Naturally, companies that develop an expertise in this critical area of project management will have the most competitive advantage. But classroom learning won't go the way of the dodo entirely. The challenge for the techies of the future will be to manage their personal development with an increasingly complex mix of training methods. The responsibility will slide from the company to the individual as IT professionals learn to understand their own learning styles and take charge of their own education. The most important techie survival skills are business savvy and interpersonal communication.
Successful techies understand how business works and how people communicate.
Techies must abandon their cube farms for the nebulous pastures of cross-functional teams and project management. Tools to live by The physical equipment we use will be wildly different as well. Certainly, new uses of media and technology will have a tremendous effect on how everyone works, techie or non-techie. It's only a circumstance of evolution that PCs are the main terminal interface between humans and the Web. Already, in Silicon Valley, lifestyles in and out of the workplace are being integrated with the creation of corporate communities and executive communities where people work and live together in the same space.