These are the skills employers are looking for now…right up till 2025

The Coronavirus pandemic has pushed companies across the world to accelerate their pace of digital transformation and automation, which, among other things, is likely to lead to a shift in the skills in demand over the next five years ending 2025, according to a report on the future of jobs.

Critical thinking and analysis, complex problem-solving and self-management skills such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility are among the top skills and skills groups that global employers view as important in the run up to 2025, said the Future of Jobs 2020 report, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in October. The WEF is an international NGO headquartered in Switzerland.

Job losses, reskilling and upskilling

The report warned that by 2025, workers across the world faced the “double disruption” of job losses caused by increased automation and the economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, which could displace an estimated 85 million jobs.

Though 97 million new roles are likely to be created during this period, displaced workers will need to be reskilled and upskilled to take them on. Skills gaps will therefore continue to be high in the run up to 2025, the report said. To plug skills gaps, on average, companies estimate that around 40% of workers will need reskilling of six months or less while 94% of business leaders surveyed said they expected employees to pick up new skills on the job, up from 65% in 2018, it added.

An analysis for the WEF conducted by LinkedIn’s data science team, however, found that some kind of a “labour force reallocation” has been underway for the last five years. LinkedIn analysed the job transitions of professionals who moved into emerging jobs over the period 2015 to 2020 and found that 50% of the shifts made into Data and Artificial Intelligence professions were from unrelated occupations. The figures were higher for sales (75%), content (72%) and engineering (67%).

Similarly, an increasing number of people are already looking to learn new skills, said the WEF report citing data analysis by online course provider Coursera. “There has been a four-fold increase in the numbers of individuals seeking out opportunities for learning online through their own initiative, a five-fold increase in employer provision of online learning opportunities to their workers and a nine-fold enrolment increase for learners accessing online learning through government programmes,” it said.

But employment status determines what courses people take, the report said. Those who were employed tended to pick personal development courses while those who were unemployed gravitated towards learning digital skills such as data analysis, computer science and information technology.

Measuring human capital

The report urged companies to invest in better metrics of human and social capital, adding that business leaders understood that reskilling was good for both business and society. “Companies hope to internally redeploy nearly 50% of workers displaced by technological automation and augmentation, as opposed to making wider use of layoffs and automation-based labour savings as a core workforce strategy,” the report said.

The WEF outlined the key elements for a successful workforce strategy: identifying workers being displaced from their roles; establishing internal committees to manage the displacement; funding reskilling and upskilling either out of company budgets or through government funding; motivating employee engagement in this process; and tracking the long-term success of such transitions.

The data for the WEF report was collected over a nine-month period from January to September 2020. Its dataset contains 291 unique responses by global companies, collectively representing more than 7.7 million employees worldwide. For more on the methodology, please read the report available here.

Get a complete overview of your organisation's skill sets with skills management software MuchSkills – your strengths visualised.

‍

‍

Top 15 skills of 2025

1. Analytical thinking and innovation

2. Active learning and learning strategies

3. Complex problem-solving

4. Critical thinking and analysis

5. Creativity, originality and initiative

6. Leadership and social influence

7. Technology use, monitoring and control

8. Technology design and programming

9. Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility

10.  Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation

11.  Emotional intelligence

12.  Troubleshooting and user experience

13.  Service orientation

14.  Systems analysis and evaluation

15.  Persuasion and negotiation 

Source: WEF Future of Jobs report 2020