The Skills That Will Prepare You For the Future

The development of technology is occurring at an unprecedented pace - whether it is in data analysis, AI or automation, the changes that are occurring have the potential to impact you, regardless of the industry you are in.

Whilst almost all industries will see dramatic change as a result of the changes of the future in some way, a digitalised, automated world has the potential to allow for career opportunity and progression - provided you take the initiative to learn and adapt.

In approaching the task of preparing and future proofing your skill set for the digital world, you’ll need to focus on the right skills to ensure your success.

What Are the Changes That Will Impact the Job Market?

Before getting into the skills that will be required in the future workforce, it is important to understand the changes that will facilitate their importance.

The world is changing in a number of ways - as emerging technologies continue to disrupt the workforce, changes will impact everything - regardless of what your job is. Automation, efficiency, remote capability and artificial intelligence are already beginning to make their way into everyday jobs. With this being said, these digital technologies do not mean that you’ll need to start coding or become an engineer - whilst many jobs will disappear and new ones will be created, these changes will just change their nature.

For example, consider the accounting industry. Whilst you might assume that accounting jobs will be vastly automated in the future, which would cause widespread job loss within the industry, the implication is instead that accounting jobs will be more personalised, requiring greater soft skills and managerial approaches similar to chartered accounting roles. This is an interesting example - rather than increasing the number crunching and technical aspects of the industry, technology development is doing the opposite.

Despite the fact that tech will largely change roles whilst keeping industries alive, there are still a number of areas in which demand will likely increase, and are worth considering as you look forward.

How Tech Will Increase Your Efficiency

While advancements in technology are going to dramatically increase the efficiency of industries as a whole, they could also mean that you are more efficient in your day to day role. A particular example in which this is true is in regard to how something called GPT-3 will impact the jobs of journalists, writers and content creators.

GPT-3 is a language model that is an extremely interesting result of research into artificial intelligence. It produces human-like text as a result of deep learning, and it does a very good job. Already, GPT-3 produces text of a quality so high that it is very difficult to distinguish from human written text. Aside from the more worrying aspects of this tech, GPT-3 has amazing potential applications across a number of areas. In terms of content writers, whilst it may result in job loss and will require retraining, it has the potential to significantly increase the pace at which they work.

GPT-3 isn’t perfect - it still requires human input in the form of prompts and editing, however by cutting out the significant task of writing the bulk of content, this AI tech will completely change how writers and journalists work.

Focus on Soft Skills

More than ever, the future will require a need for interpersonal and communication skills. As jobs become more automated, your role is likely to shift towards a more managerial, supervisory approach to work.

As tech continues to integrate into the workplace, traits of problem solving and creativity are what will ensure the effective application of this tech. These are the characteristics that will ensure the workforce can navigate and comprehend new ways of working and thinking that come with progressions in technology. Not to mention, soft skills are a significant aspect of a smooth and effective retraining process.

With this being said, the need for technical skills isn’t going anywhere. Whilst automation and AI will reduce the need for more tedious data mining tasks and other technical processes, skills of data interpretation and visualisation, as well as an understanding of AI and advanced tech in itself are already becoming increasingly valuable.

Guest Post by Rebecca Lee