In the past three years, workers relished having more learning opportunities, in skills both hard and soft. Sheila Jagannathan, the global head of digital learning and capacity building at the World Bank, says she coupled her interest in deepening her knowledge of data science with learning to be more deliberate and less reactive in most of her actions–and she also managed to publish a book. Haley Harbaugh, EdD, the talent-development leader at DaVita Kidney Care, says she learned how to zone-in on her own behavior when it’s counter-productive. Mary Vinette, the global head of learning and development at Technicolor Creative Studios, has been actively learning French following a work transfer. Shivani Dhir, assistant dean of digital learning at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, has been trying to de-program her own biases while also adapting to a task-management system.

These opportunities were not just incidental,  but due to how the pandemic disrupted the way a workday is structured and for the larger chunks of time available for us to cultivate our own erudition. A panel of learning-and-development experts cited their personal experiences in a conversation titled, “Anticipating the Job Skills of the Future,” part of From Day One’s October virtual conference on corporate learning and development. 

There is a tangible business case for upskilling. The 2022 Workplace Learning Report by Linkedin Learning relayed that companies that develop their people and give them opportunities for internal mobility retain them for an average of 5.4 years, as opposed to 2.9 for companies that don’t. Given the mutable the nature of jobs, companies are now learning to anticipate what new skills the employees are going to need while providing a foundation of a culture of continuous learning. After all, some jobs that are common today didn’t even exist 10 years ago.

A Learning Mindset

Market demands are always shifting. “Two million cybersecurity jobs in 2022 are going to go unfilled,” Dhir said. “We’re collaborating with, obviously, our academic research faculty, to think about what those those skill gaps might be, we’re talking to industry advisory councils that we built, and we’re also thinking about what pathways could we create for non-traditional  workforce [candidates] that could enter this field to quickly meet the the internet-industry need.”

On the other hand, “45% of the jobs will be lost to tech,” Jagannathan said. Thus, the illiterate person of the 21st century is not the one who can’t read or write, but the one unable or unwilling to learn. “These will be low-level skills, but new ones will emerge.” 

Climate change will create new demand for new skills. Sustainability goals need to be met by 2030, an unprecedented number of new graduates in developing countries is entering the workforce, and climate change will upend the traditional livelihoods of many. “[New workers] will be confronted with fewer job opportunities unless there’s an ecosystem of continuously upskilling,” says Jagannathan. “The old model of studying for the first 20 years of your life no longer exists. People need to continuously come in and out of learning, so we are not left for 50 years [of work] with the knowledge we acquire in school.” 

The Power of Reframing

Jonathan Reyes, VP of North America and talent advisor for the workforceintelligence platform Reejig, believes that tech has changed everything around us. “I think technology is helping us reframe what the skill might be and helping organizations accelerate that,” he said. “There is a new language that we need to learn together, but I believe tech will need to accelerate that.”  This calls for a powerful act of creativity.

“There’s a sense of play,” echoed Vinette. “I have a nine-year-old niece and this kid can do anything,” she said, referring to her niece’s problem-solving skills coming from a a sense of play. “Whatever it is, it’s going to change and every individual will have their own way to approach the newness.” 

Turning High Performers Into Leaders

Still, upskilling someone from mere worker to manager is its own set of challenges. “There is that professional-development gap that so many folks talked about, where employees will become managers, because of their individual performance,” said Dhir. Yet they lack skills like scenario planning, crisis communication, and people management. “That’s where corporate learning and executive programs are the solutions that we’ve worked on with organizations that are facing those problems to address them in real time with more agility.” 

On that note, Harbaugh recalled that a mentor once told her that, upon her being promoted to managerial level, she would now have somebody else’s career in her hands. “I really never thought about it; I had direct eyesight into navigating somebody else’s career,” she said. “We have high expectations of how we expect leaders to perform and engage their teammates. It’s important to really think and dig into more social relationships and understand how to navigate those. For me, I had to do some legwork–how to manage conflicts, how to bridge gaps between how I was managed and how I wanted to be as a leader.” At DeVita, she has been particularly keen on promoting and fostering leadership skills to technicians.  “A lot of time, people think they’re not at the nursing level,” she said. Yet, “they’re literally the people hooking the patient to the machine!”

And while soft skills are, of course, a key component in the reskilling market, employees should not sleep on some core competencies. Said Jagannathan: “In the toolkit of any employee, you need to have the creativity of design thinking, but along with that you need some basic tech foundation: data science, visuals.” STEM learning is not just for K-12 students anymore.

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Boston and Milan.