Laura Duksaitė | Which workers and managers will no longer be needed in 5 years?
Research by the World Economic Forum shows that 4 out of 10 job skills will also change within five years. What skills and what kind of leaders will be needed?
The World Economic Forum has published a list of the most in-demand occupations. It estimates that 170 million jobs will be created this decade, 14% of the current total. Meanwhile, more than 92 million jobs will disappear. So the growth rate remains positive, but the change is significant. There are many challenges ahead and we will have to adapt.
PEF research shows that 4 out of 10 job skills will also change within five years. This shows that both employers and workers themselves need to keep a close eye on their careers and the skills and competences they need now. The introduction of up-skilling or up-skilling programmes in companies will be crucial.
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It’s not even a specific skill that will be important for a manager – it’s the ability to see what the market and the team need. It is the ability to adapt to change. Because it is often not clear exactly what those changes will be and what specific skills will be needed. For example, with AI. On the one hand, it sort of simplifies the work and makes it more efficient – on the other hand, we’ve never had to fact-check like that. So the manager’s main job will be: to ensure that the team and the organisation are always adaptable.
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Adaptability – this is an evolutionary skill that is essential for survival and success. And in business too. Only now, when we talk about change, it is important to note that both the scale and the speed of change are increasing. Whereas in the past a major shift or breakthrough used to take place over decades, now, thanks to technological change, change is accelerating significantly, and can happen every year. The latest such mega-breakthrough is AI.
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One of the things is that, technologically, artificial intelligence is taking over a large part of the work and tasks. This means that simpler jobs are not done by the worker, they are done by artificial intelligence, and human jobs are becoming more complex. What is left are positions where employees do the more complex work. Accordingly, increasingly competent, sophisticated and skilled people will have to take the lead. And the manager will need to be able to evaluate their work and communicate tasks to them. Lifelong learning will not be a tired phrase – it will be a necessity to survive in a rapidly changing market.
Another point is that, because of climate change, we are facing and will increasingly face migration. So it will be important for managers to know how to recruit and train workers who have never worked in our countries.
For more on this topic, see Verslo žinios.
