In this blog, we'll discuss a report by the World Economic Forum, called Jobs of Tomorrow 2020. This report talks about the current and future scenarios of in-demand jobs and their skills. This report was created in collaboration with LinkedIn, Coursera, and burning glass.
This report says that there's a huge skill shortage. It's mentioned that 1 billion people need to be skilled by 2030 and that 42% of core skills that are required in doing day-to-day jobs will change. These are big indicators showing how much we have to upskill ourselves and we have to learn new things.
We will go over the different points that the report puts forward and discuss the different aspects of each point.
So Let's get started.
a) The report says that the 4th industrial revolution is here. The first industrial revolution was the steam engine. The second industrial revolution was about electrical advancement. The third industrial revolution around the 1960-the 70s was computers, and now we are in the fourth industrial revolution, the digital age. The Internet has now blown up and a lot of data is being collected and a lot of digital penetration is happening.
b) They identified seven growth clusters of areas with high job growth in the coming future and currently. The first cluster is Data Analytics. A lot of data is being collected and a lot of data is being analyzed. Companies and organizations need people to analyze those data. This can be done through data engineering, data science, or data analysis.
The second cluster is Engineering, more specifically software engineering. Many different platforms and applications are being built, so software engineering is definitely here to stay. High growth will be seen in the next few years.
The third cluster is people-oriented careers can be Human Resource Management(HRM). This is one of the clusters which will be very popular and very much in demand.
Sales and Marketing are the fourth clusters. It is logical that if companies are creating something, they will need to sell it. Even if we talk about big tech companies, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google, they are also businesses and at the end of the day, they now need people who can sell their software or their apps or anything.
The fifth cluster is Product development. It is a bit different from Engineering which is more technical with cloud architecture and those kinds of skills. Product development is more product management and how you understand the market and then you get to the defining features and the technical aspect of it.
Care Economy forms the sixth cluster, this is about caring for the elderly or the childhood education and care.
And the green economy is stated as the seventh cluster which will see moderate job growth. Electric automobiles and energy companies are on the rise and thus can produce a substantial amount of jobs in the future.
c) Finally talking about the in-demand skills. If you are an engineer or a Human Resource manager or salesperson, marketing head, etc you need multiple skills to improve at your job or get a new job. This report categorizes those skills also in five clusters.
The first cluster is business skills. These are classified into project management, negotiation and revenue management, profit and loss. The next cluster is specialized skills, these are more like domain expertise. For example, if you are a doctor and a specialized doctor, you will always remain in demand.
Moving ahead, the third cluster is Soft skills, which entails professional communication. This should be really important because at the end of the day we are working in an organization. We need to have good communication. We need to have good human understanding and a general spirit. Somewhere in our education system, this is not given the importance that it should.
The fourth cluster is Tech-based skills which entail the knowledge of how to use technical apps or using Microsoft teams or Google meet or Zoom. Web development, web design, excel programming macros, etc also are counted as tech-based skills.
And finally, tech disruptive skills, which are machine learning and engineering, and cloud architecture, form the fifth cluster. These are very tech-focused, very high-level skills, and those are the five clusters stated.
So it is very much important for us to understand the digital age we are in and to know the areas which will be very important in the current scenario and going forward. If we get ourselves skilled in these areas we will ensure a secure future. The skilling revolution is just getting started.
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