Learning Drives Adaptability

The pace and scale that technology disrupts is a social, political and business challenge.
Employers are best placed to make a positive societal impact, for example, by upgrading the abilities of their employees and equipping them with new skills. Employers will also reap the greatest benefit if they can successfully transform the workforce in this way.

Talent is the largest barrier to the successful implementation of new strategies.

Many leading businesses realize that it is quicker and more financially prudent to look internally and develop the talent they already have. Yet only a third of global executives report that their organizations have launched any new reskilling programs.

Belinda Parmar, Chief Executive Officer of The Empathy Business, believes companies will seek leaders who are able to help them rebuild the empathy we’ve lost with technical, linguistic and mathematical skills, and can understand the information that will continue to emerge. This will require a new kind of “data literacy”, which will be in short supply, and therefore one of the most important skills of tomorrow.

Vikas Pota, Chief Executive of Varkey Foundation, believes the jobs that won’t be automated will be those that require abilities like empathy (persuading and working well with others), a positive attitude (relearning and restudying) and resilience. These “soft” skills are hard to teach, thus there will be demand great teachers.

Also, automation will cause the skills needed by the economy to change which makes it impossible to predict which “hard skills” will be necessary.