What Skills Got You Here, Won’t Get You There!

What are the skills that will be required for your job in three years, or five years time?

A new poll tells, half the people around you in the office may no longer be doing the job they’re doing simply because its requirements will have changed and they won’t have done anything (or enough) to change in response.

None of us like to think we are entrenched in the “I don’t have time” or “when things slow down–we will get to that” mode, but a poll by the Hay Group has argued that, in a rapidly changing working environment, sitting back and expecting to be able just to continue using the skills you already have is not going to cut it in the future.

Moreover, at  the individual level, sitting back and waiting for your friendly employer to spend time and money updating your skills for you may soon be as outdated.

A poll of 500 private sector workers found more than half did not know, or were unsure about, the skills employers were likely to be demanding in the next five years.

Nearly six out of 10 were worried the skills required for their current roles were already changing, with just under half equally concerned their current skill-set will be insufficient to meet employers expectations in five years time.

A total of 61% complained their current employer was not doing enough to invest in their skills.

Yet almost half conceded primary responsibility for updating skills should actually fall to them rather than their employer.

Despite this, nearly  4 out of 10 admitted they were not taking any action to remedy this shortfall themselves.

And even those that were still might not have been doing enough. Six out of 10 said the only action they were taking was staying up-to-date with trends through trade magazines and informational versus skills based workshops. . Only around a third were looking to obtain relevant qualifications or considering enrolling on courses to enhance or fully develop new relevant  skills for the future.

Work to be done to solve this conundrum!

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