Soft Skills
Esteban Bullrich, Argentinian Minister of Education, believes the future work market will be much more dynamic than today’s.
A country-wide survey of almost 900 companies indicated that soft skills – such as teamwork, knowledge of digital tools, an understanding of rules and regulations, responsibility and commitment – are the most relevant for the future.
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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.
Biola Alabi, founder of Grooming for Greatness, believes that education for future workers must focus more on leadership, flexibility, critical thinking and teamwork.
Skills that allow us to navigate and find comfort in ambiguity will be necessary. A person’s capacity to apply concepts, ideas and problem-solving techniques across different sectors will determine employability.
Veronica Colondam, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of YCAB Foundation, believes that if entrepreneurial people are given access to capital, and are taught the skills needed to grow their business (such as financial literacy, innovation and collaboration) and how to apply them, their incomes will increase and a generation of innovators who actively contribute to a better world will rise.
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Automation will do away with most existing jobs but it will also create new ones. Retraining in a massive scale will be necessary.
In particular, manual laborers are at risk of unemployment in the absence of retraining, as the new jobs will be in more specialized areas. Governments and employers in every sector are being urged to retrain and re-skill workers to avoid a crisis.
The skills gap is often defined as the difference between the skills future workers have and the skills employers seek in new hires. But the skills gap also exists for the already employed workers and can keep growing unless they keep their skills up to date.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution automates most tasks and expands new fields of knowledge, the skills required in the work market will change.
Creativity and emotional intelligence will become some of the top skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers will need to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes.