The Skills and Competencies required for Smarter Communities - and why we are not ready

My new team at Rainmaking (www.rainmaking.io | www.urban.rainmaking.io) is initiating a global academy for smart communities. I am spear-heading the initiative, in collaboration with Denmark’s #Gate21 and many experts from around the world. It goes without saying that it is my firm belief there is a monumental and growing need for an academy such as the one I’m building. Many ‘Smart City’ and smart community agendas stall because the organizations at the heart of the exercise often lack the skills and competencies to deal with digitalization, and innovation at large. Even for cities staunchly conservative, staying away from adventurous ‘smart city’ projects, there is no escape: city data will have to be managed, data analytics and Artificial Intelligence implications for the city must be understood, threats to cyber security in public domains must be met, smart mobility one needs to prepare for now. This is a mere handful of examples of where ‘community digitalization’ is happening while you were making other plans, to badly paraphrase John Lennon. But so many professionals, practitioners, municipal leaders, department managers are simply not ready.

In my book ‘A New Digital Deal’ (2017, www.anewdigitaldeal.com) I dedicated a piece to the topic of Skills. Preparing for the right skills and competencies can be considered one of the building blocks that I proposed in the book. While the Smart Community Academy I’m founding is focused on cities, municipalities and their partners of direct relevance (utilities for instance), the skill challenge is an issue that concerns all of us. And in that light, this blog is to be read…

In March 2017, a seemingly minor headline appeared in a number of media on an announcement made by the government of Singapore that the island nation would retrain a substantial part of its public sector workforce.

“As technological advancements continue to impact societies, businesses and citizens, Singapore must prepare for jobs to be affected and learn to use new digital tools more effectively. The government itself would need to ensure its employees could do the same, said Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-Charge of Smart Nation Vivian Balakrishnan. He revealed that the Singapore government's CIO agency GovTech today signed an agreement with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to (…) provide training for 10,000 public servants in data science over five years.”[i]

Having already restructured government at large in order to prioritize and manage Singapore’s digital agenda in a pioneering way (forging the country’s Smart Nation group under the prime minister) one of its prioritized actions became to retrain a substantial share of the country’s public sector servants to become, in fact, data scientists. When such a decision is arrived at, the ask of all professionally involved is not to become something they aren’t, exercising a profession that is wholly different. The task is to develop digital skill sets, and marry them with expertise a given professional is known to possess. Importantly, the skills required for digitalization are not solely focused on technology or data analytics. In fact, there’s a lot more to it.

Let’s start out with an overview of trends and facts that directly influence the skill sets and professional requirements in the light of digitalization:

-         Digitalization comes on the back of ever more, ever more influential, and ever more complex network technologies and solutions – and these technologies must be understood, they cannot simply be taken on ‘interface value’;

-         Algorithm- and big data-determined software and platforms will render millions of jobs obsolete within 5 years in virtually every industry;

-         Many jobs that will be created in the next ten years will concern job types that simply didn’t exist until very recently, or may not even exist today;

-         The single-disciplinary or single-skill job is on its way out. The rise of smart machines and systems enables workplace automation to a point where human workers are taken out of the arena of repetitive tasks as well as many administrative jobs. To re-emphasize: unlike the early stages of automation in the latter part of the 20th century, digitalization affects both blue-collar work and white-collar work;

-         A new media ecology has emerged and continues to evolve;

-             Data-driven world – The diffusion of sensors, communications, and processing power into everyday objects and environments is producing an ever-larger avalanche of data. It also provides us with the means to see patterns and design systems on a scale never before possible. Every object, every interaction, everything we come into contact with ‘prosumes’ data. What is required is for those interacting with all this data to harvest, understand, interpret, and model the data and come to decisions which machines cannot, or where we make the explicit choice for the decision to be up to a human being and not a machine;

-         The network paradigm is affecting our patterns of work, learning and decision-making ever more deeply. This is resulting in a series of trends of relevance in its own right: the network paradigm and digitalization at large result in new work cultures that center on collaboration, peer-to-peer work and ‘collaborative leadership’;

-         Digitalization has produced new business architectures, many of which are more service oriented, require more complex ecosystems, and carry a delivery culture that is more ‘on demand’. Demand side economies of scale have entered the ring through platforms, and their dynamics and potential are as unprecedented as they are disruptive. As these dynamics are young, so is our understanding of them. We will need to build such know-how;

-         Exponential change driven by digitalization, A.I. and platforms, among others, force us individually, collectively and professionally to think through ethics. To articulate, benchmark and maintain our ethical boundaries and the values we hold dearest and to act, lead, guide and teach accordingly.

