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Preparing For The Future of Work Posted on : Jun 26 - 2016

When people discuss the workplace of the future, they frequently focus on the collaboration technologies and the layout of these new workspaces. We discuss the “intolerance” of millennials and how work tools must change to support the digital native. While the selection of tools is important,  this dialogue lacks a discussion of the type of jobs employees will perform and how they’ll be trained to do these jobs.

We’re entering the next generation of the industrial revolution and today’s  workforce is largely unprepared to fill the next wave of jobs.  Many careers in the future will be based on software programing, machine learning and data analysis using tools that barely existed ten year ago. Some of these tools, particularly in the area of machine learning and cognitive computing, are still emerging.

In the U.S. we’ve recognized a shortage of STEM graduates. McKinsey said by 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions. Not everyone is going to have a PHD is neurosciences or math, but everyone needs to understand how to deal with data and many will need to learn some form of programming language.

One of the main challenges we face is how to excite and encourage students to pursue STEM degrees. Making STEM interesting and inclusive is a key requirement for building the workforce of the future. It’s with this lense that I viewed Apple’s announcement of  Swift Playground as one of the many types of programs we should be creating to address this need.

Swift Playgrounds is an app for iPad that makes learning to to code in Swift fun and easy.  According to Apple, “Swift Playgrounds includes Apple-developed programming lessons where students write code to guide onscreen characters through an immersive graphical world, solving puzzles and mastering challenges as they learn core coding concepts. The app also features built-in templates to encourage users to express their creativity and create real programs that can be shared with friends using Mail or Messages or even posted to the web. issuing commands, creating functions, performing loops and using conditional code and variables, and allows them to progressively build confidence and skill. ” The app appears approachable and makes the process of learning code fun.

Swift is one of the first modern computing languages to hit the scene in some time. While many associate it strongly with Apple, the company chose to open source the language in late 2015. I predict it will be one of the main languages over the next five years.

The Existing Workforce Also Needs New Skills

Apple’s open sourcing of Swift and creating Swift Playgrounds is just one of many programs to shrink the skills gap that are hitting the marketplace. But we can’t wait ten or more years for the youth to graduate. We also need to excite and educate our existing workforce. For those beyond grade school age, companies such as edX and Coursera offer courses in critical areas such as statistical thinking, data science, analytics and machine learning.

Managers should create talent retention programs that focus on encourage technical training. Most companies support higher education goals such as MBA. However the MBA may not adequately train an employee for their future job requirements.  It’s easier to train a person  to perform a subset of the data skill a company might need than to try to hire the perfect data scientist.

As an employee, you also need to take control of your own career. Evaluate what role data analysis, machine learning and cognitive computing can play within your existing role. Take refreshers courses in areas such as statistics and seek out course that explain the fundamentals of data science for business people. If math isn’t your area, look for ways that your existing skills might be modified to work in another field (eg. a designer may look at building experiences for virtual reality or a logistics lead may evaluate how IoT will change their role and learn new platforms.)

You should an build an action plan with your manager to support learning at least one new skill and embrace change. Over the next twenty years, it’s likely that we’ll see at least three major technology shifts. You shouldn’t stand by and wait to see what happens. Workers of the future will actively focus on reinventing themselves. Source