PEOPLE SKILLS


Celebrating human characteristics


Digital may be disrupting jobs but the key skills required are enduring


BY WILLIAM PEAKIN


Communication. Collaboration. Curiosity. Creativity. Donald McLaughlin, of Skills


Development Scotland, lists the skills which he thinks will be essential for young people in the future of work. A future, he says, in which there are jobs that have yet to be invented. It’s a point which some educa-


tors challenge, either on the grounds that there is no empiri- cal evidence for the claim or that there is nothing new in the asser- tion; at various stages in history, industrial change has created roles that previously didn’t exist. Nonetheless, it is a view that is shared by such august bodies as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and the World Eco- nomic Forum. In the latter’s 2016 report Te


Future of Jobs, it is said that: “A focus on the state of the talent pipeline for traditional formal qualifications and hard skills… risks dramatically understating the scale of impending skill set disruption if a large part of the existing subject knowledge of the current workforce will be outdated in just a few years.” McLaughlin’s point is that while


new specialisms are increasingly in demand – data science, for example – and it is vital that a sufficient number of people with those talents are entering the jobs market, a single ‘hard’ skill in itself is not enough. Te people who do well, particularly when industries are being disrupted, are those that possess those ‘softer’ skills. Conveniently for fans of al-


literation, they all begin with C: “Te future of work can be a scary prospect,” said McLaughlin,


Cyber Live Lessons in action


“particularly for parents wonder- ing what rapid change will mean for their children; how do you plan for careers that don’t yet exist? My answer is to focus on meta-skills; communication, collaboration, cu- riosity, creativity.” He adds critical and conceptual thinking to the list. “Everyone is capable of those;


it’s a case of how we draw those out in people and make them relevant as they upskill. We should celebrate human charac- teristics. With the current focus on artificial intelligence and robotics, it is clear there are many things computers do better than humans. But there will always be things that people can do better than computers.” As chair of the digital skills


group at SDS, McLaughlin helps lead implementation of the Scot- tish Government’s digital skills investment plan. It’s a tough ask; annually, there are around 13,000 vacancies in the digital technolo-


30 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018


gies sector, yet only around 5,000 are entering the jobs market from traditional routes of university and apprenticeships. “We’re not going to solve the


challenge by generating a few hundred more graduates or just increasing the number of appren- tices - important though those are,” said McLaughlin. “We need to challenge thinking, particularly within different business sectors. We need to look at how companies meet the skills gap they are facing. And one answer may be that their next generation of employees is their existing workforce - through reskilling and upskilling.” While McLaughlin does not un-


derestimate this “here and now” challenge, he believes it is equally if not more important to address the future talent pipeline which is where support for digital skills activities in schools comes into play. “Te team has been running some cybersecurity live online


sessions for schools, which have been incredibly successful. “One example which, for me,


really brought home their impact was a school in Granton-on-Spey which ran a ‘Cracking Cryp- tography’ session with Police Scotland and ATOS. After the session finished, the class insisted that their teacher schedule some extra-curricular activities around cyber and, in fact, it’s resulted in the whole class wanting to take NAT5 computing! “I never thought I would use


the term ‘Cyber in the Cairn- gorms’ and it’s great to see the kind of influence those initiatives can have. However, on a broader level, we need to recognise that meta skills and the ability to adapt will be key. Te most suc- cessful workforces of the future will not be the strongest or the most intelligent, it will be those who are most adaptive to change. Darwin was right about that.” l


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36