BARLOW

You’d better get used to change, says futurist Ed Barlow, because it’s not going to go away, or even slow down. And, by the way, learning to speak Mandarin might not be a bad idea. “We’re into a continuum of incredible structural change,” Barlow says.

Barlow is something of a professional prophet, president of a company called Creating the Future Inc. Last month, he spoke at the annual meeting of the Governor’s Workforce Board about how onrushing trends are going to affect employment and the economy. “We’re into a continuum of incredible structural change” Barlow said.

“This will be depressing, folks,” he said, and went on to predict a period of economic dislocation that could last as long as six years, characterized by layoffs, a decline in disposable income, and a corporate world driven to increase productivity and lower costs. Even when the economy improves, he said, corporations are less likely to rehire workers than in the past.

But you never know where you’ll find a silver lining. Barlow said that if energy costs continue to rise, the cost of transporting manufactured goods might rise to the point where it’s cheaper to keep manufacturing in the United States rather than ship the work overseas to China or India.

Barlow spoke to his audience at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, in Warwick, at a rapid-fire pace, and occasionally he’d pause to get some audience feedback, yelling out, “Insight! Possible action!”

The nature of work itself is changing, he said. More of it can be done off-site. Blogs, podcasting, social networks such as MySpace and personal mobile devices such as BlackBerries change the way we communicate with one another. One of the challenges facing managers in the 21st century, he said, will be learning how to manage teams of remote workers. The corporate structure of the future, Barlow said, will probably look less like the familiar pyramid and more like a series of small satellites orbiting around a central core.

Barlow said the educational system is not preparing a workforce for the challenges ahead. For one thing, he said, almost no one is teaching high school students anything about their personal financial management.

“That is an accident waiting to happen,” he said. Employers should spend a full day educating employees on the ins and outs of their benefits; all schools should teach “personal financial literacy” to their students.

And students should be learning Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, not French, German or Latin, which Barlow characterized as dying languages. By 2030, Barlow said, China will be the largest economy in the world, and he recommended a book by Fareed Zakaria called The Post-American World.

“If you see any Chinese tourists, hug them and say ‘Thank you,’ because they’re bringing the money back,” Barlow advised.

Knowledge, in the sense of specific information, rapidly grows obsolete, Barlow said. So the important thing for future workers is to know where and how information can be found. Every worker needs a “mental desktop,” Barlow said, to keep the resources that will enable the worker to stay current. “You need to know where to go to update competencies,” he said.

Despite the current shakiness in the economy, Barlow forecasts a labor shortage in the future. “Job growth will intersect with an aging population, which will create big gaps,” he said. That’s particularly true in Rhode Island, a state with an aging population. Barlow said Rhode Island school enrollment had been projected to decrease by 5.1 percent between 2003 and 2015.

But Barlow said many older workers will not be ready to retire, either psychologically or financially. That doesn’t mean they will all want to stay on full time, but many older workers will be ready to keep working on a project-by-project basis — and they want to retain at least some of their benefits.

In light of potential labor shortages, Barlow took a pragmatic stance on illegal immigration: “Find a way to keep some of them here and educate them, because they are a future workforce,” he said.

asmith@projo.com