise offerings this coming year. To fully support their work forces, companies need to embed social and collaboration capabilities into existing business processes. It’s more than a matter of real-time access to data on devices, it’s the ability to analyze, collaborate and engage with that data.
• Increased use of modern people management —  Managing performance will move from an annual event to one with continuous 360-degree feedback, alignment, communication, development and transparency. Anyone in a person’s people network will be able to provide constructive feedback to current projects or tasks in addition to that person’s goals. Gaps will be identified, with formal or informal development activities assigned by managers in real time.
• Careers changing shape — Careers will become more fluid and less linear or ladder-shaped. People will have more jobs during their careers, and more careers over the course of their work. This will require continuous learning, development and acquisition of new skills anytime – whether they're traveling abroad or sitting at their cubicle in the company’s headquarters.

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