“The need for societies to shift labor rapidly across industry boundaries is likely to increase in importance as industries are upended in the aftermath of the immediate crisis. Societies around the world should be thinking about how they can accelerate these shifts through reskilling programs,” notes an article by Albrecht Enders, Lars Haggstrom and Rafael Lalive in the Harvard Business Review.
Though automation has often been blamed for putting traditional jobs at risk of disappearance, it is ironically this same wave of technological innovation that could lead a jobs recovery — at least within the Singapore economy. Lin of McKinsey says that the need to quicken the pace of digitalisation following Covid-19 will ultimately lead to net job creation as tech firms experience greater demand for labour to drive their expansion. These new jobs, she observes, will leverage digitalisation, data and everything that comes with these trends.
Naturally, re-training will be key for the present workforce to build the requisite skills needed for them to perform these jobs. By virtue of tending to be higher skilled roles, retraining to take up such positions promise higher wages to workers who re-equip themselves with the necessary competencies to fill these roles. As the demand for these “digital jobs” increases with the digitalisation of the economy, the need to reskill workers will only accelerate, necessitating the rapid transformation of the workforce to ensure readiness for the new economy.
