In the workplace, there is a constant re-division of work happening between humans and machines resulting in new breed of works and in the same time the skills for knowledge workers are kept changing.
We have seen that those successful organizations embracing digital technologies because they know that this generates greater value for customers, optimizes business processes and provides better environment for employees to thrive, which eventually is expected generating higher profits and positioning business at more competitive side.
In the workplace, there is a constant re-division of work happening between humans and machines resulting in new breed of works and in the same time the skills for knowledge workers are kept changing.
In this writing we would like to shed light on what type of work are becoming more and more prevalent and important in the future workplace as well as what are the skills that knowledge workers today and tomorrow need to possess in order to master the age of digitalization, and being relevant in the new business landscape. In the same time, employers cum organizations need to prepare the knowledge workers with the right mindset and the right skills in order to excel in digitalized industrial setting.
The changing nature of work due to digitalization and the emerge of the knowledge workers raising question to the business leaders of what are the actual skills and competencies mostly needed in the era of industry 4.0. Referring to the work titled “ the skill content of recent technological change: an empirical exploration”, authored by Levy and Murnane (the Quarterly Journal of Economic, 2003), we then learn that the works have changed over the past 50 years, the paper summarized the highlights of the finding that there have been a strict decline of non-routine manual works such as janitors, food preparation, and retail, the decline also is happening to routine cognitive works like bookkeeping and filling as well as routine manual work like operators in assembly line.
Observation on the above diagram catches our eyes on the explosion of non-routine cognitive analytics jobs, and non-routine cognitive interactive of jobs. So, apart from the third word in each one of these jobs, the first two words are the same, non-routine cognitive that means that the tasks are unstructured, hard to predict, not collated or not easy to be predicted in any particular order and can be manifest in any time and/or any shape.
The words of cognitive can interpreted as mental model that requires thinking, application of experience and drawing on disciplines and common-sense knowledge. The words of interactive and analytic supposed to interpret as skills to communicate well with other people, capability to perform collaborative work with peers, skills to handle people management, and to exercise leadership qualities. The paper shows that demand for analytical jobs applying systematic mind, processing volumes of data and ability to make sense out of them are steeply inclining.
In view of the above, the rise of demand for non-routine cognitive jobs shows that the industry is now looking for knowledge workers that possess a totally different set of skills. The 19th and 20th century setting of repetitive, structured and manual work is fading away. But what exactly are the skills and competencies needed about by knowledge workers in the 21st century. Paper about future work skills 2020 (Apollo Research Institute, 2012), gives us thinking of at least ten specific competencies that workers need to acquire in order to prevail in digitalized market as in the followings:
- Sense-making, workers need to be able to make sense out of the surrounding situations, sensibly and also rationally and hopefully come up with appropriate assessment and then combined with appropriate solutions to solve whatever problem is being presented in front of them.
- Social intelligence, a skill to tap into the various social channels in order to reach out to the right audience, to identify a weak signals as well as be able to smoothly handling the prevailing opinion for a particular topic of discussion.
- Novelty and adaptive thinking, capabilities to acquire different perspective, to explore different ideas and to apply them in a set of frameworks. And then, to come up with solution that is worth to try out in order to solve a particular problem.
- Cross cultural competencies, ability to work with people who are moving around with high mobility and pattern, amalgamating with people of a multicultural background that are coming from just about any city in the world.
- Computational thinking, this is very applicable to industry 4.0, capability of how do we actually identify the right set of tools that we need to use, skills on how do we develop, adapt, and combine some of these tools so that we can actually employ and create a new applications or break new ground or even discover the whole new solution or market segments.
- New media literacy, skills to master the whole area of media, information and digital knowledge in order to communicate and to acquire new knowledge from many areas and from different sources.
- Trans-disciplinarily knowledge, workers do not just need to understand about their own industry forte. But, they should also take time to learn about other domains as well that are very often through interdisciplinary knowledge approach. This trans-disciplinarily knowledge may shed light into solutions that to some are unseen problems before.
- A design mindset, a design thinking skills is the ability to gather requirements from users, work with the users and go through different iterations to refine whatever that we have designed as a prototype for people to try. Design mindset is proved to be effective to enhance inquiry based learning in better means.
- Cognitive load management, this is capability to identify priorities, to delegate tasks and to focus on those that most require and critical to the success of achieving our goal. Our resources and attention shall be adjustable and our best effort shall be spent on a task that would be most beneficial to us and to the organization.
- Collaboration skills, this is a must because now-days the problems are too complex for anybody or any one organization. Hence we need people with capability to strategically master a partnership and/or collaboration with key stakeholders including customer or even competitors in order to work together to go after a particular opportunity. In fact, market requirements and technical developments may lead to new types of business and working organization. These new types of business and organization are mostly related to cooperation and collaboration through value chain of organizations, this might be in form of an open innovation project. Open innovation is the practice of businesses and organizations sourcing ideas from external sources as well as internal ones. This means sharing knowledge and information about problems and looking to people outside the business for solutions and suggestions. So, having the right skill to identify the necessary collaborators, deploying the right tools to support the collaboration and to foster a collaborative culture a very important area to foster this particular skill.
This writing is a fast run of what kind of skills detrimentally needed by workers for their survival, their relevance to the market and even for their springboard taking a lead in a digitally driven economy of 21st century. Earning of regulations, policies and program to develop the above skills for workers is a not merely responsibility shared by governments, academia, and companies, but also professional and business associations, civil society and in essence by all individuals.
Written by:
Arif Ilham Adnan, Ir., ST., MBA., MSc.
Co-Chairman – Association of Digital Leaders Indonesia (APDI)
Permanent Committee – the Jakarta Chamber of Commerce & Industry
Arif Ilham Adnan is an engineer by training and holding an MBA Finance and International Business from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and an MSc in Energy Finance from the University of Dundee in the UK. He attended leadership and management programs in center of excellence including at University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, National University of Singapore and Murdoch University.
Arif has extensive senior leadership roles in the consulting, banking and energy sectors working for Indonesian state owned company Sucofindo, Bank Danamon and large multinational corporations, PETRONAS and Linde Gas Plc., with global placement before expanding to a leadership role in digital transformation and cyber security after earning graduate certifications from Tsinghua University, China and Cambridge University, UK.
Arif is currently the Co-Chairman of Association of Digital Leaders Indonesia, Permanent Committee at the Jakarta Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Director of Digital Siber Sejahtera, an Investment and financial advisory firm for digital transformation and clean energy projects in Indonesia.
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