During the World Employment Conference 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, we had the opportunity to interview seven experts on topics such as the future of work, education, skills and workers 4.0.

The experts interviewed were:

Amy Smyth: European Centre of Excellence – Career Management at Right Management

David Mc Williams: Economist, broadcaster, and author @davidmcw

Peter Cosgrove: Future of Work, Diversity and Recruitment Expert @petercosgrove

What do you expect the labor market to be like by 2025?

Amy Smyth: With skills changing, the kind of roles people are going to be in are very different than they are in today. And also, I think that the way people will be working will be very different. What we have now, well I think that only 1% of the people work in the gig economy, as it currently stands. But that will change, and I think it will grow. I think, the kind of roles people will do, the way they work, I think both of those things are going to change in the near future.

David McWilliams: By 2025, the labour market will be filled with more individual contractors.

Peter Cosgrove: I think that we will see some jobs disappearing because of technology, because of artificial intelligence, but the good news is we hopefully have lots of new jobs we don’t even know what they are yet. So, I think there will be a lot of disruption, and the challenge will not be the same for everyone. Some people will lose and some people will win.

What do you think education will be like by 2025?

Amy Smyth: My view on education is that, obviously with the internet, it will become much more available for more people. But my view is that degrees built on knowledge are no longer relevant. Education hopefully will be more about experience, more about the development of competences and skills that then can be deployed in lots of different ways, as opposed to a piece of paper.  And the third thing is that I think it will be much more personalized. Increasingly education institutes will have to create programs which are much more specific about you and about what your needs are, rather than just a course that is for everybody.

David McWilliams: Education right now reflects factory work, and, as far a state education is concerned it is rather unlikely to change by 2025. Unions work hard on preventing it from changing and updating.

Peter Cosgrove

I think the biggest change in education is going to be this idea of having just one degree and then working for the rest of your life. People may still go to college, because there are lots of reasons to go to college: network, and learning and thinking. But actually we are going to need to learn throughout our career, micro learning is going to be really important.

What do you think are the most significant skills’ gaps and what can be done to overcome them?

Amy Smyth: The most significant gap is in STEM skills. However, we just did a piece of research, and actually the skills that come very close second are the standard soft skills: communication, collaboration, problem solving. Those are still the skills which organizations can’t recruit, can’t find. So this elusive mix of skills, digital plus soft, these are the skills that organizations still need investing and still are kind of looking for.

In order to overcome this gaps, organizations got to invest, they got to invest on upskilling their people. I think them sitting on the sideline is not helping at all. I think this is a responsibility of everybody, I think it’s the government as well, and that we are increasingly going to be seeing private public partnerships.  We have done a project in Italy which, basically, it is taking employees from a textile industry that no longer was working and re-training them and getting them to work in the suit car industry, because that was the other big industry in that environment. And that, I think is what increasingly organizations and public bodies will have to combine, to make sure that nobody is left out.

Peter Cosgrove: The most significant skills gaps are in technology, pharmaceuticals, but mainly, the biggest skills gap will be the business growing, right now it is data scientist, ten years ago it was software developers. But some will argue that in 20 years’ time artificial intelligence will do all the programing. So, it is always what’s new, because whatever is new you don’t have people with 10 or 15 years of experience.

As regards the impact of technology, what must be done to generate workers 4.0?

Amy Smyth: I think workers 4.0 can be created, but I think that there has to be a rapid change of attitude among employers, and there has to be greater responsibility among all of us. As individuals, as employers, public bodies. Unless we want to have a huge amount of people that are locked down to work, we actively need to invest our time and money in making sure that everybody is part of this industrial revolution, not only some.

David McWilliams: In order to generate workers 4.0, it is key they realize they have an individual responsibility. Work is and will no longer be as we used to know it, so it is up to every individual to realize this and generate strategies to thrive.

Peter Cosgrove: Well, there are two parts in that: the employer and the employee. I think the employer needs to trust their employees, and at the moment we are still telling them what to do, where to go, we need to trust them and focus on one thing. And from the employee point of view they need to realize they are in control more than ever on their career. They need to build their skills, build their education, because nobody is going to be doing it for them.