The Key Elements to Thrive in the New Digital Era
What is Ahead of Us?
It’s been exactly one year since the Covid-19 pandemic became global. Looking back, as the generations who are inexperienced with the pandemic, we have certainly underestimated the impact. Things have changed dramatically in the past 12 months. We are in the midst of the worst humanitarian challenges in a century, which will cause an imminent restructuring of society and global economic order. We face an unexpected event or sequence of enormous scale events at an overwhelming speed, resulting in a high degree of uncertainty that gives rise to disorientation, a feeling of lost control, and intense emotional disturbance.
Even without the pandemic, the world is going through a constant and radical change with digitalization and technology innovation. What is called the norm will no longer exist. The new norm will become the outdated norm since business as usual is dead. We are living in such a fast-changing world that nothing will last long without changing.
If before Covid-19, companies were still taking their time to adapt, now digital business is a must-have expected from every company. We’re living on the scheme so-called the survival of prepared. It’s urging us to reimagine the way the world is working continually and to be prepared. Exponential technologies are rapidly changing our lives and societies, every day, everywhere. We will need different skills, and we will need to get much better at driving change instead of being driven by it. Be conscious and take control of the technology, not vice versa. The only way to be prepared is through a constant re-skilling and up-skilling, which is considered an on-going necessity that has gone from nice to have to must to have.
Education Revolution
Digitalization leads to new ways of working that require new skillsets. According to an IBM report: 120 million workers will need retraining due to robots. Traditional two year or four year degrees will not fit into the new reality where changes and innovations happen every day. Today’s infinite learning is a foundational element of the more significant up-skilling movement, expanding people’s capabilities and employability to fulfill a rapidly changing digital economy’s talent needs.
Up-skilling people requires identifying where an individual’s needs are to help them contribute more effectively towards their goals. This will vary for different people: some may need more support in using technology effectively, mainly if they have not been using it for all of their working life. Re-skilling is more focused on what the company lacks rather than the individual. Certain roles become less important or even obsolete, while demand for others increases, both people and businesses can benefit from new skills.
According to strategy+business Client Preview Summer 2020, there are six key concepts & approaches that can be implemented to formulate the way to transform skills and maximize the experience:
Authentic informal leaders: deploy early enthusiasts to spark interest and emotional impact
Social learning: bring together small groups, ideally compared of people from diverse backgrounds, to foster collaborative experimentation, mutual support, and collective intelligence
Self-aware assessment: track and measure results in a way that accelerates the rate at which individuals improve their skills
Citizen-led innovation: offer individuals options to choose activities (the skills and the means of learning them) that are important to them and their work
Spaced repetition: sequence learning opportunities in a way that strengthens the proper cognitive circuits and builds new habits and capabilities
Shared reality: reinforce trust and purpose by connecting with people on which new skills are essential and how to develop them
Aside from the systematical learning approaches, mindset transformation is the initial critical step for anything. If you start with the wrong mindset, or your perspective is not being kept up, it’s unlikely the result will turn out good. To develop the right attitude, we need to observe and understand how we get here and where we are heading. The 2020 lockdown triggered and facilitated the unprecedented digitalization wave which led to a radical transformation in various sectors – education, government, healthcare, finance. Changes are constantly happening on an enormous scale. A growth mindset is a rear-engine to fuel your response to changes, to keep you afloat in the rapid-change world.
The Big Move
Brands are already starting to advocate about the mindset shift and offer practical help to encourage people to take action. The next critical step is to identify your skills gaps: what you are missing, where you need to re-skill or up-skill on to fill that skills gap. We’ve already entered the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), where we need to understand and work closely with physical, biological, and digital things. The only way we can do it is by working with technologies. The drastic transformation and the emerging technology that spans across the digital, physical, and biological worlds bring the shifts in skills. They are most potent when they combine and reinforce one another.
Hard skills in huge demand are moving forward, including digital marketing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics & data science, cloud computing, and edge computing. Soft skills are as essential as hard skills that deserve special attention. Creativity, critical thinking, persuasion, empathy, and emotional intelligence are crucial for growing artificial intelligence as you’ll find them irreplaceable. It’s a matter of time for digitalization and automation. The scale will be massive, but anything that cannot be digitized or automated will become extremely valuable.
From the LinkedIn Report Leading with Learning, companies have realized the shift where they must up-skill all of their new and experienced workforces. Leaders have agreed that re-skilling and up-skilling are a must with the latest digital transformation that’s afoot.
2020 is a wake-up call for all of us to rethink how to prevail in the face of exponential digital mega-shifts. As the world’s leading organizations and companies, are we ready to take accountability and responsibility in shaping the next ecosystem for a flourished humankind world? Are we clear about the vision on how to tackle the challenges while battling between artificial intelligence and human feelings? Now it’s time to plan while we still have a chance to make a change.