Given the rapid pace of change, business model disruptions are resulting in a near-simultaneous impact on skill sets for both current and emerging jobs across industries. If skill demand is evolving rapidly at an aggregate industry level, the degree of changing skills requirements within individual job families and occupations is even more pronounced. Even jobs that will shrink in number are simultaneously undergoing change in the skill sets required to do them. Across nearly all industries, the impact of technological and other changes is shortening the shelf-life of employees’ existing skill sets.
For example, technological disruptions such as robotics and machine learning rather than completely replacing existing occupations and job categories are likely to substitute specific tasks previously carried out as part of these jobs, freeing workers up to focus on new tasks and leading to rapidly changing core skill sets in these occupations. Even those jobs that are less directly affected by technological change and have largely stable employment outlook say, marketing or supply chain professionals targeting a new demographic in an emerging market may require very different skill sets just a few years from now as the ecosystems within which they operate change.
On average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not et considered crucial to the job today, according to our respondents. Overall, social skills such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control. In essence, technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills.
Several industries may find themselves in a scenario of positive employment demand for hard-to-recruit specialist occupations with simultaneous skills instability across many existing roles. For example, the Mobility industries expect employment growth accompanied by a situation where nearly 40% of the skills required by key jobs in the industry are not yet part of the core skill set of these functions today.
At the same time, workers in lower skilled roles, particularly in the Office and Administrative and Manufacturing and Production job families, may find themelves caught up in a vicious cycle where low skills stability means they could face redundancy without significant re and up skilling even while disruptive change may erode employers’ incentives and the business case for investing in such reskilling.
Future workforce strategy
The impact of technological, demographic and socioeconomic disruptions on business models will be felt in transformations to the employment landscape and skills requirements, resulting in substantial challenges for recruiting, training and managing talent. Not anticipating and addressing such issues in a timely manner over the coming years may come at an enormous economic and social cost for businesses, individuals and economies and societies as a whole.
The Report finds that business leaders are aware of these looming challenges but have been slow to act decisively. Just over two thirds of our respondents believe that future workforce planning and change management features as a reasonably high or very high priority on the agenda of their company’s or organization’s senior leadership.