Skills shortages in 2020 will rise to an entirely new level.
And I’m not talking about STEM skills, although they’re critical. Or the ability to speak multiple languages, which needs to be more common in the U.S. Or even the readiness of college graduates to take a place in the economy, which a majority of employers report is lacking.
I’m talking about the skills that the globally-connected, superstructured, computationally focused, smart-machine powered organizations of the future staffed by longer living and working, new media-using employees will require.
We’re all thinking about that right? We’re re-writing job descriptions and re-wording job postings to incorporate the emerging skills we know we’ll need. Aren’t we?
Well, maybe not. We know the names of the skills we can’t get today – those STEM, analytical thinking, communication and personal responsibility/accountability skills we’re sure our young people don’t have.
But really — what about the skills for the future? I’m not sure what we’ll call those skills. I’m not even sure they’re skills, to be honest, but here’s what I do know:
The Institute for the Future’s Future Work Skills 2020 highlights recent research that predicts the kinds of skills for which we’ll be recruiting in 2020 (which is only six and-a-half years away). Trust me when I write that the majority of HR/recruiting professionals are not ready for this. ATSs aren’t ready for this. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter aren’t ready for this.
And clearly, our education infrastructure isn’t ready for this. And yet, here we are.
The IFTF identifies and defines 10 skills that we need to begin to teach now so we can deploy them in six-and-a-half-years. They are:
But, have you ever seen a job description requiring Trans-disciplinarity and a Design Mindset?
What kind of behavioral interview questions would you use to determine if a candidate has Cognitive Load Management and Novel/Adaptive Thinking Skills?
How would you Tweet those jobs? How would your careers page change?
And once on board, how would you manage the performance of employees’ Virtual Collaboration and Sense-making?
And speaking of job descriptions and performance management, how will New-Media Literacy and Social Intelligence change the very nature of these processes?
Whew! We think the current skills shortage is frustrating and scary. It could be that the future skills shortage will upend everything!
This originally appeared on China Gorman’s blog at ChinaGorman.com.