The year 2020 changed everything. If any company was doubting the digital future, the global pandemic accelerated digital development for sure. And companies that were slow in adopting the change, surely suffered a lot.
In the last decade, there was a growing talk about changing the nature of work. The conviction that work is what you do and not a specific place where you spend 8 hours is not a novelty. The anachronistic idea that work is defined by timeframe and location loses its significance, inter alia, for efficiency. The redefinition of the concept itself is associated with the factors we already experience. Remote working became reality last year and is likely to stay. All of a sudden it became a new standard, and the work itself is now measured by the accomplishment of the goals or the effectiveness of our activities.
Question is how this new standard will impact the employees? Should you start worrying if you possess the skills and qualities for the new job market?
The desirable employee of the future will have to reconcile quite extreme expectations. In addition to the indicated skills in the area of exact sciences, so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) the key will be soft skills like creativity, the ability to actively learn and to share knowledge, as well as cooperation with other people.
At the same time – and it should be emphasized here – soft skills are typically human and will not be covered by automation or at least it will not happen quickly. Soft skills will become the most important for employees of the future, as they will distinguish us from machines and artificial intelligence.
Professions of the future
According to the estimates, 65% of children born after 2007 will work in occupations that do not yet exist. So how do we know which of the professions will become the most desirable?
According to Forrester, automation and robotization of work will eliminate 6 per cent jobs in the USA by 2021. And 2021 is now. So, what can we do not to be replaced by chatbots or machines?
Deloitte’s report “Essential skills for working in the machine age“ indicates that among the most important skills that will allow surviving among machines in the labour market are soft skills mainly those linked to the formulation of thoughts in speech, empathy, the ability to deduce reasoning and critical thinking. The top ten also includes the ability to actively listen and flexibility in matching facts.
To understand what skills the era of robots will require, you need to know what machines are good at and where humans are better. Machines can replace people in analyzing information, but they can not look at it creatively. And while analytical software is able to draw trends from the data set, it is unlikely that to be able to combine it with seemingly distant data or explain it with the relation to the audience. Machines can beat us on many fronts but still lack the empathy, creativity and flexible mind.
This brings me to the conclusion that the ideal employee of the future is a flexible specialist. Someone who has knowledge in a few fields and is able to have a 360-degree view, who can connect the dots and see correlations and connections between various elements.
Flexible specialist should be a visionary that sees beyond the daily tasks and activities, someone who is driven and willing to constantly learn and develop.
So, let’s look at the personal and team competences of the employee of the future.
Personal competences
Learning is the core competence. In an ever-changing world, we have to assume that our education will never end. The most developing competence is being proactive, expressed by taking responsibility for one’s life and making choices. Perhaps sometimes difficult or challenging ones, and not always succeeding. But learning from mistakes completes a proactive attitude and very often success is the result of many trials and errors from which we have drawn conclusions. Mistakes and failures are part of our everyday life. Unpredictability requires unconventional and adaptive thinking – proficiency in creative thinking and finding out-of-the-box solutions.
Team competences
Success is often teamwork and requires working in multi-cultural and multi-level industry teams. The employee of the future will have to be prepared to work in a very diverse environment, hence the need for strong soft skills, especially empathy and communication. People with high emotional intelligence are able to quickly establish relationships with others because they read emotions better and adapt their behaviour to others.
In teams where the key is to work together, achieve goals, define priorities, go beyond individuality, the ability to build trust and relationships in a deep and direct way are required. The necessity to cooperate with larger groups of people in various conditions, often in virtual teams, enforces the ability to think and see the connections between individual tasks and tasks of other team members, sharing information, understanding the perspective of people representing other disciplines of knowledge.
Do you have what it takes to stay attractive in the future workplace? What skills you need to have or develop to have a competitive advantage? More on this topic coming soon!
