Let’s talk future skills (2020–2022)

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to design digital workplaces or “offices in the cloud.” These environments enable companies to allow flexible and remote working for their teams. I also teach the digital literacy, fluency, communication and collaboration skills needed to work in these modern technology-rich workplaces.

In the WEF report Jobs of Tomorrow — Mapping Opportunity in the New Economy seven professional clusters are identified as emerging in tandem, collectively projected to have 6 million job openings. They are:

Care Economy
Data and AI
Engineering and Cloud Computing
Green Economy
People and Culture
Product Development
Sales, Marketing and Content

They also identify the Top 10 most in-demand skills for each cluster.

Interestingly Digital Literacy appears as one of the top skills in five of the seven clusters!

At FutureWork IQ we define Digital Literacy as the “interest, attitude and ability of individuals to use digital technology and communication tools appropriately to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, and create and communicate with others.”

This forms the foundation of our Virtual Work Skills for the Modern Workplace programme. The programme comes in two versions. One as a self-paced online training and the other as a Virtual Instructor-led Training.

Digital Literacy, with its seven competencies is the one skill that is becoming universal regardless of profession.