A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.
It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.
It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, 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
This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!
It’s good to know that we’ll continue to have a niche in the future.
Comment by Tessa San Diego — February 19, 2006 @ 10:27 pm
Job description for corporate blogger…
Stephen Spencer has nailed the job description for a corporate blogger • identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary • take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources • rumin…
Trackback by Estate Legacy Vaults Blog — February 20, 2006 @ 9:01 am
Stephan, you’ve described a good portion of my daily modus operandi – especially:
1. “identify a wide variety of trusted sources” (for our bloggers)
2. “take in an overwhelming amount of information” (keyword OVERwhelming)
3. “aggregate, … prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more … useful” (again, I do this for our bloggers regularly)
Thanks for validating my existence! 🙂
Comment by Easton Ellsworth — February 20, 2006 @ 1:01 pm
Information Integrator – Abstractor = Professional Blogger…
Yesterday Stephan wrote a good piece about jobs of the future well the original source was looking at 2020 … Stephan read the key job ……
Trackback by A View from the Isle — February 21, 2006 @ 1:00 am