Adapting to digital economy
THE impact of technological advancement upon employment, or unemployment as the case may be, is ever so real. The past year has seen much talk about Malaysia’s preparation to enter the Industry 4.0 era where artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics are taking centre stage, drastically changing the way we work and live.
The digital economy is developing at such a fast pace that our workforce may not be suitably ready to take on the future even though they are equipped with basic technological skills.
According to a recent online survey by Ernst & Young, Malaysian consumers are digitally savvy and typically spend an average of 14 hours a day on digital devices, with 87% using the Internet daily. This indicates a rapid shift from a digital-smart to a digital-savvy society.
Digital technologies have proliferated across different industries including banking, financial services and transport, just to name a few, subsequently changing the nature of work in these industries.
According to research by the World Economic Forum (WEF), more than a third of skills (35%) considered important in today’s workforce will change in the future.
The labour market around the world is unable to keep pace with the rapid shift towards the digital economy, resulting in millions of people failing to get a job.
On the other hand, many organisations are unable to fill their vacancies.
With experts predicting that many present-day jobs will soon turn obsolete, it is high time we start altering our job skills to adapt to the transforming economy.
To illustrate, the 21st century digital economy will see the organisational structure of a company turn upside-down with fewer operational labourers and executive staff, while expanding the number of high-level talents who possess design thinking skills. This is to cater to a technology-reliant economy that constantly seeks to improve itself.
It is this transformation that pushes us to ask ourselves: What job skills must I learn to remain relevant in the future digital economy?
As Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” The major transformation required to face the new digital economy applies to two categories of people in our workforce, the operational workers who carry out manual processes and the executive employees.
Currently, contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) from the digital economy stands at 17.8% and it continues to grow each year. What skills are important for the Malaysian digital economy? There is a need for technical education, so science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) must be promoted in schools. We should encourage millennials and Gen Alpha to take up Engineering and ICT programmes at universities. Programmes such as data science, IoT, cyber security, cloud computing and digital marketing are important.
Employees are also expected to be highly creative and innovative. With university students being required to acquire these skills, education and industry must collaborate to survive.
With automation taking over manual labour, training and “retraining” our talents to use and efficiently operate these applications has become the number one challenge for most organisations.
For example, the increasing amount of human resource management applications has greatly reduced the number of workers needed in a human resource department.
In addition to operational labourers who must equip themselves to function with ICT tools, the executive level of the workforce must likewise aspire to take on the design thinking culture to develop and improve existing tools.
For a large portion of our current workforce, the learning of ICT must be shifted from a user-centric to a developer-centric education.
A mature workforce that has basic knowledge of using applications or software must adequately understand how it functions to suggest ways of improving their current tools.
Companies can play their part by providing employees the opportunity to obtain user certification that teaches advanced utilisation of tools. This should be married with the teaching of coding, a fundamental to design. A workforce that strives to design and develop new and improved methods of labour makes for an efficient society that’s able to effectively address the needs of our community.
The time for Malaysia to start readying for change is now. We must be bold and willing to drive innovation and growth in our nation.
DR DAVID ASIRVATHAM Faculty of Built Environment, Engineering, Technology and Design Taylor’s University