The Future Skills Needed for Job Adaptation for Students

How is the job market changing? Why is it changing? 

Today, we are at the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and biotechnology, to name a few, are all building on and amplifying one another. This will lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen.  

As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks once performed by humans, employees worldwide fear for their future. But what will really prevent you from competing effectively in the labor market is not the robots or artificial intelligence themselves, but rather our own minds, with all their psychological biases and cognitive limitations.  

Given the popular view that the tech sector has been driving recent major changes in our economy, we might expect technology to dominate the list of job titles that have grown the most in the share of postings over the past four years. Addressing skills obsolescence requires overcoming high psychological and intellectual barriers.  

In today’s fast-changing labor market, the most in-demand occupations such as data scientists, app developers, or cloud computing specialists did not even exist five or ten years ago. It is estimated that 65% of children entering primary school today will end up in jobs that do not yet exist. As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome or at least evade our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy. 

Lifelong learning is viewed as extremely costly in terms of time, money, and effort, and the returns are regarded as highly uncertain, especially amid technological disruption. Such views may be reinforced by the feelings of depression and hopelessness that often arise when workers lose their jobs or face career crossroads.  

This is why we find that technology is king, and it will continue to be a force that will make or break future companies.  

Technology is not the only aspect of the workplace that is changing. The workforce demographic is changing. The baby-boomer generation is aging, more young people are expected to enter the workplace, and women are a large group that will continue to integrate into the workplace.  

Constant references to the youth employment problem, as if all or the majority of young persons had difficulty obtaining jobs, appear to misinterpret the nature of the difficulty. Youth joblessness is in fact concentrated, mostly, among a small group who lack work for extended periods of time.  

The youths who make up the relatively small group that is chronically without work have distinct characteristics. They are disproportionately high school dropouts and residents of poverty areas, while academic performance in high school, on the other hand, is positively related to both employment and wages increase after graduation and entry into the workforce.  

Key take away about market changes:  

• Employment has been rising faster in occupations requiring more preparation (including education, experience, and job training).  
• Employment and wages have increased most in occupations that require higher social or analytical skills.  
• Most workers say they will need continuous training to keep up with changes in the workplace.  
• Most individuals think the responsibility for making sure the workforce has the right skills and education to be successful in today’s economy lies with individuals themselves.  
• Job security is on the decline, but most workers feel safe & secure in their own jobs.    

Many trends are changing nowadays, and it is very important for individuals to learn and understand what is going around them, especially when our economic wellbeing is a top priority in life.    

Therefore how can I stay informed on the updates happening in the job markets?    

Succeeding in such a labor market requires you to be agile lifelong learners, comfortable with continuous adaptation, and willing to move across industries. If one profession becomes obsolete, a change that can happen virtually overnight, you need to be able to shift nimbly into another.  

As an educator, you need to continuously be updated on many subjects and one of them is the job market not only for yourself but also to integrate them into your student mindset using the below tips and strategies.   

Many steps you can do to keep you aware of your surroundings in market changes:   

• Track trends in your own business as an educator and check the innovations that are happening currently and will happen in the future. Learn how to use online tools for education efficiently.   
• Network with similar people like you who are engaged in their work to keep yourself updated, such as educators in different schools, universities, NGOs, education institutions, and online conferences?  
• Read blogs, online media, newspapers, and other informative platforms to check any updates, trends, ways of work, and other related points. Many of these platforms talk about new didactic principles for teaching students in personal development for educators.    
•  engage in forums and discussion boards that are happening over the Internet nowadays and most of them are for free. These workshops deal with topics such as online education and the personal characteristics needed to teach online. 
• Subscribe to journals to be in the know of specific issues in your industry. Many journals discuss the future of education and how roles are extending in different contexts, be it online teaching, behavioural change, didactic principles, personal development, classroom management, and other related topics.   
• Listen to podcasts from experts in your current major or career, keep your ears open. Many influencers are educators, so learning from them on how they are succeeding is an important part to see how things are going in the future and how you can adapt.   
• If you want to get all the news about a certain subject regardless of the source, you can sign up for Google alerts. This tip will help you, as a busy educator, to keep yourself alerted to the updates you want.   
• Join groups on Facebook or other social media platforms focusing on education, educators, and other similar topics, that contain people from similar or close to your career and keep yourself in the loop and even engage with them.  
• Keep an eye on your “competitors” or other institutions like the ones you work with, and check what they are doing that is different and innovative. It’s a good way to learn from others. Other institutions sometimes are ahead or gaining momentum, doing more impact it’s a smart thing to see how they are doing it.      

You can start at any point or you can use multiple actions to start updating yourself on multiple trends. Now that you have grasped the idea about market changes and how to learn about it, as an educator it’s your role and duty to apply it to yourself first then guide and prepare your students to be a better fit for these future jobs.    

After keeping myself updated on all the latest trends in the job market, what do I need to do to prepare my students for future jobs? 

As an educator you play a vital role in your students’ lives, values, beliefs, and other important aspects, now it is important for them to learn from you how to be employable, here’s a couple of tips that you can use:  

• Encourage your students in their last years to consult career guidance professionals to learn from them where to go in the future, and what changes that will happen in the world of tomorrow that they need to be aware of. 
• Do not hesitate to give examples of yourself and what you have done and sharing some educational advice about the ever-changing world of markets and workforce development, in order to raise their curiosity about this issue. 
• Emphasize the importance of soft skills in their personal and work life, explain the concept of soft skills, and orient them on how to learn them.   
• Encourage Teamwork: One of the biggest things that students today need to succeed at work is the ability to work as a team. They need to understand how to communicate, compromise, and share credit so that they can be a valuable contributing member to projects.  
• Invite people who are role models to the class and ask them to share their experience, how they developed themselves from a young age and how they became successful in life. 
• Be Future-Focused by measuring post graduating success and ask students how they are going to use their knowledge after school.   
• Reinforce students by giving them decision-making and problem-solving tasks since it will help them a lot in the workforce.  
• Give them a well-rounded education curriculum including arts, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, history, and communications courses.  
• Explain to your students the concept of self-development, its indicators, and how it impacts the lives of young people. Continuous self-learning is the stepping stone for achievement in work and life.   
• Inform students about the importance of 'Cyber Safety' and 'Digital Literacy & Competency' and other topics so they can understand them, and figure them out now to be prepared for the challenges that they might face in their future jobs and not to be scared of these complex topics.   

As a matter of fact, young people of the Middle East and North Africa constitutes 50 % of the population, with a lot of potential for growth, a huge number of passionate youngsters are going into the market to make a valued and productive lives and now is the time to educate your students about the future.