03 Feb Social Competencies are the new human currency
You may believe that your value at work is derived only from your experience and that your digital and social competencies, don’t play a part in defining your success, or your value.
With the exponential increase in the power of technology, the skills that cannot be replaced by AI or automation is our ability to be human; to show empathy to connect and to care. These soft skills are what will enable us to make a more valuable contribution in the future, as collaboration, empathy and entrepreneurial skills are what make us uniquely human and it is these skills that are less likely be disrupted by artificial intelligence.
Organisation that embrace AI to automate codifiable and diagnostic tasks will free up the time of their people to be deployed towards other more valuable social tasks, an investment in building & strengthening social connections. Swinburne’s Centre for the New Workforce identified in their recent report Peak Human Potential – Preparing Australia’s workforce for the digital future’, that 38% of workers preferred to learn on the job as opposed to other learning formats. The report goes on to describe the need to develop these tacit learning environments, where knowledge can be shared and new skills acquired by observing the actions of colleagues.
“A worker experimenting with new technologies and developing insights is ‘tacit’ learning in action. So, too, is collaborating with others in ambiguous and dynamic environments on divergent problems. These tacit approaches to learning become even more important in the face of rapidly accelerating technologies because they can create new value faster.”
– John Hagel and John Seely Brown
The relevance of this need to create tacit learning environments, is how our physical workplace environments are then constructed to support and facilitate this tacit learning ability through collaborative work practices.
What business processes in your organization could be automated into the future? What impact would that have on the time of your people to create more valuable work by engaging in more socially competent activities? How is your environment facilitating this tacit learning?
In March, 2019 McKinsey did a study which found that 46% of current work activities in Australia, would be displaced by automation by 2030. Whilst Swinburne’s report identified that an overwhelming 51% of people are worried about losing their jobs to automation and AI. This equates to over 7 million Australians.
The opportunity for employers is to become a learning organisation, achieving a competitive advantage by embedding learning into the workforce as 56% of working Australians expect that their work in the next five years will require skills that they currently do not have.
They found that the more digitally disrupted the industry, the more workers preferred to learn at work.
According to Sean Gallagher, Director of Swinburne Centre for the New Worforce and author of the report, “learning and work need to converge”. By creating environments where we’re facilitating on the job learning in a more tacit approach and by identifying where AI, automation and digital disruption can be embraced, organisations can begin to deliver greater value.