Robots, AI and advanced automatization create more competition for specialists in the labor market than their more qualified or more experienced colleagues. What used to sound like a script for a sci-fi film, now has become the reality of the labor market that cannot be ignored, neither by employers nor employees.

Skills Will Have to Be Changed by Every Second Person

The Future of Jobs Report 2018 (World Economic Forum) predicts that by the year 2020 48 % of all the tasks will be committed to machines and algorithms. Due to the broad range of automatization, 75 million employees might lose their jobs and more than half of today’s specialists will face the need to retrain or gain new skills. According to Akvile Kazliene, general manager at “CVO Recruitment | Simplika” recruitment companies, those are unprecedented transformations, posing big challenges, but also bringing new opportunities. “The importance of technologies is growing in all fields. Due to the rapid progress of artificial intelligence and machine learning, companies’ requirements for competences and skills are changing. Some professions might become unnecessary. We can see changes similar to the ones that happened at the beginning of the XX century in North America and Europe when the industry took over agriculture and massive retraining occurred. This time the pace of changes is much faster, creating the urge to retrain for more than 10 million people in the developed economies”, says Akvile.

Millions of New Workplaces Needed

“Transformations also bring new opportunities”, says A. Kazliene. “Specialists can have more interesting jobs, better self-realization, employers can operate more efficiently and create more value, and societies can progress”.

“Experts from the World Economic Forum predicts the need of 133 million new workplaces in fields like data analytics by the year 2022. To fill in all those places a vast number of specialists from other fields will need to expand their competencies, gain additional skills and retrain. Such tendencies alter the prevailing perception of career where sudden turns and unexpected directions become inevitable”, explains A. Kazliene.

Learning to Learn

“Active learning, analytical thinking, creativity, and innovation-oriented skills are becoming as important as knowledge of specific technologies”, says HR expert.

“The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution determines the need to retrain and obtain more than specific technological competencies. It is not enough to learn a programming language or apply one new model while working on data because such skills can become outdated in a few months. Technologies progress so rapidly, that the most important and valuable skill becomes learning to learn fast, adapt to the changing environment, find new solutions and new opportunities. That is the kind of flexibility that will be needed by professionals who want to keep up with the demand”, A. Kazliene notes.

According to A. Kazliene, with increasing AI and automatization influence on business processes, some human competencies will be highlighted as well. These include critical thinking, negotiation skills, complex problem-solving skills, emotional intelligence, and leadership.

“In terms of particular positions, the demand is growing for data analysts, scientists, software developers, e-sales and social media professionals, retraining could be oriented towards these positions. The demand for innovation and product development managers, customer service and market specialists should also remain and even grow”, predicts A. Kazliene.

Everyone Will Have to Adapt to Changes

According to HR expert, employers are becoming aware of the need to broaden and develop competences, therefore, they seek to help workers adapt to changing labor market conditions in various ways.

The company’s competitiveness, potency to create high value-added products and services are highly dependent on the ability to use relevant skills and competences. As a result, employers heavily invest in developing the necessary competencies within their companies, search for unconventional training methods and collaborate with institutions of education, striving to create a learning-oriented culture”, says A. Kazliene.

According to a recruitment specialist, employees have to be ready to learn. Otherwise, they might lose the competitive battle against robots and AI that are more accurate, cheaper and faster Continuous learning and openness to innovations is the only key to success for many specialists.