What Skills Will We Need in The Future?

Digital Innovation and Artificial Intelligence, led by globalisation, are changing the way organisations work; including reworking the competitive strategies and customer expectations; bringing on a major cultural revamping in organisations. This has necessitated an urgent need for newer skills requirements affecting about 14% of the global workforce; important ones explained below; which are expected to be in great demand in future. The need of the hour is to build one’s skills not just the resume.

Emotional and Social intelligence is expected to be one of the highly demanding skills. According to Career Builder survey, 71 percent of employers gave higher regards for emotional intelligence over intelligent quotient. It is considered as one of the top three job skills. A human being’s ability to show empathy, be ethical, and connect with fellow human beings will continue to score high in the corporate sector. The ability to work in a diverse work environment would be highly appreciated. This capability of humans cannot be easily replaced or replicated by machines, even in this era of increasing digital innovation. In sectors like healthcare, such skills would be in greater demand going forward.

Creativity will be at the fore of innovative ideas for formulating new products or services, working techniques or brining in innovative technologies, giving organisations a competitive edge and improving brand visibility. People with a creative bent of mind will find great opportunities as a graphic designer, video game designer, copywriter to name a few.

With newer technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains etc, being at the core of digital innovation, people would be required to be digitally literate and more comfortable with technology. A study named “Closing the Skills gap” showed that 40% of employers expect artificial intelligence to lead the way in filling the skill gap. They should be well versed with how data has to be accessed and used in their business processes. Science and Engineering streams will also find more favour in the future, skills in the area would be preferred.

People with the ability to think clearly and logically would be in demand and at the helm of affairs. With continual changes in the way businesses are carried out, an attitude for being able to identify, construct, analyse and do problem-solving are looked upon as very important even called the “new normal” by prospective and potential employers. The advent of artificial intelligence will see more day-to-day tasks being done by machines. People would be expected to get more involved in complex decision-making processes benefitting both on the personal and professional fronts.

Innovation brings with it the need to be continually able to adapt to new things and ways of working. This leads to more current skills getting redundant in future. People will need to be very flexible in their mind-sets to adapt to change and should be able to update their skills sets according to the changing business requirements, so as to be part of the corporate world. Steve Jobs once famously said “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”.

Digital innovation has brought forth the need for strategic leaders. As such, people who can hone their leadership skills would have a great advantage over their peers. The world has seen great leaders like Bill Gates, Jack Ma, Warren Buffet, to name a few, who changed the way business was conducted worldwide with their unique and distinguished leadership skills.

Many other skills are likely to gain prominence in the years to come due to the ever-changing demands of the global economic environment.