Number of mobile workers in US will exceed 105 million by 2020

Mobile workers will account for nearly three quarters (72.3 percent) of the US workforce by 2020, thanks to the increasing affordability of smartphones and tablets and  growing acceptance of corporate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) schemes. According to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC), the US mobile worker population will grow at a steady rate over the next five years, increasing from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million in 2020. Innovations in technology such as biometric readers, wearables, voice control, near-field communications (NFC), and augmented reality are already increasing productivity and enabling workers to work in completely new ways. In a recent IDC survey, 69.1 percent of those responsible for  managing mobility within their organisation had seen a reduction in costs as a result of implementing BYOD programmes.

“Mobility has become synonymous with productivity both inside and outside the workplace, and the mass adoption of mobile technology in the United States has cultivated an environment where workers expect to leverage mobile technology at work,” said Bryan Bassett, research analyst, Mobile Enterprise Device Solutions at IDC. “This expectation will be supplemented by new solutions specifically intended to manage the challenges associated with the growing needs of the mobile workforce.”

Key findings from IDC’s mobile worker forecast include:

• Office-based and non-office-based mobile worker populations will stay in relative balance to one another throughout the forecast, with non-office-based mobile workers representing more than two thirds of the total mobile worker population.
• Manufacturing, construction, retail and healthcare workers are inherently more mobile and these industries are expected to see faster growth in their mobile worker population than other vertical markets over the forecast period.

IDC defines office-based mobile workers as those whose primary workplace is an office environment, including both corporate and home locations. This category includes mobile professionals, occasionally mobile workers, mobile non-travellers, and telecommuters. Non-office-based mobile workers are those whose primary workplace is on location or in the field, not in an office environment. The two types of non-office-based mobile workers are mobile field workers and mobile on-location workers.

Click on the link to view: U.S. Mobile Worker Forecast, 2015-2020.