How Far I'll Go: Building Skills for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Gig Economy

How far will I go in the workplace of the future? That is a question all our clients should be asking themselves.

Before we begin, I’d like us to take a few minutes and ask some questions about our clients so we can assess how ready they are for the fourth industrial revolution and the gig economy:

·        What percentage of your clients are proficient in basic computer skills, such as Microsoft Suite?

·        What percentage of your clients are more than proficient in basic computer skills?

·        What percentage of your clients are using social media in a positive way to promote themselves and their work locally? Globally?

·        What percentage of your clients would have the necessary business skills to go out and start their own business tomorrow?  

·        What percentage of your clients are well informed about business, the global economy and industry trends?

After thinking about these questions, which of these skills are your clients lacking the most?  

·        technological?

·        business?

·        global mindset?

As career practitioners, we have several very important questions we should ask ourselves about our clients and the future of work:

·        How do we help our clients and our country prepare technologically for the fourth industrial revolution when they are still struggling to keep up with the computer/information age of the third industrial revolution?

·        How do we help our clients prepare for the fourth industrial revolution workplace when they are still using a factory job search mentality? Which is really a second industrial revolution job search mentality.   

·        How do we prepare our clients, and our countries, to work globally when they are still thinking locally?

·        How do we help our clients, but even more importantly our entire current workforce, develop the proper business skills to embrace a growing gig economy?

·        Given where we are right now, how far will our clients go?

Much will depend on what we, as practitioners, do to advocate for our clients. It will depend on how our governments, businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and schools understand what skills are needed and equip our clients to respond to an increasing technological, entrepreneurial, and global workplace.

We, as a society, are falling behind every day in the skills necessary to be successful in the workplace of the future. 

As practitioners, we must think about how:

·        We are the bridge between our clients and the world of work, regardless of where we work.

·        We need to be the advocates for our clients.

·        We need to be the ones who direct our high schools and post-secondary institutions.

·        We need to be the ones who direct our government serving agencies.

·        We need to direct agencies towards offering our clients the skills they will need to go farther in the fourth industrial revolution and the gig economy.

We need to do this because we are the ones who know what skills our clients will need.

William Bridges (1994) stated, "We all will have to learn new ways to work...While in some cases, the new ways of working will require new technological skills, in many more cases, they will require something more fundamental: the "skill" of finding and doing work in a world without clear-cut and stable jobs...Today's workers need to forget jobs completely and look instead for work that needs doing, and then set themselves up as the best way to get that work done."

This ability to have these critical thinking skills and the creativity to move fluidly throughout the future workplace will be key to our clients’ success, but more importantly, adopting a technological, entrepreneurial, and global mindset will determine how far our clients will go.

What skills do our clients need and how can we best advocate for them?  

The World Economic Forum has put together several reports focusing on skills needed for the future workplace. “The report asked chief human resources and strategy officers from leading global employers what the current shifts mean, specifically for employment, skills and recruitment across industries and geographies” (World Economic Forum, 2019).

The World Economic Forum (2020) report, The Future of Jobs Report, lists the following top 15 skills needed for 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.  trouble shooting and user experience

13.  service orientation

14.  systems analysis and evaluation

15.  persuasion and negotiation

Another example of future skills needed by our workforce is Forbes’ list of the 14 characteristics important for leaders in the fourth industrial revolution (Marr, 2019a).

1.      actively agile

2.      emotional intelligence

3.      humbly confident

4.      accountable

5.      visionary

6.      courageous

7.      flexible

8.      tech savvy

9.      intuitive

10.  collaborative

11.  quick learners

12.  culturally intelligent

13.  authentic

14.  focus

When we understand the workplace of the future, it only makes sense that these soft skills will be needed by our clients. Lists like these are common. Adaptability, emotional intelligence, lifelong learning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving often appear on these lists. While I believe these skills to be necessary, I think they lack context. I believe there needs to be a greater emphasis on what I would call the core skills for the fourth industrial revolution and the gig economy.

