The Future of Skills Post-COVID-19

Recently, in one of the mentorship sessions I had with someone, I was asked what I believe will be the future-proof skills the person in question, who just graduated from high-school, should focus on learning in the coming years and what will be the jobs of the future. And, even though it is very difficult to predict what sort of jobs will be created in the future, predicting what skills will be relevant 10-15 years from now is slightly more feasible. Why? Because while some jobs will disappear and new ones will be created demand is expected to remain steady for advanced technological skills as well as for social and emotional ones, while demand will continue to decline for activities that require mainly physical, manual and basic cognitive skills. This trend has been going on for some years now due to the advent of AI and automation, which were already creating major shifts in required workforce skills, but the current health crisis has accelerated the disruption and the need to reskill people. However, in the famous words of Winston Churchill, 'we should not let a crisis go to waste', and instead we should focus on reassessing the skills we teach our children (supply), determine the current needs of the labour market and what will be the jobs of the future (demand), and create road maps to bridge any gaps that might surface between the two. Since I've already tackled the topic of future of jobs after the pandemic in a previous article, in this one I will focus on identifying what skills will be the most relevant post-COVID-19.

State of play

As I've previously mentioned in a TED Talk I delivered around the topic of future of skills, there will not be a shortage of jobs in the future, but rather a shortage of skilled workers to perform them. According to a recent research conducted by Google and McKinsey & Co., more than 90 million European workers may need to develop significant new skills within their current roles, while up to 21 million may have to leave declining occupations by 2030. Moreover, while growth is predicted in some sectors such as in the healthcare and IT sectors, automation, and more recently COVID-19, will lead to a sharp decline in other occupations, construction and manufacturing presenting some of the highest displacement rates (source). Based on these predictions we can infer that in the future people will be spending less time on predictable physical activities and on collecting and processing large amounts of data, activities where machines exceed human performance, and will be spending more time on activities that machines are less capable of, at least with the currently available technology, such as managing people, applying expertise, and communicating with others (source). Consequently, the labour market will be disrupted as jobs will require increasingly more social and emotional skills, and more advanced cognitive capabilities, such as creativity, critical thinking and problem solving. According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Co. Europeans will spend 30% more time doing work related to social and emotional skills. So, while possessing advanced technological skills will definitely be an advantage in the future, it will not be sufficient in order to have a successful career. Therefore, the secret to remaining relevant in the future of work is to constantly learn and acquire 'in-demand skills', both socio-emotional skills, as well as technological ones (eg. programming, data analysis).

Source: Automation and the future of the workforce, McKinsey & Co.

Re-skilling is paramount 

Providing people with opportunities to learn new skills throughout their lifetime will be a critical challenge for governments and companies alike. According to research conducted by McKinsey & Co. for advanced economies, the share of the workforce that may need to learn new skills and find work in new occupations is up to one-third of the 2030 workforce in the United States and Germany, and nearly half in Japan. Governments will need to ensure that workers are equipped with the right type of skills to navigate an ever-changing job-market. This will require high-quality education and training, but also good skills assessment and anticipation systems, the right types of incentives for individuals to invest in those skills most needed in the labour market, and the provision of up-to-date and tailored information and guidance. It will also require modern systems of lifelong learning to help workers adapt and update their skills over the course of their career. When it comes to the private sector, 87% of executives said they were experiencing skill gaps in the workforce or expected them within a few years, and the ongoing health crisis has made this issue even more urgent.

Source: Re-skilling and Remote working to recover in the 'Next Normal', McKinsey & Co.

Even before the pandemic started some major companies had launched ambitious programs to up-skill and re-skill their employees to prepare them for the future of work. For example, Amazon pledged $700 million to retrain 100,000 employees for higher-skilled jobs in tech, JPMorgan Chase made a five-year $350 million commitment to develop technical skills in high demand, and Walmart invested more than $2 billion in wages and training programs. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 has forced many workers to do tasks they never could have imagined a year ago, sometimes in novel ways they wouldn’t have thought of before. For example, employees in apparel companies such as Brooks Brothers and New Balance are now producing surgical masks and gowns, while Tesla, Ford and General Motors have retooled their factories to produce ventilators from car parts, in order to help hospitals, and Bank of America has temporarily converted more than 3,000 employees from across the bank into positions intended to field an onslaught of calls from consumers and businesses. While such examples of rapidly re-skilling employees to meet a pressing demand caused by dire economic conditions, a health crisis, or both are laudable, they are not sustainable. Therefore, in the long-term companies should focus their re-skilling efforts on addressing broader issues across strategy, skills, and social responsibility (source):

• When it comes to strategy, executives will need to set their strategic vision and determine if they can use new technologies to gain a competitive advantage;
• When it comes to skills, organisations need to assess current workforce skills, determine their future needs, and create a road map to bridge the gaps;
• When it comes to social responsibility, executives will need to consider the impact of their decisions on the communities in which they operate. 

