Future of Work — Top 10 skills required for 2025
The World Economic Forum, stated in this article that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. It is crazy to imagine that half of a company’s human resources will become obsolete in a few years and that the knowledge and skills gap between employees will widen to such an extent.
For a majority of worldwide organizations, since the cloud revolution, the focus has been to convert systems or acquire technologies, and the implementation of those digital technologies was considered an important contributor to market success and usually associated with the most innovative and modern companies.
The pandemic, however, has made the digital transformation an integral part of many firms’ survival. Digitalization is indispensable to preventing business disruption, organizing work remotely, improving communication with customers, suppliers, and employees, and selling products and services online.
The main problem in my opinion is that these transformations have not properly taken into account the human aspect and the implementation of solutions to bring them to support the transformations rather than undergo them.
During my time in the consulting world, I had the opportunity to see it every time: change management strategies were applied while deploying enterprise platforms as a consequence of the implementation itself rather than considering how the employees would need to transform to support their digital transformation.
In addition to trying to adapt the workforce while transforming, having no organizational change strategy might also be the biggest constraint to successfully transforming digitally. That being said, reskilling the employees is not a condition to a digital transformation but rather is a consequence of the digital world in which we live and the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.
But the very technological disruption that is transforming jobs can also provide the key to creating them — and help us learn new skills.
The Forum estimates that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines. But this is balanced by the fact that 97 million new jobs may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms. Also according to World Economic Forum, for those workers who stay in their roles, the share of core skills that will change by 2025 is 40%, and 50% of all employees will need reskilling.
Top 10 work skills
Critical thinking and problem-solving top the list of skills that employers believe will grow in prominence in the next five years, but newly emerging, are skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility.
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active Learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring, and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, Stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
I truly believe that it is a reality and that it is time for companies to react to either accompany their employees towards adapted training programs or to reconsider their human resources structure to prepare for the future.