I prefer how the Deloitte (2018) report, Preparing Tomorrow’s Workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, organizes the skills necessary for the future workplace. While this report is geared towards preparing youth for the fourth industrial revolution, it is just as relevant for older workers. Deloitte states, “Building on foundational skills of literacy and numeracy and aligning with the literature and conversations from youth focus groups, we frame these skills into four categories.” These categories are:

·        workforce readiness, including literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, resume writing, self-presentation, time management, professionalism, etiquette, social norms

·        soft skills, including communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, adaptability, initiative, leadership, social emotional learning, teamwork, self-confidence, empathy, growth mindset, cultural awareness

·        technical skills, including computer programming, coding, project management, financial management, mechanical functions, scientific tasks, technology-based skills, and other job- specific skills (e.g., nursing, farming, legal)

·        entrepreneurship skills, including Initiative, innovation, creativity, industriousness, resourcefulness, resilience, ingenuity, curiosity, optimism, risk-taking, courage, business acumen, business execution

As you can see many of these skills are on the previous lists, but they now fall under a category heading, helping us understand “the why” of how these skills will be important in the future.

When we think of what is driving the need for skills, I believe it’s best to think of three areas of core skills needed for the fourth industrial revolution:

·        technology   

·        entrepreneurship

·        globalization  

The reason for doing this is that our future skill lists focus on the soft skills that come from these core areas but fail to address in detail the specific skills needed in each of these areas. We will study each of these three areas and the skills needed to meet the skill sets for each one.

Technology

The area that will have the greatest impact in our future will continue to be technology. We will experience a more entrepreneurial workplace and a more globalized work world because of the growing use of technology.

Just as computer skills was the number one skill necessary to be successful in the third industrial revolution, the number one skill needed to be successful in the future fourth industrial revolution workplace will be technological skills. Reflecting on the third industrial revolution helps us understand this.

Our clients need to understand how new technology will impact their industries, their businesses, and their jobs, and focus on learning about those technologies that most impact their work.

The Deloitte report (2018) states that people will need to learn computer programming, coding, project management, financial management, mechanical functions, scientific tasks, and technology-based skills. But fully understanding the technology-based skills needed will better prepare our clients for the future.

For those of us who have seen the impact of the computer era on the workplace, we can see that the fourth industrial revolution will be like the third industrial revolution on steroids. If learning computer skills was important in the third revolution, then it only makes sense that learning about big data, augmented and virtual reality, and cloud computing will help our clients be more successful in the fourth.

Therefore, we need to do a brief review of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution so we can understand which ones are important for our clients to learn. Also, we need to remind ourselves that many of these technologies have already been around for 20 or 30 years. How many of you are using any of these technologies in your own workplaces or industries? For example, we are already using augmented and virtual reality, drones and bioprinting in medicine.

Technology is expanding our industries and our world in ways we never thought possible, and it is allowing people to do work never before imaginable: creating moon and Mars bases, printing organs for transplant, cleaning up environmental waste, and working on global answers to a worldwide pandemic.

The fourth industrial revolution is the combination of the digital, physical, and biological worlds.

·        Digitally, we are creating the new fields of artificial intelligence, the internet of things, big data, blockchain, cloud computing, and virtual and augmented reality.

·        In the physical world of the fourth industrial revolution, we have the areas of advanced robotics, autonomous vehicles, and 3D printing.

·        When we combine the biological world with the digital and physical worlds, we create the fields of bioprinting, neurotechnology and synthetic biology, and expand on work in the field of genetics.

The fourth industrial revolution brings together workers and technology in a way that is far more integrated than in the third industrial revolution.

As most of us know, automation is a huge part of the upcoming revolution. Augmented reality and virtual reality are already being used extensively in training programs across industries. These technologies are also being used in interviews and in on-boarding procedures. Holograms are being used for military mapping, art, visualizing patient medical data, and information storage, and in fraud and security. Drones are being used in medicine, agriculture, and tourism.

We are already seeing the use of augmented reality in company training. Seeing how successful the use of this technology is in terms of training time reductions, in some cases reducing overall employee training from 2 years down to 3 months, it will not be too long before this technology is being used in post-secondary institutions on a routine basis (Blumstein, 2019). Augmented reality allows people with lower levels of education and lower skill levels to train up quickly and efficiently. Augmented reality will be the answer to the quick retraining of our workforce.

