Skills for the Future of Work by Gladis Araujo

Automatic Summary

Master the Future of Work: Key Skills and Approaches

Welcome to the future of work where new skills will be crucial and the right approach determines success. Global Quality Vice President for Mattel, Gladys Araujo, offers invaluable insight into the evolving world of work in this insightful article.

What Is the Future of Work?

The future of work is alarming yet promising. On the downside, many jobs will be displaced, up to 46% globally and even worse in certain regions. About 65% of current jobs won't exist tomorrow. However, new jobs will be created, but only those who reskill and upskill themselves or their teams will be ready to accept these opportunities.

In other words, the future of work crisis is a mix of job displacement and the creation of new jobs that many might not be equipped to fill. So, the time to act is now. Preparing yourself and teams for this new environment is crucial, or our organizations will suffer due to the unavailability of talent.

Why Is This Future Work Crisis Happening?

The future job market is shifting for several reasons: COVID-19 has reset the world, automation continues to replace human tasks, digitalization is accelerating, and demographic patterns are changing. All these factors have triggered massive shifts in the job market today and future.

What Are the Future Skills of Work?

After conducting research from various sources like Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKenzie, and the World Health Organization, Araujo identified ten core skills necessary for the future of work.

The Ten Core Skills of Future Work

These skills are arranged under four quadrants of Self-Leadership, Interpersonal, Cognitive and Digital Literacy, with Lifelong Learning at the heart of all of them:

  1. Self-Leadership: Antifragility, Self-Confidence, Wellness,
  2. Interpersonal: Communication, Collaboration, Empathic Leadership
  3. Cognitive: Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking,
  4. Digital Literacy: Having a Digital Mindset.

Lifelong learning is a constant theme running through all these skill sets. This constant learning is beneficial to ourselves, our business, and our employees.

Reskilling and Upskilling – A Path Forward

To be relevant in the future of work, Araujo suggests we take three major steps:

  • Strategic Planning: Carefully review the industry trends and anticipate potential scenarios for the future.
  • Analyze Your Skills: Understand what skills are vital for future jobs based on the strategic plan.
  • Commitment to Upskill and Reskill: Regularly schedule short-term training sessions on essential skills to keep up with industry trends.

Case Study: Singapore leads by example, nurturing a lifelong learning environment through their strategic partnership with different entities since 2013. The combination of online and physical resources, a step-by-step framework, and mentorship put them at the front of adapting to work's future.

Conclusion

The future of work is changing rapidly, and we must evolve with it. Stay proactive, keep learning and invest in developing new skills to ensure individual, team, and organizational relevance. Failure to act promptly can result in a high unemployment rate and a shortfall of talent in many industries. This is a call to action for everyone to start preparing for the future of work.

For further information or questions, feel free to reach out to Gladys Araujo via her email address or through LinkedIn. Embrace the future of work, and remember, lifelong learning is the way forward.


Video Transcription

Welcome everyone to the conference. Skills for the future of work. Let me introduce myself. I'm Gladys Araujo. I'm currently the Global Quality Vice President for Mattel.And I have over 25 years experience in leadership roles in the area of global supply chains in four continents and always leading multicultural teams that I feel very blessed because of that. And currently, I'm working in a very exciting project that is the end to end digital transformation in global Quality. I'm very happy to be here with you to share about the future skills uh for the future of work. Please feel free to ask any question along the way. And if we don't have time for whatever reason, you will have my contact information at the end of this session and feel free to reach me out. Let's start in the future of work. Do you know how many jobs will be displaced? The numbers are alarming according to MNC, globally will be 46%. But in other countries is even worse. The numbers like in Latin America, you can see between 54% up to 74%. Additionally, many of the jobs that we have today will not exist tomorrow. Around 65%. The good news is that more jobs will be created than the jobs that will be displaced. However, what will be happening if we don't start acting now, there is a crisis coming ahead in some industries and in some companies are already happening or in some countries.

What is this crisis ahead? Meaning there will be a lot of new jobs but many others will be displaced. And if you don't do enough skilling and reskilling of yourself or your team, the unemployment rate will be really high because you will not be prepared for the new jobs coming ahead. And the other thing that will happen is that our organizations will suffer because the talent that they are looking for will not be really available. Then in reality, we need to start working on that on filling the skill gap very soon. This is going to be impacting our business, our people and ourselves. Then we really need to look for ways to do the upskilling and reskilling not only for ourselves also for our team. Unfortunately, according to Garner, a research that they conducted in February of this year, around 81% of the companies are unprepared or they are doing nothing. Then in reality, this is a a call to action for everyone here. But why is this happening? And what do we need to do do to build the workforce of the future? That's precisely my intention today to create this awareness of what is happening, what is coming and what will be the path forward then three main pilots that I'm gonna be discussing today.

