The digital world is changing rapidly. The explosion of social networking and the emergence of the real-time web in Twitter, FriendFeed and Google Wave are bringing new challenges and opportunities. The shifting landscape means that companies will need people with unique skills — whole new careers are being created.

Let’s take a look at some of the career opportunities that could arise in the future, driven by the NewNet.

Data Analysis

The rise in social networking has led to a huge increase in interaction on the Internet — Facebook, for example, currently has more than 250 million active users (with 120 million logging on every day) and is on track to claim over 300 million by year’s end. All of us are producing mountains of useful data as we interact with social networks, creating and consuming content, which companies can garner to gain more insight into their customers, spot gaps in the market, and get an advantage over their competitors. People who are skilled at making sense of this mass of data will be in huge demand in the future. Indeed, Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, says that the “sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.” Large corporations are looking to expand the number of statisticians they employ. IBM, for example, is preparing to increase the number of data analysts it has from 200 to 4,000, a significant rise.