With all this technology impacting our lives, it would only make sense that our clients need to become proficient with a multitude of new technologies.  Yet these skills are not really discussed in lists of skills for the future. Will we need to learn how to use drones in our industry? Augmented or virtual reality? Maybe we will need to learn how to use bioprinters. I can see a time when bioprinters will be used in every hospital, not just research facilities. Medical staff will need to be trained in this new technology. Psychologists and social workers will need to learn how to use big data in their research. The list is endless as to how fourth industrial technology will be integrated and used across industries.

The Forbes article (Marr, 2019a) listed “tech savvy” as a general skill, versus discussing the specifics of what technological skills the workforce will need. Just as most of us are trained in computer literacy today, we will now need to learn how to interact with robots as part of our work and personal lives, develop data analysis skills, and learn how to use augmented and virtual reality and 3D printers.

 “A survey done by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software and Society shows people expect artificial intelligence machines to be part of a company’s board of directors by 2025” (World Economic Forum, 2015).

I believe these skills will be essential for most workers, yet they are rarely listed on the skills needed for tomorrow’s workplace. As Marr (2019a) states, “the ability to understand what tech can do for an organization is essential, and leaders must continuously embrace new platforms and tech tools.”

Codelearn is a company out of Barcelona that has created a game-based learning method designed to teach programming, robotics, and computational thinking to everyone. Codelearn (2021) believes the skills necessary to be successful in the fourth industrial revolution are:

1.      problem solving

2.      creativity

3.      empathy and teamwork

4.      critical thinking

5.      communication

6.      organization and self-management

7.      coding

While Codelearn lists, as others do, the more general soft skills, they do mention one specific skill that completely makes sense for the fourth industrial revolution: coding.

The fourth industrial revolution is known as the integration of the digital and human world. Of course, we will need to learn how to code. This is the language that humans and the digital world will use to communicate.

If workplaces expect to see intelligent machines as part of the leadership team, then workplaces should also expect employees will need to be trained to work with more technology as well. This is where looking back to the past and understanding the impact of computers and the information age had on the workplace and the third industrial revolution, will help us embrace technology at a faster rate than the workforce is currently doing.

Think back to the questions that I asked at the beginning of this presentation. What percentage of your clients are proficient in basic computer skills? We are leaving the third industrial revolution. We are well on our way to using the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. Are your clients trained in coding? Are they prepared to start using the technologies of the fourth revolution in their workplaces?

It is in thinking about these questions that I contend technology skills need to be number one in preparing for the fourth industrial revolution. We will not all need a computer science degree to work in the fourth industrial revolution; however, as part of the third industrial revolution, we are all using computers in our daily professional and personal lives. It will be the same for the fourth industrial revolution but with new technologies.

Entrepreneurial

Today’s graduates are joining a workforce where the Gig Economy — including consultants, independent contractors, freelancers, side giggers, and on-demand workers — makes up an estimated 30-40% of the U.S. workforce. They’re also facing an economy in which alternative work arrangements are growing faster than traditional full-time jobs, and are only projected to keep growing. The recent news that the majority of Google’s workforce is made up of independent and temporary workers rather than full-time employees is just one example of the rapid transformation of the corporate workforce. (Mulcahy, 2019)

For those of you who work in high schools and post-secondary institutions, are 30 to 40% of your students ready to go to work for themselves?

As technology, primarily automation and artificial intelligence, replace workers, we will all need to learn how to function in a gig economy. This will require learning not only how to create our own business opportunities but also how to be continually reassigned projects as work is needed within organizations. We all need to learn how to re-design ourselves on a project-by-project basis both inside companies and within the larger business environment.

We already know that the trend is for the number of independent businesses to increase. This means that over 50% of our workforce will be independent workers running their own businesses, either as sub-contractors, solopreneurs, or small business owners. Are your clients ready to be independent business professionals? Do they have the business, marketing, sales, and financial skills to run their own businesses?

I like the Deloitte report (2018) for this reason. It specifically mentions entrepreneurial skills as a separate category. As a reminder, they state the skills that we will need in this area are initiative, innovation, creativity, industriousness, resourcefulness, resilience, ingenuity, curiosity, optimism, risk-taking, courage, business acumen, and business execution.

