What Will Your Workplace Look Like In 2028? - Chicago Booth

If I were looking 10 years out, I would say the changing nature of work will particularly reward talent living in some of the world’s biggest cities. The concentration of college-educated workers is already increasing in big cities, including San Francisco and New York. That contributes to an increasing inequality of life between larger cities and less populated areas. As computerization causes routine work to be automated, certain types of nonroutine, cognitively intensive tasks will offer an even bigger reward. It’s becoming more important for us to interact with other highly skilled people to get innovative results.

Place is key. People are not moving to remote rural areas and using Skype to hold their office meetings. Technologies like this have been around for the last couple of decades, but in fact we are seeing people concentrating in particular cities. There’s a productivity benefit: it’s still really valuable to be in a particular place and work face to face with your coworkers. As technology continues to evolve, it has been a complement to certain skills rather than a substitute for being in a particular place. At the same time, there’s a segregation of the workforce because of the high cost of living in cities. Young graduates are moving downtown and causing the quality of life there to rise—these migration trends are creating more location-specific talent. There seems to be a particular advantage to bringing skilled people to big cities, and driving that is an urban revival.

When you think about the international dimension of the future workforce, things look different. In the future, technological changes will make it easier for people outside of the United States to perform knowledge-related tasks for a greater array for industries—an expansion of what services can be produced elsewhere. If we see substantial decreases in the cost of communication technology, the American workforce might face foreign competitors in labor segments that haven’t felt much competition in the past. More doctors may start to work from overseas to serve US patients, for example. Even now, some of these tasks are restricted by policy, not technology.

In the short run, I think that face-to-face interaction is going to continue to be important and something that’s embedded in the office. But if technological improvements come at a sufficiently rapid pace, will a physical presence become less important for highly skilled professional-services jobs? That’s hard to forecast.