New skills in industry 4.0 in Cloud era
The current Industry 4.0 Revolution is causing significant social and economic effects, such as changes to the labour market. In fact, the unstoppable technological progress, mainly focused on cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), affects both companies as well as human resources. At the dawn of this new digital era, the concepts of AI, augmented reality, virtual reality and sharing economy, just to mention some of these emerging technological phenomena, can no longer be ignored. Besides, we should not think that these changes are so far from us.
E-commerce, smart working, distant learning, cloud products and services are just a few examples of a digital transformation closer to us, which also requires new professionals, specific skills, and different tasks. Not by chance, the main consequence has been the skills mismatch: a real discrepancy between the skills that are sought by employers and the skills that are possessed by individuals.
This is not a surprise: experts have been saying this for a while now. For example, the “Future of Jobs 2020” report, by World Economic Forum, has mapped the jobs and the skills of the future, tracking the pace of this big change.
The report’s key findings include:
- the adoption of cloud computing, big data and e-commerce remain high priorities for business leaders, following a trend established in previous years;
- the top skills which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead up to 2025 include groups such as critical thinking, problem solving, active learning, stress tolerance and flexibility;
- despite the current economic downturn, most of employers recognize the value of human capital investment.
Back to the second point, these are the so-called new 4.0 skills, among them there are specialized skills in Product Marketing, Digital Marketing and Human Computer Interaction. In addition to this, during the Covid-19, the online learning platform Coursera has been able to identify an increasing emphasis within learner reskilling and upskilling efforts on personal development and self-management skills.
In other words, in addition to lifelong learning, professionals of the future (not so distant) will have to acquire the 4.0 skills, included in the well-known “Future Skills Map”.