The New Workforce Will Job-Hop. AND THAT'S GOOD

For the last 20 years, regardless of the economic situation, people have spent fewer and fewer years in a given job. Today, the average time someone in their twenties spends in a given job is 18 months, and this number has been steady for the past five years.

What this means for the future is that middle management will be full of people — Generation X (Gen X) and Generation Y (Gen Y) — who are accustomed to moving in and out of jobs, and in and out of the workforce — all the time. So companies will need to make employees valuable right away. If ramp-up time takes too long, the employee will already be gone.

The good news is that job-hoppers deliver more results in their careers. Job-hoppers develop skills at a faster rate, they grow their networks at a faster rate and they stay more engaged at work (engagement levels at work increase for two years and then start plummeting, unless the worker changes jobs within the company). In terms of the future of the workforce, this means everyone will be better at delivering results faster.

The new workforce will not use e-mail.

Today, e-mail accounts for only 5 percent of electronic communication. Ninety-five percent of electronic communication is via social networking sites. Gen X and Y are adept at social media tools, and the use will infiltrate more aspects of business very quickly.

This is because the return on investment (on budgets) to social media is stronger than traditional media. This is true for advertising, PR and recruiting.

Additionally, younger workers understand communication via social media because they view it as conversation, and it is more effective in terms of time management. But e-mail is only one-to-one, so it's a slower way to get out messaging.

Today, the majority of executives use e-mail. That is not likely to be the case in five years. People who want to stay relevant in their field must start understanding the utility of social media.

The workforce in five years will be the most effective at communication. Ever.

Stanford University recently unleashed a ground-breaking study that shows that students today are stronger writers than any students Stanford has ever had. The reason for this is that social media demands concise, persuasive writing. It used to be that people only did this writing in school, for an audience of one: The Professor.

Today, students write on blogs and networks and site aggregators, and these venues demand concise, persuasive writing every day, or else no one will take the time to read what the student writes.

Also, it used to be that people did 90 percent of their writing in school, and then largely stopped, aside from professions such as law and journalism. But in five years, almost all workers will continue to write outside of school for their whole lives, and their skills will get better and better as they have to compete more and more for audiences for what they write.

The more the workforce uses social media to communicate, the better the communication skills of workers need to be.

The workforce will become collaborative. Finally.

For the last 20 years, the Harvard Business Review has been publishing research about how collaborative teams outperform groups of individuals who are bad team players.

The problem is that the workforce has been full of terrible team players.

Baby Boomers are the most competitive generation ever. There have always been too many of them, they had to fight to get everything and then they measured their success by salary, car brand and the size of their house (they invented the term McMansion).

Gen X has been disenfranchised, and while Baby Boomers were building McMansions, Gen X was working McJobs — because there were no good jobs left for Gen X. Due to generational circumstances — such as lousy parenting and rejection in the workplace — Gen X is cynical and fundamentally individualist.

Gen Y is the only generation that got taught teamwork in school. On the playground, teachers taught them that “you can say you can't play.” They did book reports on teams and they went to prom as a group. Sometimes they even quit a job as a group.