Over the years, we have learned that predicting specific job categories and labor requirements is difficult, and that many predictions are later shown to be incorrect. Instead of predicting jobs, the Institute for the Future, an independent, nonprofit strategic research group, has identified 10 skills that they believe will be vital for teens and young adults to possess in order to be successful in the workplace in 2020.
The key skills needed in the future workforce are:
- Sense-making:ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
- Social intelligence:ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
- Novel and adaptive thinking:proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
- Cross-cultural competency:ability to operate in different cultural settings
- Computational thinking:ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
- New media literacy:ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
- Transdisciplinarity:literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
- Design mindset:ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
- Cognitive load management:ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
- Virtual collaboration:ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team
One of the many implications of this study is that current educational establishments can no longer rely on the social circumstances of the past or the aging technological infrastructures that currently exist, and must make rapid adaptations in order to better prepare teens for the workplace of the future.
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