As digitisation, automation and advances in artificial intelligence disrupt work, some 375 million workers — or roughly 14 per cent of the global workforce — may switch job roles by 2030, forecasts a McKinsey Global Institute report, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation . Among the sectors impacted, IT stands out for the very fact that it is the fulcrum of all the actions in this realm. Evidently, it is the IT worker who must start learning new skills first.

But is the global workforce ready to upgrade its skills and stay relevant in the job? As PwC’s Global Digital Operations 2018 Survey illustrates, while Industry 3.0 involved the automation of single machines and processes, Industry 4.0 encompasses end-to-end digitisation and data integration of the value chain.

Clearly, the skills required are different from the traditional IT skills, and call for concerted efforts from companies, government bodies and other agencies. The World Economic Forum (WEF) recently launched the IT Industry Skills Initiative to meet the global skills gap challenge and address job displacement arising from automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The initiative is committed to reaching one million people with resources and training opportunities on the WEF-sponsored SkillSET portal by January 2021. The initiative has partners such as Accenture, CA Technologies, Cisco, Cognizant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Infosys, Pegasystems, PwC, Salesforce, SAP and TCS. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 1.4 million jobs to be disrupted between now and 2026, of which the majority — 57 per cent — belong to women.

A recent report, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All , brought out by WEF and the Boston Consulting Group, captures the present crisis after surveying 1,000 job types in the US, comprising 96 per cent of the jobs there. It finds that 16 per cent of today’s workforce, if called on today to move to another job with skills that match their own, would have no opportunities to transition. Another 25 per cent has only 1-3 matches. At the higher end of the ladder, just 2 per cent of workers have more than 50 transition options. That’s where reskilling matters. WEF estimates that with reskilling, the average worker in the US would have 48 viable job transitions, against 10 now. Among those transitions, 24 jobs would lead to higher wages.

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