The number one is why this is happening. What are these famous critical skills that I need to develop to be relevant in the future of work or or develop in my team? There are some soft skills and there are other technical skills. Then we will review that and what will be the path forward, what I need to do in my organization, for myself, for my team to really be relevant in the future of work. And I would like to share at the end the Singapore case that in my opinion, that's the best in in class in terms of a con that is really thinking ahead since 2013 on how to convert the whole country in a lifelong learning uh uh model for work. Then we will be discussing that in a minute. Then let's start with the why? Why is this crisis really happening? Everyone knows here that the war has been reset because the COVID and that we are living in what is called the boca time, high complexity, high volatility, high ambiguity and uncertainty. And, and we know that many of our jobs will be displaced or many of the tasks that we are doing will be automated. Around 30%. We can see every day in our organizations robots for moving materials or in the manufacturing floor.

We see also the automation already uh reaching uh the the healthcare and the uh take care of elders and kids and the medicine and physiotherapy uh training or maintenance. Even the basic task, uh the world is changing very rapidly. And of course, the Coronavirus uh accelerated the scale of remote work. The digitalization accelerate the automation and of course, the current work that is happening is also changing the environment and then we need new skills to be really competitive. The demography is also changing.

We are living longer and we have low fertility rates and and everyone knows here that there is a great resignation. People, people is leaving their jobs because they are looking for more purpose, work life balance, for better uh conditions at work. Then this requires new skills in in our uh place of work. And of course, the climate change and the commitments that we all have in the organizations as a as citizens uh to reduce the CO2 then is is uh laying in our organizations and new new processes, new equipment, new machinery that needs to be having new skills as well. Globalization is is growing and the need of nurturing or localization, meaning to be closer to our customers in our manufacturing centers. Then in summary, in all these elements that I think we all know they are important triggers that are truly changing. The the the world that we are living today and the world that is coming ahead and to face this world, we need to develop new skills to succeed in this future of work. Then what are these magical critical skills or what are the top skills that we we need to develop? Then I I did a research that is my gift for all of you today.

In this research, I was investigating all the uh documents uh best in class from Deloitte Private House Cooper mckenzie Mal, uh the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization, as well as Singapore as a country. And then I I identify the ranges between some of them uh uh just listed like five critical skills for the future of work, but some others, the more comprehensive I would say in this case is Mackenzie mckenzie found around over 50 skills. I'm not trying to be overwhelmed. I will be explain you in a minute how to make sense of all these new skills that we need to, to develop. But I just want to give you a sense of the wide range of skills that are out outlined by the experts out there. Then what I did in this process, it's a, I did a, a collage of all of them comparing contrast and I identi identify a 10 that I consider the core skills among all all the skills that were listed from these experts. And this is uh what I have here to show to you today. They are in four quadrants. One is the self leadership, interpersonal, cognitive and digital literacy. And at the heart of all of them is lifelong learning because this is the new mindset that we need to have as a leader of, of our organizations and develop in our teams, the curiosity to continue the learning because the challenges will continue growing and, and, and we need to be always learning and learning new ways to do business.

Then we need to truly cultivate that mentality. That is the growth mindset. In terms of self leadership is not any longer enough to have a resilient attitude. We need to be really anti fragile. What is the difference between resilience and anti fragility resilience is that you are resisting child challenges that are happening to you and, and you are having the ability to return to the same or stay the same in terms of anti fragility, you are gonna be getting better because those challenges you are learning and then you are capable of returning to a better place.