Again, many of these are the soft skills that will come from operating in a gig economy. Core skills not mentioned but equally important will be basic financial literacy as well as the financial skills to read financial statements and conduct basic bookkeeping. Our clients will also need to learn how to market and sell themselves and their businesses. They will need to understand their industry and how economic and business trends will impact their companies. They will need to understand how world events will impact their businesses and how to pivot their businesses to be successful when dealing with sudden global changes.

How many students today are learning the business skills they will need to work in this non-factory type workplace? What I see is that we still continually prepare our students to work in a factory-style, second industrial revolution world when we are living and working in an independent business environment.

If you think I am proposing that we completely revamp the education system, that is not the case. We do not have to redesign the entire school system; however, we need to ensure that every student— every student—takes a basic business course during high school and another more advanced business case course during post-secondary education. This course must include economics and global trade. For example, psychology students should take an entrepreneurship course designed for small business management because many of them will end up being solopreneurs. The more we help our clients and our students become successful businesspeople, the better off and more successful they and our country will become, and the more prepared they will be to move easily through the gig economy.

I also want to be clear that I do not believe that the gig economy is meant to be about holding down a series of poor paying, part-time jobs and struggling to make ends meet. If you read William Bridges Jobshift (1994), then you know that the gig economy is more about the ability to see business opportunities as sub-contractors to fill in gaps not being currently met within a company. It is an opportunity for people to be creative and fluid in their career choices and movement.

When I had my first baby and was working as an auditor, I did not want to go back to work full time. I knew that my employer set the audit schedule at the beginning of the year, and that often more audits would come up during the year. It meant that management would have to drop some of their scheduled audits to make room for these other audits. I approached my boss and said I would contract to the company to cover off these unplanned audits. I also approached my previous boss from another company and created enough work for half the year, just the amount I wanted. When I think about the gig economy, I think about business opportunities that are just waiting for people to take advantage of, like many celebrities who act, sing, write books, create fragrances, and operate their own fashion lines. Ideally the gig economy is about knowing our skills, knowing the business market, and creating careers that lend themselves to our skills and our lifestyles.

For example, a teacher may teach music full time at a school, tutor in the evenings, and take people on tours of European music capitals like Vienna during the summer, having multiple streams of income and allowing the teacher to take advantage of the global workplace. A mechanic may work for a company, do jobs on the side, and produce how-to YouTube videos.

This is where the soft skills of critical thinking, creativity and problem solving become indispensable for our clients. But if they do not possess basic business skills, these opportunities will feel out of reach.

The ability to take their skills to the world and not just to their local businesses is our last core skill necessary to be successful in the fourth industrial revolution and the gig economy.

Global

There are several skills that are useful to be successful in the global workplace.

The first skill we need to learn is to develop a global mindset, that ability to see ourselves as part of a global workplace, not just a local one. Why is this important? Because often our clients have skills that could be useful to companies in other parts of the world.

A friend of mine met with a company doing technical training in Eastern Canada when we were at a conference. They were so impressed with her, they told her they had been thinking of expanding their program and opening a branch in our city. They hired her to open that new office. Understanding that we can help businesses expand to our area of the world is one way to take advantage of a global workplace.

When I started writing my LinkedIn articles, my goal was to be known in the North American career development field. When I posted my first article, a well-known Canadian career development practitioner shared my post. It was then shared by another practitioner in the U.K. Another practitioner from New Zealand shared his post. Within a few days, my work had been shared halfway around the world. I had never in my wildest dreams expected that people all over the world were reading and sharing my work. Since then, my work has been shared in Asia, Australia, India, and all-over North America. I am still stunned at how far my work has gone.

We truly do live in a global workplace, and that is why our clients’ social media accounts are so important. They are the global resume of our clients. We never know who is looking at our profiles and where it may lead.

Marr (2019b) explores another reason for a global mindset:

In a digital, interconnected world, employees of the future will need to have a global mindset. Schools and educators must adapt learning to take this into account. For example, history might not be taught from the perspective of one country but rather with examples from around the world; and instead of teaching the same languages that have always been taught, schools should look at international demand and the languages of emerging markets.”

Let’s explore language skills, both knowing English, which is the language of international business, and being multilingual. People in Europe understand the advantage of knowing and working in several languages. We need to learn other languages to better communicate with businesspeople in other parts of the world. Knowing multiple languages is nothing but an advantage in a global work world.

