New skills to meet new challenges
Robots will not rob us of our jobs, only make them more complex
Automation will require humans to acquire a whole range of new skill sets.Photo used for representational purpose only
Robots, artificial
intelligence, driverless cars — these are no longer terms from sci-fi movies.
This is the reality of the future, and the future is right here.
According to World Economic Forum, we are on
the cusp of Industry 4.0. For most of us, the future revolves around how
technology will make people obsolete and how automation will replace human
workers with machines.
However, unfortunately, most of us are
missing the bigger picture. Technology and automation will indeed change the
way jobs are done in the future.
When robots take over the manual work, and
artificial intelligence can handle tasks that earlier required a human brain,
what remains to be done is different from what we do today.
What is important to understand is that the
future of tomorrow does not replace humans but demands people to have the right
technology acumen.
Therefore, it is imperative to understand the
skill sets of the future. According to a Pearson study,
following are the top
10 skills associated with future occupations.
Skill sets for the future
1. Ideation: The ability to come up with new
ideas about a topic. Here, the number of ideas matter and not their quality or
creativity.
2. Decision-making: The ability to understand
the cost versus benefits of a potential idea or action and choosing the most
appropriate one.
3. Originality: The ability to come up with
unique ideas on a given topic to creatively solve a problem.
4. Active learning: Using learning
principles/instructional methods to come up with procedures to teach new
things.
5. Systems evaluation: The ability to
identify indicators of system performance and the actions needed to improve the
performance relative to the goals of the system.
6. Learning strategies: The ability to
understand the implications of new information for current and future
problem-solving and decision-making
7. Complex problem-solving: Identifying complex
problems and reviewing related information to develop and evaluate options and
implement solutions.
8. Critical thinking: Using logic and
reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions,
conclusions or approaches to problems.
9. Systems analysis: Determining how a system
should work and how changes in conditions, operations, and the environment will
affect outcomes.
10. Deductive reasoning: The ability to apply
general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
This suggests that creativity, judgement,
adaptability will play a critical role compared to domain specific knowledge.
While domain can be easily replaced by robots and AI, the ability for machines
to handle skills like creativity is far-fetched right now.
Over the past decade, there have been
incredible technology advancements. Have these automated or eliminated every
aspect of a job requiring human intervention? No. Jobs haven’t gone away;
instead, they have become complex or the scope has changed, requiring newer
skills and competencies. So, preparing for the future needs continuous
learning.
And with change comes great opportunity. So,
if you embrace learning new skills to stay ahead of your industry, you will
position yourself to meet and exceed your goals — regardless of the technology
or where you stand today.
(Ritu Agast is Director — Human Resources at
Pearson India)
Source | The Hindu | 3rd January 2018
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan &
Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
No comments:
Post a Comment