Emerging Skills Trends Across Industries
What should I study? What are the emerging skills and trends across the world? These are some of the most common questions between students, for people considering a career change, between people ready to begin their studies, or for those looking to learn a new ability and gain promotion in their jobs.
The world changes very fast and the needs of the companies as well, those businesses that do not change fast will stay out of the market, that is why companies push harder to find the best talent available, of course, this is not an easy task. When companies investigate the market, they find the talent available does not have the required skills for the jobs positions they are trying to cover. Professionals not having the right skills is a problem in both ways, this is not just a problem for companies but also professionals looking for jobs, many of them finish working in a different area of what they study. Some of them spent more than four years of studies to finish in a job that is not related to their studies and the skills they got over those years cannot be potentially in those jobs; they waste time and money. In this blog, we are not trying to scare you but to help you to find the perfect career for you, or at least make you aware of where the trend is going to be in the coming future and know which skills will be required so you can be prepared for the change.
Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” This quote still be real and can be applied to companies and professionals, that is why adapting to change is a top skill that everyone should have, it is about to adapt to any situation, for example, new technologies, it is well known that every day more data is generated around the world, and knowing how to manipulate it will be a very useful skill, however, technologies are not the only winning method some studies shown that emerging skills are more about human capabilities than machine work.
There are many studies related to this topic, but one of the most important and complete is the one elaborated by the World Economic Forum (an international organization for public-private cooperation). We will share the list and explore in more detail some of these skills but before I would like to highlight one interesting finding in this report, it says that half of the employees will need reskilling by 2025 due to technologies and the pandemic’s effects, I am sure this statement shows the importance to focus our energy on learning the right skills for the future.
These are the top 10 skills of 2025 according to the “Future of Jobs Report 2020, World Economic Forum”:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring, and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
Let us analyse those emerging skills and understand why they would be so important in the future. The first skills refer to having critical thinking, using logic and reason to solve problems, and becoming a strategic, unique, and creative person. We have seen that many activities can be replaced by machines even those activities that involve developing new technology and that years ago we never thought will be possible to replace, who would guess that an activity created to automatize routinary activities such as programming could be automatized by a machine, better called artificial intelligence, well in the near future the innovation, the creativity, and the taken decision will still on humans side, and it will have a more important role. Having a good imagination can help to develop new initiatives, you can find yourself as an entrepreneur or in the innovation or development department of a big company.
It will be very valuable to have active learning, and by that, we mean the ability to seek information, understand it, and transform it into something useful. A curious person, thirsty for knowledge, constantly learning, is someone who can adapt to changes easier.
In the list we have some skills such as leadership and social influence, I am sure this skill did not surprise you; it was a predictable guess. Leadership is about inspiring and motivating other people that is why new leaders are learning on human capital, it takes time to develop this skill, but perhaps this is one of the skills that appear in old and will still appear in new lists of emerging skills, we would like to remind you that you always can increase your abilities by taking some courses and focus on developing your weak spots.
What about technologies, design, and programming… well the future is still on technology, just have a look at the development of tech companies over the last ten years. If the trend is there, learning abilities like web development, graphic design, game development, etc. can bring you a lot of benefits.
These are some of the courses that we offered and that you may be interested in: