The knowledge worker of the future

There is a rising generation. A generation that does not remember not being connected to a computer, a gaming console, a mobile phone, you name it. My son, John, who is almost 18 is that generation. I'm sure someone has already tagged this group similarly to the Y, X, and so on generations, and I've no intention of doing that here. This generation has been immersed in digital consumption daily, they've seen computers transform from the ugly beige boxes, to laptops, net books, and now tablets and smart phones. They've adopted early and they've easily adapted as the computer world changes.

My son plays World of Warcraft, Star Wars The Old Republic, Call of Duty, and occasionally plays me in Quake when I'm up to being schooled in gaming. Why does this gaming matter? It removes some of the anxiety of meeting new people. Because they are always connected, there is a feeling of familiarity with the larger world. They know and understand each other and they know and understand their world - which is going to be the "new world" in just a few short years. This emboldens them to do things that other generations may have thought twice about. They are not alone and unafraid. They are a generation and unafraid.

They have grown up with the interwebs which has enabled the game play and familiarity with society (their society), and certainly their love for gaming and computers.

Why is all of this important?

It is important because this coming generation is the new knowledge worker. Be it salesman, tech, inventor, or more likely all three. As in every generation, it takes the right personality to make great things happen. Think Steve Jobs. With my son's generation, the right personality matched with the understanding of technology will kill two jobs - business analyst and IT. Heck, you may even be able to roll the sales position under him, too!

This generation never looks at gaming instructions...they throw them away with the plastic shrink wrap. There is no such thing as intuitive software (another blog topic for another day), but there is an intuition for how one expects software to react. "At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original" - Edmund Husserl

Cognition? You betcha - having that level of understanding does already make for a great geek. But, only if one knows how to listen and observe as to how a system is actually used, which means moving away from the mindset of thinking one knows how the customer uses a system to one that knows how to use software/systems.

At what point will we see the merging of business analyst / salesman / IT? That's the funny part, it's already happening now. You might want to slip on the sunglasses that Nada wore in the movie They Live. :-)

Google Ari Weinstein (twitter @AriX) and you'll find a 17 year old iOS developer, or Nick D'Aloisio, the developer of the Summly app. This generation is out there doing great things already.

My son's generation is the future "knowledge worker", we just need to figure out how to help them live up to that label.