Fahad Manzur
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 50% of the employees need to reskill and adopt new in-demand skills before 2025. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are on top of the list, both believed to be in demand in the next five years.
Emerging skills for this year are self-management skills because of the aftermaths of Covid-19. The soft skills in focus are active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility. Reports also give stats for the time required to learn a new skill. 40% of workers can reskill themselves in six months or less time.
The percentage is huge and points out to shift in the demand of skill set in the near future. The report also emphasizes the role of machines in the human workforce. According to an estimate, 85 million jobs will be displaced due to the shifting between humans and machines. 97 million new jobs will be created in the future which will require new skills.
The Top 10 skills of 2025
- Analytical Thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring, and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
Data from LinkedIn and Coursera enables tracking the types of specialized jobs required in the future in multiple emerging professions. These specialized skills include digital marketing, product marketing, and human-computer interaction.
How long will reskilling take?
Business leaders’ majority (94%) are expecting their employees to learn new skills and reskill according to changes required for the businesses. This percentage was 65% back in the year 2018.
40% of workers will require six months or less to adopt new skills. The time frame to learn new skills is higher in the healthcare, health, and consumer industry. Â Energy sector and finance sector workers will require more time to learn and adopt new skills as it requires more time-intensive programs.
Employers will require to launch Training Programs internally, but the training programs can be achieved through online learning platforms and external consultants.
Due to the pandemic, the trend of learning new skills is accelerated. Coursera has noticed a significant increase between April and June in the number of persons seeking to learn more skills.
Five times increase was witnessed in employers providing opportunities to their workers for online learning and there were nine times increase in the people enrollments for accessing the online resources through government training programs.
According to the report, there are skills in the Top 10 that can be learned within 2 months’ time. These skills are Content Writing, and Sales, and Marketing.
