Page 49 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

THE FuTurE OF SKIllS
The future of work will be quite different from today. Hence, the workforce of the future needs to be armed with the right skills
dr debashish Sengupta, Royal University For Women, Bahrain
Digital, AI, and automation technologies are transforming the world and the future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic has acted as a vigorous catalyst in this transformation and has tremendously accelerated the whole process. The future of work is likely to be very different from the one that we see now. Take, for example, the education sector, to which I belong. The traditional universities may soon see the end of the road if they do not quickly innovate and leverage modern technologies to make their offerings accessible with no geographical or time barriers. The EdTech companies are growing fast on the horizon and the future in all likelihood belongs to them. In the same way, each sector is transforming and so is changing the skills that will be demanded in the future to
deal with this transformed work and workplace. From network being built across companies, we might have companies being built on the network completely. Some have already begun, and others are fast transitioning into the same. So, what are the skills for the future?
Mapping Skills For The Future
Many organisations have tried to enumerate the skills for the future. Some of the studies have really done a great job in doing the same. While these listings of future skills are good in their own ways, each of these studies has presented a slightly different version of skills for the future. Therefore, it was important to map these various future skills reports and create a comprehensive future skills list that could serve as a benchmark for various academic and corporate development programs as well as a guide for personal professional development.
Methodology
The mapping of the skills for the future was done in two steps- first, mapping across few selected and global future of skill studies, and second, these skills were mapped to different skill categories.
Six top future skills studies were mapped. These include future of skills studies by global bodies, global consultancies, and top recruiter sites World Economic Forum, Forbes, Institute for the Future (IFTF), McKinsey & Company, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW), and Top Resume. The skills were assigned scores (weights) based on where they featured in terms of rank in a particular study. The scores for each skill were then aggregated. Since the maximum score for any skill was assigned as 10, any skill which had an aggregate score of less than 10 was not considered significant enough to be part of the final list. Keeping this criteria, 16 skills made it to the skills for the future category.
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