Three months ago, I wrote a post entitled 'Open invitation to all Global Mobility Professionals' exploring the issues regarding lack of skills training in Global mobility.

I was therefore interested to learn that the World Economic forum had produced a report, called ‘The Future of Jobs’ which featured the issue of skills. The report asked chief human resources and strategy officers from leading global employers what the current economic shifts mean, specifically for employment, skills and recruitment across industries and geographies.

Cutting through the pages of the report the points that interested me was that five years from now, over one-third of skills (35%) considered important in today’s workforce will have changed.

With developments in robotics, autonomous transport, artificial intelligence, machine learning, biotechnology and genomics we will obviously see transformation in the way we live, and work. This will lead to some jobs disappearing, others will grow and jobs that don’t even exist today will become commonplace. The only certainty we need to plan for is that the future workforce aligns its skill-set to keep pace.

So what does that skill-set look like?

According to the Forum the top 10 skill sets needed by 2020 compared with today are;

Not to dwell on the findings its no surprise creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need. With new products, new technologies and new ways of working, we're always going to need to be more creative in order to benefit change - Its also not a skill you can readily automate either.

What did surprise me was the idea that negotiation and flexibility will begin to drop from the top 10, understandably as masses of data (yes, big data) begins to make decisions for us.

Similarly, active listening, considered a core skill today, will disappear entirely from the list whereas Emotional intelligence, which doesn’t feature in the top 10 today, will become one of the top skills needed by all. This might be tough for the last reported 1 in 5 CEO's recorded as Psychopaths in a recent study by Nathan Brookes.

However, what does ring true is that we need more focus on our ‘soft skills’, not only in todays workplace but in the workplace of the future.

But that’s only what I think, I’m more interested in what you think....So, lets share in the comments box below.