In a future where one person will have 17 employers and five different careers, what are the must-have skills?

Once upon a time, employers were responsible for upskilling employees. In the coming era of job disruption, knowledge is the key currency and employees will need to learn new skills themselves – and stay resilient

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Whether you are 16 or 60, digital literacy is an important skill. Photo: Reuters

Published: 3:00am, 15 Feb 2020Updated: 4:27am, 15 Feb 2020

If you want a shocking assessment, warts and all, of what the future working world has in store for us and our stressed-out millennials, you can do worse than start with Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

The self-mocking former head of Britain’s Open University insists that he is a “glass-half-full kind of guy”, but as he walks through the future pastures of work, many might prefer for that glass to contain a stiff whisky or two.

This is a world of change on steroids in which mobile phones – “those weapons of mass distraction” – are both empowering and a source of unprecedented mental stress. He predicts that one of our most important future skills is going to be resilience.

And if the internet and smartphones have changed everyone’s world in the past two decades, then we have seen nothing yet. With the launch of 5G-based systems in the coming 18 months, this “great disrupter” is going to disrupt still more. We just have to get prepared for it. As Bean says: “Shift happens!”

We already know that 50 per cent of existing jobs will disappear in the next 20 years: “Hard skills will still matter, but they are perishable,” Bean says. “The only enduring skills will be soft skills, and future jobs will be soft-skill intensive. Knowledge becomes a critically important currency.”

When greybeards like myself left university in the early 1970s, the life plan had a comfortable symmetry to it: after five years of early-life play, and 20 years in education, we could expect 40 years of steadily progressing through a single company, which provided a stable salary, a secure pension, and a life out to pasture from 65 – if you lived that long.