FUTURE OF JOBS – POST COVID 19 Speaker -Mr. Anshul Sonak

CEMCA under its Skills initiatives conducted a Webinar on the topic: Future of Jobs - Post COVID 19 on June 15, 2020. The expert speaker of the session was Mr. Anshul Sonak. He is the Regional Director – Innovation & Education Programs (Asia), Corporate Affairs Director (SE Asia) working in Intel at Singapore with 23+ year experience on education & skills technology sector and is passionate about innovation for sustainable & inclusive development.

Prof. Madhu Parhar introduced and welcomed Mr. Sonak and invited him to deliver his talk.

Mr. Sonak started his presentation by emphasizing on the point that every pandemic gave new learnings and made us stronger. While mentioning COVID-19 Pandemic, he said whether this pandemic gives us negatives or more opportunities is yet to come. COVID 19 situation is raising the issue of unemployment globally and this is the relevance of today’s topic ‘Future of Jobs’.

All are living in VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world, where data is huge and it is disrupting lives, 50% of the existing works could be automated in coming times and 140 million knowledge workers will be displaced by robotics. There is a pressure on reskilling. He added that attention span of workforce has reduced to 8 secs and this is based on research. He talked about career changes and disruption is massive. He stated that ‘doubling of change is the new constant’.

Job crisis will only grow but Automation and Artificial Intelligence will create new opportunities. So new age job creation will need more of human machine partnerships. Empathy and explanation skills will have job opportunities. There are three big categories of jobs which have value. These are trainers, explainers, and sustainers. The trainers should have thorough knowledge of language and machine to impart the knowledge. He explained that new jobs will need fusion between Skills and Human. Human can do best as they can create, judge, improve, lead and empathies but machine can produce data, give results.

While talking about the Covid 19 impact, he said “world will have no choice but to embrace digital transformation. It will be the reset opportunity and will accelarate change.”

He emphasized that the current generation is more engaged, participatory, connected and image rich. New learning will have a combination of learnability, variability, and sociability as it is the mindset for jobs. He compared the notion of Learn to Work with the new required notion of Work to Learn where learning is a continuous process.

The new employers will check for resilience of the employed. This means person will have to accept the failures and at the same time shall be ready for resilience.

There is a need for accelerating reskilling in T-shaped/ M- shaped. This means having two or three main skills. He also stressed on the skills needed today that are soft skills and not hard skills. Life span of soft skills is long. On the contrary life span of hard skills is very low. He gave quick tips on leaders of today and tomorrow. He also shared that learners are changing and with learners will change the system of learning.

There is the need for adapting to the new situations and new skills and bringing in resilience and grit to move ahead. This is key to success in Jobs.

At the end he posed following questions to think:

1.What are you doing differently compared to last year?

2. How are you embracing new skill sets and mind sets?

3. How fast are you shifting to brick and click model?

4. Are you leading change? Or is change leading you?

He ended his presentation with Robert Noyce’s quote “Do not be encumbered by history. Go and create something wonderful”.

At the end few questions were raised by participants and he gave following tips:

1. Immersive learning should be adapted and the leaders of the institution should go to the ground level and find out the requirement of Skill as per the current demand.

2. Inter-generational learning approach can help the older generation in learning.