The skills of the future

What are the key competences of the future job market? Digi-Talks is bringing you a summary of the project “A Working Future” conducted by Djøf.

“A Working Future”

In this article we want to put focus on what students should be aware of as they make their way into the future job market.

After a ‘robot’ had trawled through 270.000 job ads from 2012-2017 and after a series of workshops with various employers had been conducted, the project “A Working Future” by Djøf has revealed what sort of competences the employers are looking for in general.

One thing is that the overall number of key competences in job ads have increased quite significantly. Today it is not enough to have professional competency, you also need a range of social skillsets and personal traits.

Competences of the future

There is an evident development in job ads towards requiring more and more from the individual both socially and personally.

In the social domain it is the ability to cooperate, negotiate, motivate, instruct others, persuade, have empathy, and be able to provide good service. Communication is also a key competency, especially the ability to share your knowledge and disseminate it in an understandable way.

In the role of a leader some of the key competences asked for by employers is the ability to coordinate other’s work, put teams together, coach, create environments of change, and be able to coordinate knowledge and actions within teams.

In the personality domain it is traits like being innovative, curious, proactive and agile. We also have to be stabile and robust. This is seemingly a paradox. We need to be ready to change at any minute, but we also need to be stable and sturdy.

What is the end of it?

Nikolaj Kure, associate professor at the department of business management at Aarhus University, would like to see a curve that compares the development of employee burnouts and the increase of competences required. He believes that we have to insist on our professional competency and fight the idea that we always have to be agile and ready to change.

Is it fair to demand that we are professionally competent, socially skilled, and have a whole number of personality traits – all at the same time? Let us know in the comments.

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