Then we need to develop that anti fragility in our skill set, uh grow our self-confidence, our self motivation and wellness. We need to be uh uh accountable for our own wellness, defining the boundaries and role model in our organizations. The importance of self cultivating this self wellness and also the self-awareness is important because we need to constantly reasses assessing ourselves what is missing in this book. At time. What that is changing constantly. What are my new skills, either soft or technical that I need to continue upskilling and reskilling and cultivating the lifelong learning, self management and action. It refers to the uh emotional intelligence to face the challenges ahead that we are living. And in terms of uh interpersonal skills is the communication is very critical, but the communication here is different. I put it in three main uh buckets. The first one, we really need to communicate in a way that we truly connect with our people and our partners from the mind to the heart and really listening. That's number one, number two is that we really need to provide support to the team or our partners. And number three is to recognize those efforts. That's the new model of communication to be successful on those challenging times. Collaboration is more important than ever is eliminated the silos inside your organization among departments even uh across uh most multiple sides or multiple countries.

But very important also to collaborate with external your external stakeholders in your supply chain and logistics as well as other companies, other industries. Because with, with the collaboration is the only way we would be turned out in success. All the challenges ahead this continue.

That's the new way of living and the leadership that we need to model nowadays is more an emphatic leadership, create an environment of trust for our people and be able to mobilize the the positive energy of our people in the workplace and and always role model, the ethics and the well being in terms of, of cognitive, the cognitive is a problem solving, critical thinking and creative thinking.

It got to the next level. What I mean this we are the ones defining what problems needs to be solved by the machines. We are the ones who needs to be making sense of all the data that this digital world is throwing at us. What we are gonna be doing with this data, more, more data analytics, more data science, how to apply critical thinking and creative thinking to solve the problems that will continue happening every day. And what will be ended up happening is that we will have plenty of projects that we will need to manage and have that ability and we need uh of course, as had as we have been talking in all this conference to develop a digital mindset and digital literacy, you need to pick and choose what is relevant for your industry and, and specifically for your job.

Then what to do? What is the path forward? Of course, I have been saying constantly upskilling and reskilling and and partnership with universities, other companies and government. What do you really need to do is to analyze where are the trends of my industry? What is my strategy going forward? What are the different scenarios about what is the worst things that will happen? What is the best case scenario? What is the most probable scenario? And based on that define a strategy, plan on your upskilling and reskilling uh plan for you and for your people. OK. Based on that, I would suggest maybe to take a look on Mackenzie, the 52 skills and, and pick and choose, OK? These are the ones that will be relevant for me to succeed in the future based on these scenarios. And then where I am, where is my team and where is the gap and start building that strategy? We need to provide on the job training, more short training, like two or three months, maximum per skill and, and keep moving and, and that has to be constant in the case of Singapore, that is just a, as a role model. As I was telling you at the beginning in 2013, they decide to convert the country in a lifelong learning that everyone has that uh skill and then they partner with companies, universities and the government and they created even an institute and also an online platform to support.

And there are five steps in their business model. The first one is the so one that is the change, meaning, creating awareness of this gap of skills, precisely what I'm doing today and that they really need to do something about it. And the second step is OK, let's analyze what is my purpose? What are my, my strengths. What are the skills that I have in my inventory then explore on some tree because partnering with the organizations, uh the government identify what are those critical um, a jobs that are necessary today that I don't have talent available, then you will have in one side these jobs that are available and in this size, the people skills.

Then what is the gap that I need to do as a, as a citizen of Singapore? What is my path to go into those jobs? And that's what is the, the zone for or the growth to the? OK. I want to go in this, this and this and this is what I need to develop. And then in some five or the five stage is to really start putting in, in operation. This, they have a coach uh along the way and then once that you do your upskilling and reskilling, there are plenty of jobs available on that arena that you are uh you are looking for. And then even this model is, is available uh physically like a like a AAA building where you go through those stages and it's an interactive model or you can do it also online. Then in summary, uh we really need to create awareness in ourselves, in our team that to succeed in this book, a time that is changing every single day, we need different skills. We need to identify what are the skills that are necessary or relevant for my indu for my type of job and for the trends that are coming and start working on that define that path forward.

And like the Singapore case, then this is what I have uh today for you. Uh I hope I create awareness on, on what are these skills for the future of work. And here uh you can have my, my email address and I'm very active and linking in, you can scan my code and feel free to reach me out. I'm more gonna be more than happy to continue the conversation and addressing any, any questions that you may have or if you want to have the presentation available, it will be my pleasure. Then if you have any questions, we have still like two minutes left and I can address if you ha if you have any questions, I I'm looking at the chat, then any if you have any question or comment, uh please feel free to put it in the chat. If not feel free to reach me out. Thank you for, for being part of this uh conference and continue enjoying the these sessions.