The re-skilling revolution needs to start today

Disruptive technologies like AI, robotics, and cloud computing will continue to shape the way we live and communicate. When it comes to the way we work, we’re seeing new jobs emerge across a wide range of professions, levels and skills. 

Professionals are going to need the right mix of skills to take advantage of this new world of work today and in the future. Equally important is making sure that the future of work is open to everyone.

We have insights into these skills, based on what we can see from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph -- a real-time, digital representation of the global economy based on the interactions of more than 660 million members, 50 thousand skills, 30 million companies, 20 million open jobs, and 84 thousand schools.

We and the Forum share these insights with business and government leaders, as part of a regular series of reports on emerging jobs and skills and gender parity in the workforce. These leaders influence their own hiring practices as well as education and training policy. Armed with the right insights, they can help prepare their own employees and their constituencies better for the future of work.

I was in Davos last week to talk to these leaders and share the latest. 

Tech skills are essential, but don’t underestimate soft skills 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is creating new types of jobs, all rooted in technology. Three of the job clusters we identified in the World Economic Forum's Jobs of Tomorrow report – cloud, engineering and data, which are also among the fastest-growing overall – require disruptive tech skills like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and cloud computing. Because technologies like AI are so pervasive, many roles in areas outside of traditional tech, like sales and marketing, will also require a basic understanding of AI.

While they aren’t growing as quickly as tech-dominated jobs, new sales, content production and HR roles that rely on more diverse skills sets, especially soft skills, are also emerging as a complement to the rapidly growing tech industry. Demand for soft skills is likely to continue to increase as automation becomes more widespread, and skills like creativity, persuasion, and collaboration – which all top our list of most in-demand soft skills – are all virtually impossible to automate.

We need to ensure school curricula and retraining initiatives are designed to reflect the skill set needed, and do this in an informed way.

With the rapid evolution of jobs, many women are or will be locked out

While the data reflects a diversity of new opportunities, further analysis shows a worrying imbalance in those able to take advantage of them. In our ongoing research on gender with the Forum, we found that the largest gender gaps among emerging jobs are in roles that rely heavily on disruptive tech skills, with the share of women represented across cloud, engineering and data jobs below 30% (for cloud computing it’s as low as 12%). 

As it stands, the professionals setting the objectives for AI, robotics or cloud computing are therefore likely to be male. Bias in AI is notoriously difficult to detect, but a more diverse team can catch it earlier. Given the outsized impact these technologies will have on society and the economy, we have to build creative, quicker solutions to ensure the inequalities that exist today do not have a hand in shaping our tomorrow.  

While there is certainly room to improve gender equity by embracing greater diversity in hiring and more inclusive managerial practices, our data suggests that those gains will not be sufficient to achieve parity. 

There’s untapped talent to fill the gaps in emerging jobs

Taking advantage of existing and adjacent talent can make a massive contribution to the rapid expansion of talent pipelines. Our research reveals that training and up-skilling “near AI talent,” what we’ve identified as workers who have sufficient foundational skills that with the right training and support could emerge as AI workers, could double the pipeline of AI talent in Europe, for example.

Taking a similar approach with the gender gap, we’ve found that sub-groups of disruptive tech skills where women have higher representation – genetic engineering, data science, nanotechnology and human-computer interaction – could, with the the right targeted reskilling, transition into emerging roles.

A focused, informed approach to re- and up-skilling could have a massive impact. 

Upskilling is only one part of the solution

Our research shows that living in a high-income neighbourhood, going to a top school and working at a top company can lead to a 12x advantage in accessing career opportunities. This means that two people with the exact same skills, but who were born into different neighborhoods, may be worlds apart when it comes to the opportunities afforded them. 

Here at LinkedIn, we are working to understand what we have identified as the “network gap” – the advantage some individuals have over others as a result of who they know. This focus is helping us ensure our products don’t discriminate against those without the ‘right’ connections. It also gives our members and customers opportunities to expand beyond their comfort zone, help each other and reach new talent pools. We know we can’t tackle the network gap alone, so we are bringing groups across civic society, business and the world of work to engage and do something about it.

What’s next

While I was in Davos, the Forum announced an ambitious initiative, a Reskilling Revolution to reskill one billion people by 2030. We’re a founding partner, and I want to personally congratulate the Forum for stepping up on this incredibly important issue.

We will continue to advance our product and to collaborate with companies and governments worldwide. It’s going to take collaboration and commitment from every part of the workforce, government, intergovernmental and non-profit organizations, and business to re-evaluate the way we educate and make hiring decisions. And we need to do it in a way which levels the playing field for everyone.