The skills that staff require for the future are changing faster than ever. Photograph: iStockIf you want to persuade entrepreneurs, chief executives and policymakers to do something, you usually have to put a figure on the potential benefits.
Since 2021, the great resignation – the broad term for the late-pandemic trend for millions to quit or change jobs – has further complicated a skills puzzle made up of interlocking economic, corporate and individual decisions. LinkedIn compared the skills its members had listed as most important for particular jobs in 2015 with those for the same jobs in 2021. A quarter of those skills had changed in six years. Partly because of an acceleration in automation during the pandemic, the social network estimates that between 39 and 44 per cent of vital skills could change again by 2025.
Bob Moritz, global chairman of PWC, says upskilling cements trust between employer and employee and that staff without skills are more likely to quit. Photographer: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg Blue also pointed to an important byproduct of favouring skills over formal qualifications. A skill-based approach opens the door to potential recruits from underrepresented backgrounds with non-traditional educations, because “it doesn’t really matter where you come from or what kind of experiences led you to have these skills” .
Some jobs in digital marketing, data science and user experience design did not exist at the time, making a flexible approach essential, she pointed out. “If we expected that these job roles can only be filled by people who emerged from the school system, we would have a tremendous number of people who were underemployed, and that’s a huge waste to the system and a great tragedy for the individuals.”Fourth, workers are not the only ones who need to reskill and upskill.