2020 skills: A look back at the Jobs of the future report 2017

Al Morris

Transformation Lead, This is Milk

As we come to the end of January 2018, we feel the need to take a step back to Jan 2017 and have another look at the ‘Future of Jobs report’ by the World Economic Forum.
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This detailed report looked into the future of industry to identify the new categories of jobs that are emerging, as well as the skill-sets that are becoming more essential to these roles.

The Future of Jobs Report aims to unpack and provide specific information on the relative magnitude of these trends by industry and geography, and on the expected time horizon for their impact to be felt on job functions, employment levels and skills - The World Economic Forum

The 'Future of Jobs' report 2017 Takeaways

• Ageing countries won’t just need lifelong learning - they will need wholesale reskilling of existing workforces throughout their lifecycle
• Businesses have many opportunities to collaborate more to ensure that individuals have the time, motivation and means to seek retraining opportunities.
• On average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today!
• By 2020 Social skills such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills, such as programming or equipment operation and control
• In essence, technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills
• Business Analyst and Sales Representatives are the two frontrunning emerging roles that businesses expect to become critically important to their industry by 2020

One year on from this report, This is Milk are coming off of the back of a successful Roundtable event, in which industry leaders discussed how we can tackle the issue of the digital skills gap in Scotland. The findings of which will allow us to design a training solution to tackle the issue.

However, before we release these findings:

After 1 year, how is the ‘Future of Jobs report’ standing up to it’s predictions?

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Roles

The World Economic Forum predicted that the two front-running roles that would emerge as we approached 2020 would be that of Business Analysis & Sales. We always knew that Business Analysis would be a key role, with the ever expanding use of data and analytics driving how we run our businesses. This has continued to be the case throughout 2017 and will only increase with every day/month/year that passes.

For a business to ignore it’s own data and fail to learn from/understand the information, places them at a significant disadvantage to their competition who embrace modern analytical practices.
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As also predicted by the WEF, sales experience is a key skill required. Although sales skills may on the surface seem separate from digital project functions, it is the soft skills associated with selling that businesses are continuing to see the real value in. This is Milk will have more on this topic to release from our Roundtable discussion which we be reveal the outcome of very shortly.

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Skills

As you can see above, the skills of 2015 compared to 2020 vary in such forms as emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and an increase in creativity.

​As the WEF predicted:

Technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills

​We believed that businesses are crying out for people who at heart are just just good people, and their technical skills should really be secondary? We asked industry if businesses are recognising an individual's mentality, personality and drive before the specific technical skill they are being employed for during our Roundtable event also.

It is clear that in the course of this past year, that industry is aware of the need to change, however action to do so is falling behind. ​

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Conclusion

So far this 1 year old report is standing up really well to the scrutiny of time. This is Milk are seeing signs of industry progression everywhere, with a distinct lack of skills to perform the roles that are needed just now and in the future. Trends for soft skills are on the rise, with industry recognising the need have such professionals as part of their organisations.

Over the coming days we look forward to releasing our Roundtable findings to you.

Will the Scottish Business market tell us they are having the same problems we believe they are having? 
Will the predictions of WEF hold true in Scotland?

We look forward to finding out, stay tuned.

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(Blog first published 30/01/2018)