The Three Cs: The digital skills you need for future success

How can we identify the digital skills of the future? The future world of work demands that we view digital skills as a key building block of all jobs – driving performance and productivity across the board – rather than an isolated set of skills for specific tasks. Futurist Tom Cheesewright points us in the right direction…

The role of the futurist is to survey the landscape, but in four dimensions rather than three. We picture how the landscape will evolve over time. Our task is not to make specific predictions, though we might, for fun, from time to time. Instead, we examine the range of possibilities and share those, sometimes prescribing actions that seem a sensible response to the spectrum of possible futures.

Across all the industries in which I work, not least those concerned with place and space, there are a few key trends and most prevalent of all is the rising role of technology. The march of digitalisation is not slowing. In just a few years, the digital world will be so embedded and enmeshed in the physical that we will stop considering them as separate things. Talk of digital skills may evaporate, but they will be more crucial than ever.

Three technologies for tomorrow

Let me give you three examples of technology that will bring this about. The first is mixed reality. There is a good chance that by the mid- 2020s our primary interface with technology is a pair of glasses that overlays everything we see in the physical world with digital information. That might mean virtual billboards, virtual objects, even virtual people – or creatures. All rendered in photorealistic quality and synced perfectly into the physical environment. We’ll still need other interfaces. It’s hard to see how we replicate the precision and tactility of the keyboard and mouse in that time frame. But most of us will likely spend ten hours a day in this blended world of physical and digital.

The second critical technology is the so-called Internet of Things. The price of adding an internet connection to an object, be it a brick or a shirt button, is now incredibly low. It will continue to fall, to the point where the utility required to justify adding a connection to objects becomes almost negligible. Whatever you want to monitor or control remotely, you will be able to – within reason. Getting enough power to things will remain a challenge for the time being. But the places we inhabit will increasingly be made of smart things rather than dumb ones, constantly monitoring the environment for the sake of our health, security and quality of life. Or, to look at it from another perspective, there might not be a lot of privacy in the future.

Both of these technologies will be deeply connected by the third: artificial intelligence. AI will play a greater and greater role in all our lives, both positive and negative. There’s no immediate prospect of AI reaching sci-fi levels of capability. This is not the world of C3PO or the Terminator. Instead, we will rely on a very large collection of much more rudimentary automated functions to assist us at home and at work, and to manage our interfaces with the mixed reality we live in and the smart devices that surround us. AIs will handle basic shopping tasks, and make bookings for our travel, with very little intervention from us, or even any formal command. They will know what we want and where we need to be and take care of things on our behalf. Much of the administrative burden consuming chunks of our working lives will be increasingly automated, allowing us to focus on those talents that remain uniquely human. Of course, many people are employed in largely administrative roles. This low-friction future is perhaps not so positive for them.

The prevailing trend for employment in this future world will likely be a continuation of the current trend. We are shifting from a world of secure jobs in large, monolithic corporations, to more contract work distributed between smaller organisations and freelancers. Successful businesses now are often made up of a network of components, many of which are not owned and operated by that business. Resource is acquired to meet demand, sometimes through entirely digital interfaces – so called Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs – and sometimes through marketplaces of freelance workers, like oDesk and Fiverr. Process and data-driven work is largely handled through the former. But the more human work is handled through the latter.

What does that human work look like? What skills will continue to differentiate humans from machines into the future?

There are three skills with strong digital components to consider: Curation, Creation, and Communication.

Curation

Curation is the discovery and qualification of the information that drives business and the creative process. In an increasingly globalised, hyper-connected market these skills are more important than ever. Curation skills help people to find the right data, products, services, and suppliers to help them to create and deliver projects, and to ensure the quality and veracity of what they find.

A practical example from a digital perspective is the effective use of search engines. We’re all familiar with tapping a phrase into Google or shouting it to our voice assistant now. But there remains a higher level of skill in structuring those queries to find what is needed quickly and filtering the answers to find the best or most relevant.

Future design decisions will be increasingly based on data, especially with the ubiquity of connected devices and social networks providing a flood of feedback to consider on everything from environmental factors to aesthetic opinions. Tomorrow’s designers and architects will need to be well versed in sourcing, qualifying and manipulating this information.

Creation

The core value of tomorrow’s creative professionals will remain the same: to synthesise something new in response to a challenge or brief. What will continue to change is the tools we use to deliver that value. There are two trends to watch for particularly, and skills to develop in response.

The first is AI assistance, or generative design. Given a set of parameters a machine can now generate an infinite variety of solutions to a problem. These can be used for inspiration or optimisation, allowing the creation of solutions that minimise cost or environmental impact through reducing the materials required, for example. Machines can iterate and test designs, for example looking at structural performance, many times faster than a human can. But they can’t fulfil the brief on their own. Using these tools, a human designer can accelerate the design process and optimise the result.

The second trend is towards increasingly rich tools for visual design. Mixed reality enables us to experience physical designs in three dimensions and allows to consider how those designs perform over time and in different contexts. What will they look like in five years or ten, in different weather conditions, or experienced by people of different sizes or abilities?

Communication

In an increasingly networked world, we are all going to spend more time interfacing with others as a critical function of our own success. Whether it is winning work or collaborating on projects, the power of great communication will be incredibly important. Though nothing will beat face-to-face communication for richness in the near future, digital communication skills will play a very important role in making us visible and attractive partners: like dating profiles for the working world.

Learn to learn

Few of us can work without some measure of these skills already. But their value only grows in importance in the coming years. Now is the time to wake up our mental muscles and ensure that we are in a learning mode, constantly seeking to improve our skills of curation, creation and communication. Learning – or relearning – to learn is perhaps the most important skill of all.

Tom Cheesewright is the founder of applied futurism practice, author of Book of the Future and creator of the Futurist’s Toolkit, a suite of tools for agile organisations. Through consulting, speaking and media work Tom helps people to see, share and respond to a coherent vision of tomorrow.