Working towards a Human Future
The world around us is changing at such a rapid rate that our idea of work and the skills we need to thrive will be profoundly different by 2035.
Like the rest of the UK and most other post-industrial nations, Scotland is grappling with the rapid advancement in technology, significant population and demographic change, an increased focus on our wellbeing as well as the urgent need to address climate change.
These forces will have a significant impact on skills and learning. And whilst we can’t predict the future, we need to act now and, together with our partners, drive a resilient skills system that will ensure Scotland’s people and businesses thrive in the future.
SDS is already working closely with other skills and enterprise agencies to collaboratively develop a vision for Scotland’s skills system in 2035 and driving innovation in the system that will enable people to embrace and shape the future.
To further inform that work, we partnered with the RSA on a project to explore their Four Futures of Work in a Scottish context. These Four Futures present four distinct and divergent visions of the UK labour market in 2035 - big tech, empathy, precision and exodus economies.
In 2019, we jointly ran workshops with a group of prominent Scottish learning providers, employers, policy makers and trade unions to understand their lived experience of change and to explore the consequences of the Four Futures for Scotland.
The result, a newly-published report highlights the key implications that each of the four economies would have on the Scottish labour market and skills system, and outlines seven challenge areas for our system:
The research highlights that the short and decreasing shelf life of today’s skills demands greater investment in the skills and capabilities of workers, including those with no or low qualifications and those most at risk of job automation. This is increasingly important, as evidence signals that low-skilled workers are less likely to see investment in their training and are unlikely to progress beyond low-skilled work.
This will also require us, as Scotland’s careers service, to develop new ways of giving guidance and advice to those already in work and at risk.
SDS has been leading the way to create a system that is responsive to the needs of Scotland’s businesses and employers, and places employers at the heart of developing the talent they need for the future.
Expansion of work-based learning options is a significant focus for SDS, it’s the best way to develop current technical skills as well as meta-skills that will create an adaptable workforce in the future.
Giving people access to high quality work-based learning that increasingly recognises meta-skills – innate human characteristics such as communication, teamwork, creativity – will ensure Scotland’s people are able to adapt and thrive throughout their working lives so it has ever been more important to raise the profile of apprenticeships and work-based learning among employers, parents and young people.
Scottish Apprenticeship Week, which ran from 2 – 6 March, has grown exponentially over the last decade and continues to gain strong backing of employers, policy makers and learning providers across the country.
This year’s theme Talent Without Limits aimed to challenge outdated views of apprenticeships because attracting a diverse range of individuals from all ages, background, abilities and cultures will help build a more productive, dynamic workplace environment and help meet the level of demand of current and future workforce challenges.
What the RSA’s Four Futures of Work does is gives us all a deeper understanding of how we might do this and provides a range of useful provocations with which to challenge the status quo and develop new responses.
Regardless of which direction the future takes, it is clear that continued collaboration and an ability to leverage innate human meta-skills such as adaptive resilience and creative problem solving will be vital for Scotland’s people and businesses.