Scanning the Future

Imagine if there was a way for your near-accident on a snowy or icy highway to tell public works exactly where salt trucks need to be dispatched. Sound loony? It's actually not all that far-fetched. If your car's GPS and anti-lock brakes were connected with sensors on a wireless network, every time you hit an icy patch, your location could be relayed to public works so that they could send salt trucks right to that spot.

This kind of intersection between emerging technology and possibility is the subject of the 24-Month Future Scan Report, a semiannual research project conducted by the Trends Consortium. The consortium is a cross-industry network of thinkers, practitioners, and business and technology researchers sponsored by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Business Learning Forum. The Future Scan report is intended to identify those trends or innovations that are likely to have a significant impact on business during the next two years.

Not all of the six trends identified in the report will necessarily affect workforce management or performance or training. But reading about them might just give you some ideas, and we've done our best to describe each trend and suggest where it might have an impact on the people you train or the way you train them. Each initial quote explaining the trend comes from the Future Scan report; then we add our two cents on what it might mean for you. (For more about the report, see "About Future Scan.")