Skills of the future
What are the skills needed in the future workplace in 2020 and beyond? This was the question I sought to answer in front of about a hundred recruiters from various companies during the RecruiTech: Recruitment and Technology Forum organized by Asia Select.
As I consult and converse with several organizations from all over the country on digital transformation, I get a good sense of the current and future state of digital transformation across several sectors. A sound baseline is a 2016 Microsoft study on the state of digital transformation in the country, showing that 32% of companies surveyed have a full digital transformation strategy in place, 43% in progress with specific strategy, and 25% with limited or no strategy in place. By 2020, I forecast that 75% will have a full strategy in place and being implemented.
Therefore, employers in the future will require new set of skills from experienced professionals and new graduates. The top hard skills that recruiters will be looking for are those that involve one or some of the following domains: cloud computing, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, data privacy, Internet-ofThings (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI).
While these technologies, especially AI, threatens to replace jobs through automation, certain soft skills will become indispensable and cannot be replaced by robots. Distilling from the list propounded by the World Economic Forum ( WEF), I enumerate six requisite skills by 2020 and beyond.
This is the most desired skill to have by 2020, which is defined by WEF as the capacity “to solve novel, ill-defined problems in complex, real-world settings.” Organizations will go through fast-changing settings brought about by technology and new ways of working, such that employees will need to handle uncertainties in different situations. They need to see the big picture, understand relationships of variables, and define alterative solutions to a problem.
The WEF report says “[m]ore than one third (36%) of all jobs across all industries are expected by our respondents to require complex problem- solving as one of their core skills.”
Employers lament over the fact that the crop of graduates we have now lack critical thinking — the skill in using logic and reasoning, being able to use these to interrogate an issue or problem, generate alternative solutions to the problem, and consider the pros and cons of each approach.