The new smart will be determined not by what or how you know but by the quality of your thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning… -Ed Hess, Harvard Business Review June 19, 2017.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Ed Hess, an author and professor of business administration and a Batten Executive-in-Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business, stipulated that in a few years from now, people would be hired not based on just what they know, but on how they think. This idea is based on the effects of the fourth industrial revolution. To fully understand the fourth industrial revolution and how it would inevitably affect jobs of the near future, we would first have to understand some key concepts and ideas.
An industrial revolution, according to encyclopedia britannica, is a process of change from an agrarian and handcraft economy to one dominated by machines, industrial methods and manufacturing processes. The first industrial revolution, which began in the mid 1700s, witnessed the use of water and steam power to mechanize production. During the second, electric power was used for mass production. The third, which emerged recently in the mid 1900s, introduced the whole world to the use of electronics and information technology to automate production processes.
Now the fourth industrial revolution, is building on the third, the digital revolution that has been going on since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by the fusion of cutting edge tech products, services and experiences that would literally blur the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres of life. Huge amounts of data are generated every day, about 2.5 quintillion bytes per day because of the increasing number of people connected via mobile, computing and smart devices to the internet with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity and speed. And so this huge amounts of data which are now being mined and analyzed daily have led to the creation of concepts and technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, blockchain and so on. This technologies are the bedrock of the fourth industrial revolution.
These explosion of technological advancement has resulted in new type of needs demanded by the digital consumer of today and the near future. In 2015 the World Economic Forum started a digital transformation initiative and so far the research from this initiative has revealed that enterprises would have to constantly reinvent their business model in other to keep up with the ever evolving expectations of the the digital consumer. These expectations include products and services which are hyper personalized with compelling experiences offered in access-based models such as the cloud based services.
These huge amounts of unstructured data, technologies and new business models, would bring the need for new skills by organizations. The new skills would require not just classical disciplines, but a new way of critical thinking and higher levels of emotional intelligence. This new way of thinking would also involve being open minded with the ability of deducing unbiased insights from huge, real-time streams of structured and unstructured data.
There are lots of tech pessimists who believe that the fourth industrial revolution would bring about mass global unemployment. As a tech optimist I strongly believe that this is not the case. Instead we should all get ready for the new skills we would have to develop and adopt in order to work seamlessly with these emerging technologies.
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