I remember when I was volunteering with an ESL student in one of the high schools. He was very upset and felt that his ability to speak his home language was a disadvantage and only knowing English as a second language had him at a disadvantage. I asked him what he wanted to do after high school. He said accounting. I asked him if he had ever thought about working in accounting in the travel or hotel industry, where knowing another language would be a distinct advantage and would allow him to travel within the company around the world. You could tell from his facial expression that he had not thought about this, but it brought him great joy and a new mindset.

I also recently worked with a client who wanted to work for an international fashion company so that she could eventually travel through her work. Knowing multiple languages would be a plus to her resume.

Being able to work with people from all over the world will be an important skill. In a global community there is no room for intolerance. We will all need to learn more and more ways to work together. The pandemic and the need for researchers and doctors to work together and share information to come up with ways to solve this problem is only one example. As we move forward and we use big data to solve bigger and bigger problems, we will see the need to work across cultures only expand.

Now that we have explored the core skills of the three workplace drivers, it makes sense to touch on a few of the soft skills that will come out of these three areas. Marr (2019a) shares how courage will be a skill needed by tomorrow’s leaders: “There won’t be a clear roadmap to follow in the workplace of the future. This requires a leader to have the courage to face the unknown and navigate difficult circumstances. Possibly even more essential is the courage to change course in the event the situation calls for a new strategy.”

Marr (2019a) also shares how agility will be an important skill to learn. One of the greatest impacts happening in the workplace is rate of change, and it only makes sense that our clients, and more importantly our leaders, in tomorrow’s workplace will need to have the skills that help them maneuver those changes. Marr (2019a) states that, “due to the speed of change in the future workplace, leaders will have to be agile and be able to embrace and celebrate change. Successful leaders during the 4th industrial revolution will see change not as a burden but as an opportunity to grow and innovate.”

Having explored the skills needed to work in a technological, entrepreneurial, and global world, I ask again, are your clients ready for this future workplace? Will they be able to develop the additional soft skills that were also listed as important to navigate the fourth industrial revolution?  

We can see how being creative and innovative will help us maneuver in an entrepreneurial world. We can also see how emotional intelligence will help us work collaboratively in a global workplace. We can now see how our emphasis on being lifelong learners will be an advantage in continually learning more and more technological skills.

My challenge, though, to all practitioners is to remember that we are the bridges to industry for our clients. This means that we must be the ones to inform our institutions that our clients need technological, entrepreneurial, and global business skills to live in a work-from-anywhere global world.

Will you advocate for your clients and help us move our clients forward? How far will they go? As far as we help them go.

References:

Bridges, W. (1994). Jobshift: How to prosper in a workplace without jobs. Addison-Wesley Publishing, Reading, MA.

Blumstein, G. (2019, October 16). How virtual reality can help train surgeons. Harvard Business Review. Research: How Virtual Reality Can Help Train Surgeons (hbr.org)

Codelearn. (2021, May 4). Essential skills for the 4th industrial revolution. Essential Skills for the 4th Industrial Revolution | Codelearn.com

Deloitte. (2018). Preparing tomorrow’s workforce for the fourth industrial revolution. gx-preparing-tomorrow-workforce-for-4IR.pdf (deloitte.com)

Marr, B. (2019a, May 13). 14 essential leadership skills for the 4th industrial revolution. Forbes. 14 Essential Leadership Skills For The 4th Industrial Revolution (forbes.com)

Marr, B. (2019b, May 22). 8 things every school must do to prepare for the 4th industrial revolution. Forbes. 8 Things Every School Must Do To Prepare For The 4th Industrial Revolution (forbes.com)

Mulchany, D. (2019, October 3). Universities should be preparing students for the gig economy. Harvard Business Review. Universities Should Be Preparing Students for the Gig Economy (hbr.org)

World Economic Forum. (2015). Deep shift: 21 ways software will transform global society. Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software & Society. WEF_GAC15_Deep_Shift_Software_Transform_Society.pdf (weforum.org)

World Economic Forum. (2016). The future of jobs. The Future of Jobs - Reports - World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

World Economic Forum. (2019). HR 4.0: Shaping people strategies in the fourth industrial revolution. WEF_NES_Whitepaper_HR4.0.pdf (weforum.org)

World Economic Forum. (2020). The future of jobs report 2020. WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf (weforum.org)