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By JAMES STEVENSON -- The Canadian Press

 TORONTO (CP) -- As many of Canada's traditional manufacturers, technology and the new global marketplace mean the workplace of the future as the last Labour Day of the 1900s passes will be one of constant change.

 Workers will be forced to upgrade skills constantly and many will work from home as part of an extended team linked through expanded technology. Even traditional blue-collar jobs in assembly line work or hard-rock mining now require far more computer and technical skill.

 And most of the new jobs will continue to come from small companies that start from bright ideas and expand through technology, creative financing and aggressive entrepreneurship.

 Mazher Jaffery, principal of the Toronto-area Canadian Business School, suggests that life-long learning has become inevitable to keep up with vastly complex machines.

 "We're sitting with so-called personal computers that have the capacity of what would have been traditionally a main-frame," he says. "There's more technology in a PC now than what went into an Apollo space ship."

 The business school's mandate is primarily to provide job-seekers with career training. "It needn't be computers, but it is computers because that's where all the jobs are," says Jaffery.

 The increase in electronic gadgets into the workplace also has a significant affect on the number of small and home-based businesses.

 Ted Mallett, research director at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, says a steady stream of new gadgets will continue to advance electronic networking. And it will continue to erase the constraints of the workplace, much like the cell phone and fax machine have done in the past 10 years.

 Mallett anticipates a big push into wireless technology with digital phones -- something that's already being witnessed in the Canadian financial sector where pilot programs are testing wireless banking and stock trading.

 And from wireless comes video-teleconferencing, with real time link-ups between work, home, even possibly automobiles, allowing a completely virtual business network.

 "High technology gives you the capability," says Mallett. "But it's the options that allow people to operate on a more human scale that will determine whether it's a success or not."