Workers will begin to rely less on corporate loyalty and more on their own skills - and the opportunities new technologies afford - and more and more of them are setting up shop on their own. Eurostat reports that approximately half of small to mid-size businesses in Europe are one-person companies. The impact on marketers is that more marketers will work from home, sub-contracting matrix skills will become more common. There is a strong need to build good remote communication and team-working skills.
Analysts predict that by the end of the twenty-first century, employment as we know it is likely to be phased out in most of the industrialised nations of the world. For the first time in history, human labour is being systematically eliminated from the economic process. A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies, together with new forms of business reorganisation and management, is wiping out full-time employment for millions of blue- and white-collar workers. Just as manufacturing jobs were taken over by robots in the 1970s and accounting/finance jobs were taken over by batch-processing computers in the 1980s, middle-management jobs have been under siege in the 1990s. A key reason is advances in technology that have moved information out of the exclusive possession of management and into the general population.