Another trend I've noticed in recent years is that mid-career retraining is becoming particularly important, as the skill mix needed for a successful career constantly changes. Companies can take the lead in some areas, including with on-the-job training and providing learning and development opportunities for employees to constantly upgrade their skills. However, individuals will need to take ownership of their re-skilling journeys in order to be better prepared for a rapidly evolving future of work. There will be demand for human labor, but employees will need to rethink traditional notions of where they work, how they work, and what skills they bring to that work, which will be critical for their own well-being.

Future-proof skills

According to a paper on the future of work and skills published by the OECD back in 2017, two types of skills are most likely to be important in the future: people and digital skills. First, with the disappearance of routine tasks, growing emphasis will be placed on skills which are more difficult to automate. In particular, there is evidence that the labour market is increasingly rewarding people skills (more commonly known as soft skills), such as the ability to communicate, work in teams or lead them, solve problems and self-organise. Second, the importance of digital skills has also been increasing for over a decade now. However, while the demand for digital or technological skills has been growing rapidly, there is a shortage of ICT professionals in most advanced economies across the world. Consequently, governments and companies alike are making considerable investments in digital skills education (United Kingdom, Estonia, Finland, Google, Microsoft, HP, etc.), and individuals are flocking to online learning platforms to develop their digital skills.

According to a report published by Coursera, the world's leading online learning platform, the demand for technology and data science-related skills is growing exponentially. Technology enrolments increased 13% since last year, with the biggest increases in Computer Networking (+56%), Databases (+22%), and Security Engineering (+18%). Within Data Science, the largest enrolment growth was in Machine Learning (+14%) and Statistical Programming (+9%). The increasing amount of data being collected across industries, the growth of mobile and smart devices, and the spread of the Internet of Things has fuelled demand for greater personalisation in products and services, in turn influencing the popularity of these skills, which has been rapidly increasing in recent years.

According to the findings from Coursera's Global Skills Index, Europe is the global leader when it comes to skills, making up over 80% of the cutting-edge category globally across Technology and Data Science. Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands are consistently cutting-edge in the aforementioned domains. However, skill performance within Europe still varies and there’s a clear gap between the requirements of future jobs and the skills people currently have. Countries in Eastern Europe with less economic stability don’t perform as well as Western Europe in the two domains: Turkey, Ukraine and Greece consistently land in the bottom half globally.

Source: Global Skills Index, Coursera

The data scientists at Coursera that helped put together the Global Skills Index have also created a taxonomy of the skills content of online courses and assessments, drawing on insights from learners and instructors on the Coursera platform. If we look at their findings for the data science and AI professional cluster, a course on Deep Learning is ranked first as it teaches in-focus skills such as Deep Learning, TensorFlow and Artificial Neural Networks. This prioritisation is shared in the engineering and cloud computing professional cluster.

Source: Jobs of Tomorrow, World Economic Forum  

But in order to prepare young people for the future of work and the jobs of tomorrow, another skill cluster needs to be taken into account, complementing people and digital skills. I like to call this skill cluster the 'growth-mindset skills', which will become increasingly more relevant in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world we live in. This cluster is comprised of skills such as flexibility, adaptability, resilience and grit. However, these are skills that educational institutions are often struggling to equip us with, so it is down to each individual to develop these skills and prepare for the future of work. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging time for most people around the world, it can also be an unprecedented opportunity to develop our growth-mindset skills, becoming better prepared for future crises that put our societal and individual well-being to the test. Reimagining jobs around the constraints of today’s uncertain environment may accelerate the future of work and open up new and innovative ways in where and how work gets done, and more importantly what skills will people need to develop in order to be successful.

Below is my TED Talk on the future of skills in the age of technological disruption:

Further reading:

• European Skills Agenda (European Commission);
• Schools of the Future (World Economic Forum);
• The urgent need for skills (Google);
• What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages (McKinsey & Co.).