Workforce Trends and Strategies for the Fourth Industrial Revolution To harness the transformative potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, business leaders across all industries and regions will increasingly be called upon to formulate a comprehensive workforce strategy ready to meet the challenges of this new era of accelerating change and innovation. Policymakers, educators, labour unions and individual workers likewise have much to gain from deeper understanding of the new labour market and proactive preparation for the changes underway. Key factors to consider include mapping the scale of occupational change underway and documenting emerging and declining job types; highlighting opportunities to use new technologies to augment human work and upgrade job quality; tracking the evolution of job-relevant skills; and, finally, documenting the business case for investment in retraining, upskilling and workforce transformation. Recent projections of the extent of structural change in the global labour market depend significantly on the time horizon taken into consideration. In addition to the rate of technological advancement itself, various other considerations—including easeofcommercialisation,publicadoptionofnewtechnologies, and existing labour laws— influence the rate at which these developments accelerate workforce transformation. A cluster of emerging roles will gain significantly in importance over the coming years, while another cluster of job profile are set to become increasingly redundant. Across all industries, by 2022, the cluster of emerging professions is set to increase its share of employment from 16% to 27% of the total employee base of our company respondents, whereas the employment share of declining roles is set to decrease from currently 31% to 21%. About half of today’s core jobs—making up the bulk of employment across industries—will remain strong in the period up to 2022. It should be noted, however, that these projections primarily represent the share of roles within the remit of large multinational employers and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A complementary perspective might emerge from analysis that focuses on small- and medium-sized enterprises, or more fully consider employment sectors including health, care
and education. Such segments of economic activity hold the promise for further job creation opportunities.
Among the variety of roles that are set to experience increasing demand in the period up to 2022 are established roles like Data Analysts and Scientists, Software and Applications Developers, and Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists that are significantly for and enhanced by use of technology. Also, expected to grow are roles that leverage distinctively ‘human’ skills like Customer Service Workers, Sales and Marketing Professionals, Training and Development, People and Culture, and Organizational Development Specialists as well as Innovation Managers. Moreover, extensive evidence found on accelerating demand for various wholly new specialist roles related to understanding and leveraging the latest emerging technologies: AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Big Data Specialists, Process Automation Experts, Information Security Analysts, User Experience and Human-Machine Interaction Designers, Robotics Engineers and Blockchain Specialists. From automation to augmentation Some forecasts project that advances in automation will result in the wholesale replacement of the human workforce. Rather than narrowly focusing on automation-based labour cost savings, an augmentation strategy takes into account the broader horizon of value creating activities that can be accomplished by human workers, often in compliment to technology, when they are freed of the need to perform routinised, repetitive tasks and better able to use their distinctively human talents. Importantly, most automation occurs at the level of specific work tasks, not at the level of whole jobs. For example, according to one recent study, whereas nearly two-thirds of today’s job roles entail at least 30% of tasks that could be automated through currently available technology, only about one-quarter of today’s job roles can be said to have more than 70% of tasks that are automatable. The most relevant question to businesses, governments and individuals is not to what extent automation will affect current employment numbers, but how and under what conditions the global labour market can be supported in reaching a new
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Malaysian Technology Strategic Outlook 2019/2020 Intergration of High Technology
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