Future Work: Technological Literacy and Adaptability

As is the case when any great change looms ahead, predicting what’s on the horizon isn’t an exact science. While we might be able to make educated guesses about some jobs in the future, many may appear that we could never have predicted. Even today, there are job titles and roles that didn’t exist even ten years ago. Couple this with the fact technology is going to be an even more fundamental part of the workplace in the coming years, and we can start to see how important it will be for employees to be adaptive and technologically literate. New tech and roles could spring up surprisingly quickly, and the most employable candidates will be the ones that can hit the ground running.

Technological Literacy

Technological literacy might sound like a complicated term, but it really just refers to your general ability to use, understand, and assess technology. This could be anything from booting a laptop to write an email, to maintaining a server, or editing video in a software suite. While we’re certainly all getting increasingly familiar with ever more advanced devices like smartphones, tablets, and VR as consumers, we also need to be able to reach a good level of competence and comfort around both existing and upcoming technologies in a professional sense.

With manual and repetitive jobs on the automation chopping block, the human workforce will very probably have an increased focus on interpreting and managing data from machines or AI. Upskilling yourself now could make you much more employable in the future as a result.

Adaptability

The days of having a very particular set of skills and sticking with them for your whole career are coming to an end (sorry Mr Neeson). It’s been suggested that the half-life of skills has been gradually decreasing over time from 30 years to a current average of six years. This means that in order to stay attractive to employers, and relevant to the next wave of jobs, being able to adapt to new procedures and environments while learning new skills is going to be crucial. What makes adaptability even more important is the fact that we can’t accurately predict what jobs might actually entail in the coming decades. Those that can quickly acclimatise to new working practices and tackle fresh challenges head-on will be extremely valuable to employers as a result.