The above major trends and facts directly influence the type of skill sets required in the era of digitalization. David Deming, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, found that that since the 1980s, job and wage growth have been strongest in occupations requiring both high cognitive skills and high social skills. Occupations involving a lot of mathematical skills, but less social interaction, have shrunk in terms of total share of the U.S. labor force over the past three decades. In other words, it still pays to be good at math in today’s labor market, but it’s often no longer enough.[ii] Such findings prove to recur in much of the research. Below follows my summary of the key skill sets required in order to thrive in the era of digitalization and to in fact lead it:

-         A rudimentary understanding of technology and data analytics, as well as the ability to leverage and communicate that know-how;

-         The social skills and emotional intelligence to thrive in collaborative environments, thrive as a collaborative leader, manage complex ecosystems and make ethical decisions;

-         The ability to merge different skills. To recall the findings of Deming: it is not math that will get you there, but math combined with social skills. Or technology married with the ability to talk business architectures and business outcomes. Or engineering skills with ethics. Convergence rules;

-         Hybrid media literacy. Social and professional human conduct is facilitated by an ever-larger and ever more hybrid set of media. This ranges from classic media and communication tools, to social media, collaboration tools, user interfaces and many other kinds of software. The ability to master modern media literacy is an important skill;

-         Design thinking and the converged skills set typically involved in this;

-         Resilience. With the world around us having become ever more complex and interconnected, with the paradigm of central control on its way out, the ability to deal with uncertainty, respond swiftly to sudden realities, the ability to act with resilience, is an essential attitude and skill to have.

In practical terms, then, what is it that should be pursued as part of a New Digital Deal, a smart city program or, say, the strategy of a service provider getting involved in a digital nation agenda?

-         Train society’s new generations and an organization’s new recruits for the jobs of tomorrow. According to the European Commission, in the EU alone, 1.2 million open ‘IT’ job vacancies will exist by the year 2020 – not counting the many positions that carry adjacent professional requirements (say a social science data specialist, or a medical big data expert). In order to get our house in order, a (re)alignment with our institutes of education is imperative. This is a challenge for many a community perhaps, but it also represents a wonderful and strategic opportunity: communities that become educational centers of excellence in any area of relevance to digitalization stand to benefit substantially. The same holds true for large private sector organizations: those that enable career-spanning digitalization-relevant education for their employees will produce, retain and attract talent – and leverage that talent to succeed in the marketplace.

-         Build teams with hybrid skill sets of relevance to digitalization. Ensure you have people that understand the novel world of data analytics. Get socially and emotionally intelligent people onboard – you will need them. If you hire techies, hire techies that understand people, real needs and business outcomes. On the government side, involve people that understand private sector and market thinking. On the private sector side, involve people that can think contextually rather than ‘core sales’ only.

-         For any team, any organization and their existing employees anywhere: do not shy away from building continuous education programs, especially where it touches on digitalization. We are living longer, working longer and change is happening ever faster. So any given individual can be expected to be in need of a different set of skill sets by the middle or end of her or his career than she or he had in the beginning. While this is a generic statement of generic value to a generic New Digital Deal, it should be core to the thinking of anyone building a smart community here and now.

Bas Boorsma

Managing Director of Rainmaking Urban, Author of A New Digital Deal

A New Digital Deal has been out since September 1, 2017 and is available in print and E-book editions at Amazon. The Italian Translation of the book will go live on April 20, 2018.

The Smart Community Academy (not the official name) will be launched in September 2018 in collaboration with a group of Anchor Cities. Stay tuned!

www.rainmaking.io

www.anewdigitaldeal.com