Nobody cared about Zoom, Skype, Cloud Computing, and eLearning before the COVID19 Lockdown, and very few people had any use for Facebook Live streaming, but now it’s a norm for doing business, marketing, and communication.
COVID-19 has changed the way people work and interact. We now have to think about repositioning ourselves, our strategy, skills, and our vision because this change is progressive.
Technology for centuries has both excited the human imagination and prompted fears about its effects. Today’s technology cycle is no different, provoking a broad spectrum of hopes and fears.
Over the next ten to 15 years, the adoption of AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, digital marketing, and automation will transform the workplace as people increasingly interact with new applications and ever-smarter machines.
These applications, technologies, and that human-machine interaction, will bring numerous benefits in the form of higher productivity, GDP growth, improved corporate performance, and new prosperity, but they will also change the skills required of human workers.
While the demand for technological skills and applications has been growing since 2002, it’s gathering pace since 2016. The increase in the need for programming, social and emotional skills is similarly accelerating. By contrast, the need for both basic cognitive skills and physical and manual skills is declining.
All technological skills, both advanced and basic, are seeing a substantial growth in demand. Advanced technologies will require people who understand how they work and can innovate, develop, and adapt them. Research suggests that through 2030, the time spent using advanced technological skills will increase by 60 percent. Creating a fast rise in the need for advanced IT and programming skills, which will grow drastically. People with these skills will inevitably be a minority.
However, there is also a significant need for everyone to develop basic digital skills for the new age of automation and digital marketing.
Basic digital skills will be the second-fastest-growing category, and the demand for entrepreneurship and initiative-taking will grow even faster.
You need to be curious enough to equip yourself now for this change. Yes, Adapt or Die. People who will not adapt are in for a lot of trouble. The more rapid the pace of change, the more dire the consequences of stubbornly sticking to old ways.
To quote Darwin: “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
