Upskilling & Reskilling: Developing Power Skills for Tomorrow’s Challenges

Kevin Coleman is a highly skilled senior level project and program manager/advisor with experience leading projects with labor budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-million dollar budgets across multiple industries.

  Organizational Culture   Strategy   Talent Management  

The workplace of tomorrow will certainly be different from the one we have today. No one’s crystal ball can forecast with a high-degree of accuracy exactly what tomorrow’s work environment will be like, but there are some indicators.

There will undoubtably be disruptive changes taking place for years (if not decades) to come. With that, professionals must continuously assess what the skills and personal attributes needed to succeed in the workplace of the future are—and then cultivate them. They will likely be some combination of soft skills and hard skills that are influenced by numerous factors. However, the overall changes to the workforce go far beyond the current thoughts of most professionals.

The current workforce longevity is much longer these days—and growing. According to figures published in Deloitte’s 2017 “Rewriting the Rules for the Digital Age,” career lengths will increase to between 60 and 70 years as we move much closer to a life expectancy of 100 years of age. The report also examined the average length of time an individual will remain in a specific job, and that is a mere four-and-a-half years.

While that is eye-opening, what caught the attention of many (and the reason behind this article) is that the coming half-life of a skill will only be five years. That means a new skill’s value will be cut in …

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