To kick off a recent talk, I decided to identify “Five for the Future” – five facts that I’ve learned – or discerned – in recent times, which give us a clue as to what will happen in our lives. The first few came easy.

The most surprising fact to drop out of an interview was that one-third of the world’s economy is biotech. One-third … Kick in a big chunk of big pharma, add on healthcare, all manner of genetically-modified agriculture, energy, new approaches to manufacturing, and even bio-security and bio-defense. In the end, you can see when the economy is moving – and that’s where the jobs will be.

Biotech itself leads us to another important fact: With the advances of biotech, Baby Boomers are now going to live 10-20-30 more years than they originally thought they would. That’s right. The life span you planned on (or possibly ignored) your entire adult life has been getting longer, just as you’ve been living it. One Stanford professor purports that if you are of working age today, you will likely retire at 76.

Which leads us to number three.

If we’re all living another 10-20-30 years, then instead of a 40 year career, we now have a 60-year career. Now, the way we previously looked at our working lives, it was go to school, work 40-45 years, and then retire. Today, when you look at the numbers, that a lot of retirement.

Not only that, many of us prepped our careers with college degrees designed to live a lifetime. The truth is that my three-decades-old bachelors degree in Computer Science has become more of a conversation piece then a technical credential. Which leads us to number four – in a 60 year career, you have to re-think your education and credentials. For the Baby Boomers, that means re-working out everything you thought you already had nailed.

Which circles us back around to biotech. If we still need jobs, we gotta go where the jobs are … and that means biotech. But what many of us think we know about biotech may not necessarily serve us well. Obviously, at our finely-ripening Baby Boomer ages, we’re not going to suddenly run off and become stem cell scientists.

Which brings me to fact number five.

Less than one percent of the biotech jobs go to research scientists, CEO’s and venture capitalists. These are the cutting edge, the folks who sharpen the edge to make it cut. But in the years to come, 99% of biotech jobs will come from far more familiar terrain – finance, sales, information systems, manufacturing, healthcare and services … and those jobs look familiar!

There are areas new to everyone, like bio-security and bio-defense, but most jobs are recognizable in most ways. Just consider the information explosion that’s just starting to brew. Who has had their DNA broken down? But we all expect to. As we get rolling here, the data from DNA alone is a tsunami of bits. Add in the expanding range of our once-a-year tests, plus the new move to constant monitoring, and you’ve got yourself a mountain of data. And a host of privacy issues to boot.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? Think data, data, data – even in the non-biotech areas. There are Video iPods and the phenomenon of YouTube. And cell phones? With six billion people on the planet, it’s important to know that two billion are using cell phones, and how much they can do with them is changing rapidly.

So re-think your career. Go where the jobs are. Juice up your credentials. And this time out, make sure you’re having a great time every day you go to work.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.