⦁ Jorge Tamayo
⦁ Leila Doumi
⦁ Sagar Goel
⦁ Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic
⦁ Raffaella Sadun
Five new paradigms for leaders and employees
In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled—a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors—members of a collaboration between the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard’s Digital Reskilling Lab and the Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute—interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling:
- Reskilling is a strategic imperative.
- It is the responsibility of every leader and manager.
- It is a change-management initiative.
- Employees want to reskill—when it makes sense.
- It takes a village.
The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.
Back in 2019 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development made a bold forecast. Within 15 to 20 years, it predicted, new automation technologies were likely to eliminate 14% of the world’s jobs and radically transform another 32%. Those were sobering numbers, involving more than 1 billion people globally—and they didn’t even factor in ChatGPT and the new wave of generative AI that has recently taken the market by storm.
Today advances in technology are changing the demand for skills at an accelerated pace. New technologies can not only handle a growing number of repetitive and manual tasks but also perform increasingly sophisticated kinds of knowledge-based work—such as research, coding, and writing—that have long been considered safe from disruption. The average half-life of skills is now less than five years, and in some tech fields it’s as low as two and a half years. Not all knowledge workers will lose their jobs in the years ahead, of course, but as they carry out their daily tasks, many of them may well discover that AI and other new technologies have so significantly altered the nature of what they do that in effect they’re working in completely new fields.
To cope with these disruptions, a number of organizations are already investing heavily in upskilling their workforces. One recent BCG study suggests that such investments represent as much as 1.5% of those organizations’ total budgets. But upskilling alone won’t be enough. If the OECD estimates are correct, in the coming decades millions of workers may need to be entirely reskilled—a fundamental and profoundly complex societal challenge that will require workers not only to acquire new skills but to use them to change occupations.
Link: https://hbr.org/2023/09/reskilling-in-the-age-of-ai
