Wherever you go and whatever industry you work in, there’s a great deal of talk today about insecurity in the labor force. Employees are being laid off by the thousands every month in good and bad economic times. This trend will continue, with massive lay-offs every year for the indefinite future. Rapid changes taking place in knowledge and information are creating new products and services, and rendering many current products and services obsolete. When demand shifts, people have to move quickly to jobs producing what customers want today, rather than what they wanted yesterday.
The sum of total human knowledge is doubling up every two to three years. This means that you could take all the knowledge accumulated in human history, from every country and in every form, and put it into a huge pile. Three years from now, at most, there would be a pile of new knowledge next to it. This pile will be equal or greater than the first pile.
Knowledge multiplies exponentially. A new piece of knowledge can be combined and recombined with other pieces of knowledge to create, still, more knowledge. By early in the 21st century, the total accumulated knowledge of mankind in certain areas will be doubling every year.
In personal terms, this means that today your knowledge must double every two to three years just for your to stay afloat at your current level of ability, at your current income, in your current field of work. If your personal knowledge is not increasing at the same speed that general knowledge is increasing in your field, you will be in great danger of becoming obsolete.
The main reason that people are laid off is that companies need new forms of knowledge and skill, and they need more knowledgeable people in newer, more specialized areas. Just as some companies are announcing lay-offs of thousands of people, other companies are hiring thousands of people.
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