... The Top 15 Skills Needed For The 2025 Job Market
The World Economic Forum revised their ‘Future of Jobs Report’ in October 2020. This updated survey places the following as the top 15 skills required for 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
Emotional intelligence
Troubleshooting and user experience
Service orientation
Systems analysis and evaluation
Persuasion and negotiation
Key Findings
The COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns and related global recession of 2020 have created a highly uncertain outlook for the labour market and accelerated the arrival of the future of work. Despite the currently high degree of uncertainty, the report uses a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative intelligence to expand the knowledge base about the future of jobs and skills. It aggregates the views of business leaders - chief executives, chief strategy officers and chief human resources officers - on the frontlines of decision-making regarding human capital with the latest data from public and private sources to create a clearer picture of both the current situation and the future outlook for jobs and skills. The report also provides in-depth information for 15 industry sectors and 26 advanced and emerging countries. You can read the full report here.
The report’s key findings include:
The pace of technology adoption is expected to remain unabated and may accelerate in some areas.
Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double-disruption’ scenario for workers.
Although the number of jobs destroyed will be surpassed by the number of ‘jobs of tomorrow’ created, in contrast to previous years, job creation is slowing while job destruction accelerates.
Skills gaps continue to be high as in-demand skills across jobs change in the next five years.
The future of work has already arrived for a large majority of the online white-collar workforce.
In the absence of proactive efforts, inequality is likely to be exacerbated by the dual impact of technology and the pandemic recession.
Online learning and training is on the rise but looks different for those in employment and those who are unemployed.
The window of opportunity to reskill and upskill workers has become shorter in the newly constrained labour market.
Despite the current economic downturn, the large majority of employers recognize the value of human capital investment.
Companies need to invest in better metrics of human and social capital through adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics and matched with renewed measures of human capital accounting.
The public sector needs to provide stronger support for reskilling and upskilling for at-risk or displaced workers.
The challenge for all involved in education is what do we need to do differently, and what do we need to keep doing, to help prepare our young people for life outside of school in the future?
