Upskilling for Shared Prosperity predicts that upskilling and reskilling could propel the transition to an economy where human labour is increasingly complemented and augmented – rather than replaced – by new technology, thus improving the overall quality of jobs.
Inertia in educational systems
The new Davos report points out that education systems – in particular secondary and tertiary education – must act and embrace this to play a central role in a comprehensive upskilling agenda.
Several higher education areas urgently need addressing:
“New arrangements – shorter, modular, part-time, with mixtures of in-person teaching and asynchronous self-directed learning – have to be developed. And to do that in a high-quality manner requires an enormous investment.”
As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), we must be vigilant to keep our classes relevant to the rapidly changing workplace and the emerging digital aspects of life in the 2020s.
deployment of 5G delivery to mobile computing
Certainly, 5G provides a huge upgrade in bandwidth, enabling better streaming of video and gaming. However, it is the low latency of 5G that enables the most powerful potential for distance learning. VR, AR and XR could not smoothly function in the 4G environment because of the lag in images and responses caused by a latency rate of 50 milliseconds (ms). The new 5G technologies drop that latency rate to 5 ms or less, which produces responses and images that our brains perceive as seamlessly instant.
the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0. The adoption of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Systems
While in some ways it’s an extension of the computerization of the 3rd Industrial Revolution (Digital Revolution), due to the velocity, scope and systems impact of the changes of the fourth revolution, it is being considered a distinct era. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is disrupting almost every industry in every country and creating massive change in a non-linear way at unprecedented speed.
In his book,The Fourth Industrial Revolution, professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, describes the enormous potential for the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as well as the possible risks.
Our workplaces and organizations are becoming “smarter” and more efficient as machines, and humans start to work together, and we use connected devices to enhance our supply chains and warehouses. The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution might even help us better prepare for natural disasters and potentially also undo some of the damage wrought by previous industrial revolutions.
There might be increased social tensions as a result of the socioeconomic changes brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution that could create a job market that’s segregated into “low-skill/low-pay” and “high-skill/high-pay” segments.
We need to develop leaders with the skills to manage organizations through these dramatic shifts.
We need to recognize that as we leave the third and enter the fourth industrial revolution our systems of learning — that is, codifying knowledge into a curriculum, then transferring that pre-determined knowledge to accepting students so that they can become productive workers – can’t support a rapidly changing world where new knowledge is continuously created and new skills are required to capture opportunity. Deloitte’s John Hagel argues, and we agree, that workers and organizations must now strive for “scalable learning”, the ability to rapidly adapt to new information and quickly deploy new skills to act upon it.
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