The rapid changes taking place worldwide in technologies, communications, methodologies, markets, industries and the nature of work itself, continue to drive rapid change in the skills employers will need employees to have in the future. We feel that employers can use all the help they can get predicting what skills will be needed by 2020.
This report analyzes key drivers that will reshape the landscape of work and identifies key work skills needed in the next 10 years.
From the Institute for the Future (the University of Phoenix Research Institute), the report describes the findings of some rigorous research by people who think about the future all the time. They have identified six major drivers of change currently operating to perpetuate rapid evolution of technologies, methods and workplace skills. They have further identified ten non-traditional work skills that they believe employers will have to find, resulting from the concurrent operation of those drivers. While the article’s title mentions the year 2020, we feel that a number of these newly articulated skills and abilities are important even today.
The article is certainly high level, and only starts to identify for us the “what” in terms of future employee skills and knowledge needs. While it doesn’t help us with the “how” of assessing the presence of these skills, nor the “how” of imparting these skills through training, we think the article is excellent food for thought, and important in providing employers a good starting point in trying to grapple with the future and the impacts of change on what they must seek out.
What do you think?
