The State of Skills: A Global View from Burning Glass Institute and Wiley

Abstract

While Future Skills are widely discussed, there is also a profound debate on how to measure and assess skills in order to identify skills gaps and design measures to address them. Job markets are undergoing significant changes due to the constant demand for new skills in almost all industries. One in eight U.S. job postings in 2021 require skills in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Social Media, and Product Management, which are among the fastest-growing and most rapidly spreading skills.

While Future Skills are widely discussed, there is also a profound debate on how to measure and assess skills in order to identify skills gaps and design measures to address them. Job markets are undergoing significant changes due to the constant demand for new skills in almost all industries. One in eight U.S. job postings in 2021 require skills in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Social Media, and Product Management, which are among the fastest-growing and most rapidly spreading skills. Workers have had to replace or upgrade over a third of their skills to keep up with their occupation’s demands in the past five years. Skills disruption can have positive effects on innovation, productivity, and compensation, but it can also lead to job loss and make education and training systems obsolete. The Burning Glass Institute and the Business–Higher Education Forum have identified these four high-demand emerging skill sets as a laboratory for understanding how to prepare workers and students for skills disruption, with a focus on the U.S. The report includes profiles of recent innovations from the BHEF network to illustrate how programs can help learners acquire essential skills.

This report’s methodology as well as the section “How Emerging Skills Are Spreading” (p. 25) are shortly described in this info box, showing how technology-related skills are becoming transversal skills across sectors.

FormalPara Coming Soon to a Job Near You: How Emerging Skills Are Spreading Beyond the World of Tech

The section discusses how the four skill sets laid out (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Social Media, and Product Management) are spreading beyond the tech sector to other industries. This reflects a fundamental shift in adoption from niche technologies to broad acceptance across fields (Fig. 25.1). Additionally, the geographic concentration of people with these skills is decreasing, with significant declines in AI/ML and Cloud Computing skills. The trend of dispersion is consistent, and many more jobs for people with these skills are available across the country. This shift is driven by the explosion of demand and the deeper integration of these skills into the core of everyday work, and not just the post-pandemic shift toward remote work.

Fig. 25.1

Top non-tech jobs requiring AI/ML by share of skill demands (own representation by the Burning Glass Institute, the Business-Higher Education Forum, and Wiley)

FormalPara Beyond Tech: How (Higher) Education Institutions Should Address Emerging Skills

The chapter also discusses the implications of the spread of emerging skills for higher education and businesses. It is argued that emerging skills, such as AI/ML, should become staples in a wide array of courses and curricular areas, not just limited to specialized programs. Educational institutions should ensure that learners are aware of the importance of these emerging skills to virtually all career paths. Schools should continuously assess and reassess the relative importance of key skills in the labor market and collaborate closely with local and regional businesses and other industries or sectors for which the new emerging skills may well prove qualifying. By doing so, higher education can play a critical role in preparing individuals for success in the workforce. Furthermore, businesses should adopt the expectation that the workforce will constantly acquire new skills and center learning in the entire enterprise. They should track pressing skill needs and relevant skill adjacencies and use this information to identify or build effective talent pipelines internally. Companies can also partner with higher education institutions and others to deliver high-quality, just-in-time learning for existing and entering employees, either inside their companies or in higher education or other settings.

FormalPara Methodology

The Burning Glass Institute conducted a landscape analysis to identify areas of great transformation in emerging skills that change jobs, workplaces, and industries, and to inform leaders on how they can respond to this phenomenon. The study analyzed 228 million job postings from 2015 to the present and identified four clusters of skills that are experiencing rapid rates of growth, high demand, and are spreading across industries and regions. The study prioritized identifying new skills that have emerged over the past decade and do not require a university degree as a prerequisite. The paper examines the growth, demand, spread, and transition pathways of these skill clusters throughout firms, occupations, regions, and industries.

Further Information: https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/how-skills-are-disrupting-work