The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a serious toll on the entire planet. Our daily habits changed, our interactions changed, our work lives changed. All the minor changes in everyone’s life added up to bring tremendous changes to the life of our nations, especially on the economy front. The pandemic brought to the surface the flaws and weaknesses of our economies, disrupting the already frail balance that governed people’s lives. Life worsened particularly for people whose life was already in disadvantaged situations. The pandemic has caused a rise in unemployment that was already increasing because of the rise of automation and new technologies. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, half of all employees around the world will need reskilling by 2025 (WEF, 2021: 3) in order to avoid further unemployment and to keep up with technological development.
Upskilling for Shared Prosperity is a report by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with PwC, that aims at explaining the necessity to give people the opportunity to update their skills and to learn new ones in order to partake in future workplaces. By doing this, we will also ensure a more inclusive and sustainable economies and societies.
What does Upskilling mean?
Upskilling means gaining new competences or expanding existing knowledge in the same field of work. Thanks to Upskilling, employees may feel more fulfilled by their jobs and seek for chances of professional growth.
What does reskilling mean?
Reskilling means gaining new competences that will allow the employees to fill a different position in their company. Since the work market is quickly evolving thanks to latest trends or discoveries in technology, reskilling is an incredible tool for companies that allows them not to lose talented workers, replacing their obsolete skills with new, useful ones.
How can Upskilling and Reskilling improve the world?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is causing impressive changes in our economies and the skills needed for the jobs that it is creating, and will create, might differ from the ones that workers have today. The problem is that no one is helping workers to gain the new, necessary skills and this means that they could be left behind, causing a raise in unemployment and a negative impact on government revenues. While many people are unemployed because they are not skilled enough, people employed in lower-skilled jobs are risking their position because of the shocking increase in automation. For these reasons, upskilling seems to be the better solution.
The report by the WEF gives evidence that upskilling may be helpful for economic inclusion and social cohesion, but it will also help to speed up economic recovery. WEF analyses today’s economy under different lenses: instead of focusing on GDP, productivity, and employment growth, the report also displays the social benefits that could be caused by developing specific sets of skills. Upskilling means not only gaining concrete competencies such as new computer programs or how to work with new machines. It also means acquiring knowledge for new kinds of jobs and transferable skills, which are skills that may be useful in any job, such as critical thinking, creativity, and self-management.
These specific skills can only be developed if one has a learning or growth mindset, which is the ability to develop skills over time. This is similar to the concept of lifelong learning, which refers to the process of gaining knowledge and learning new skills throughout your life. If people see learning as a process that does not end with formal education, but can continue through time and via different means, their personal and work life will improve significantly.
The World Economic Forum in 2020 issued the third edition of The Future of Jobs Report, a different report about reskilling. The report analyses the jobs that will be available in the future and the skills that will be necessary for them.
According to the report, by 2025, tasks, jobs, and skills will be transformed thanks to the adoption of innovative technologies. As a result, the 43% of surveyed companies will reduce their workforce due to technology integration. It is estimated that by 2025 humans and machines will spend the same amount of time on work tasks. Therefore, the report introduced the concept of reskilling. Most of the employees will need to undergo training to work with the modern technologies and machines, in order to reduce the gap between actual and demanded skills.
The report urges companies to invest in trainings for employees to develop 15 skills that will be necessary for every worker by 2025. Those skills are:
- 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
- Emotional intelligence
- Troubleshooting and user experience
- Service orientation
- Systems analysis and evaluation
- Persuasion and negotiation
Most of them are the so-called ‘soft skills’ that do not concern specific jobs, but can be used transversally for any job position, making any employee more versatile. In a world still deeply influenced by the pandemic, with technology advancing at the speed of light and financial crisis in different countries, it is crucial for companies and governments to focus on improving the access to upskilling and reskilling for every worker. Governments should create links between formal education and companies, so that the above-mentioned soft skills can be developed at an early stage and every worker can gain a growth mindset since the very beginning.
Francesca Cuomo
World Economic Forum, Upskilling for Shared Prosperity, 2021.Sources:
World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs, 2020.
World Economic Forum Towards a Reskilling Revolution – A Future of Jobs for All, 2018.
https://factorial.it/blog/reskilling-e-upskilling/#significato-di-upskilling (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
https://www.ispring.it/blog/reskilling-e-upskilling (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/elearning/the-importance-of-lifelong-learning/ (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/lifelong-learning.html (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
https://www.muchskills.com/blog/skills-employers-looking-for-till-2025 (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
https://www.unleash.ai/reskilling-and-upskilling-still-the-watchwords-for-2022/ (last consulted on 25/02/2022).
