These are indeed challenging times, but it is also a precursor of a new era of business due to the following innovations and initiatives. I expect 6 dominating trends in 2021 and beyond. They are: 

Stimulus packages driving growth: US alone has been executing a second stimulus package of $1.9 trillion in 2021 following the 2020 package of a similar nature. A lot of that money is flowing into the Indian economy through financial institutions and fund managers and boosting up the stock market to an all-time high. The Indian government is also expected to announce a set of direct transfer measures to boost demand at the bottom of the pyramid and build a bottom-up demand stimulus. Top-down demand stimulus measures in terms of policy changes and incentives for corporates are also expected to be announced in forthcoming quarters by the Indian government. These measures will definitely drive economic growth. 

Technology refresh backlog in Corporate and government infrastructure projects: Due to the 2020 and 2021 Covid situation, a lot of capital investments especially in the area of IT and core infrastructure areas for technology refresh have been kept on hold. Once things get back to normal, a lot of analysts are expecting that these projects will start getting kick started leading to a slew of downstream investment and job opportunities. The government is also expected to focus on key infrastructure projects which will drive both demand and job growth. 

Investments in healthcare and allied services: Investment by the government in healthcare and allied services is expected to double to about 4-5 percent up from 1.6 percent currently in the next budget. This is expected to create new employment opportunities not just in hiring doctors and nurses but in allied areas like health insurance, hospital management and claims processing. Some amount of consolidation is already happening in the hospital management space with entities like Manipal taking over Columbia Asia.PPP (Public Private Partnership) in terms of expanding bed capacity along with facilities is expected to increase leading to more corporate hospitals working with state governments. Professionals in areas of marketing, HR and finance from MBA institutes will be hired to fill up these organizational gaps in addition to doctors and nurses. A lot of corporate hospitals have already started using digital marketing tools to expand their patient base and have invested in a professional sales force to drive corporate tie-ups. 

Bio Research and Bio- analytics area: Both government and corporate organizations are expected to invest heavily in areas like genome sequencing and biowarfare to combat the next wave of Covid like situations. While there will definitely be requirements of trained scientists, there will also be positions created for business analysts and bio-analytics persons in these areas. Companies like Biocon are expected to hire heavily in bioanalytics and mathematical modeling areas and also sell those models through a marketing team. 

Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and quantum computing models: Both governmental and corporate entities are expected to invest hugely in these areas which would give them an edge in terms of predicting the next wave of infections in Covid and allied areas. In quantum computing, pandemic simulation and getting predictions in terms of a range rather than a date/time prediction would be a huge advantage. In fact, Bluedot an AI platform that scans hundreds and thousands of foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks first detected a cluster of pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan in 2019 which alerted experts about Covid. These AI/ML models will be sold to government and corporates on a subscription basis just like Bloomberg and Morning star subscriptions are sold in the financial market. A new generation of salespeople will need to be hired who know both sales and analytics. 

While everyone knows about Zoom and Teams, the next wave of investments will come in terms of building a safe and secure infrastructure at home for remote working. Secure VPN and Secure messaging systems which are businesses enabled to work remotely will drive new investments in the corporate arena. Collaborative software and remote business processes will drive the next wave of innovation and associated hiring. A mixed way of working in both virtual and physical mode will drive the next level of sales methodologies as well. Leading sales methodologies like Miller-Heiman, SPIN and Challenger have already started incorporating remote and virtual environments in their business process.