In just five years, the requirements to hold a position have changed radically and at an accelerated pace, and it shows in three quarters of the jobs.
That is one of the conclusions of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report “Shifting Skills, Moving Targets, and Remaking the Workforce”, after evaluating more than 15 million online job offers between 2016 and 2021. With this information, it designed the Disruptive Skills Index (Skill Disruption Index) with which it was possible to verify how fast and significant the changes in specific roles are.
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As explained by the firm, the index combines two measures: the arrival of new skills and the change in the importance of those skills.
For a data engineer, this index is 100 and for an organizational psychologist it is 82.
Also included are a chief information officer/director of information technology: (76), a talent acquisition/recruitment manager (71), a technical writer (69), an executive director (63), and a counselor. career (60).
If it is an air traffic controller that indicator is 56, for a physicist it is 48; for a cook it is 37 and for a musician or singer it reaches 27.
About three quarters of the jobs changed the most between 2019 and 2021 (a compound annual growth rate of 22%) than between 2016 and 2018 (19%).
“We attribute this increase to the pandemic, which forced companies to rethink operations and people in all types of occupations to adopt new ways of working and new skills”, analyzes According to Sandro Marzo, Managing Director & Partner of BCG .
Additionally, 37% of the top 20 skills in demand in average jobs have changed since 2016.
One in five skills (22%) it’s brand new. The sectors where this change has been seen the fastest are finance, design, media, writing, business operations and management, human resources and IT.
“In fact, the pace of change has accelerated to such an extent that many jobs are being compromised in the absence of disruptive skills,” he says.
The study looked at the percentage of the top 20 requested skills that changed. In jobs related to customer service, while in 2017 they were 13%, by 2021 it went to 46% and in administration and commercial operations the jump was from 13% to 32%.
According to BCG, technology is the main factor driving the change in in-demand skills. In some cases, it has brought drastic changes to different sectors and cites, in particular, the case of electronic commerce.
In others, it implies more subtle changes such as the replacement of paper by tablets, the assignment of medical or banking shifts, or even the payment of transportation from applications.
A theme that is confirmed in this study about disruptive skills is that the skills that have to do with fields such as data analysis and digital marketing are no longer limited only to jobs in the field of Technology and Information ( YOU).
For its part, soft skills, such as verbal communication and relationships, have become transversal to all areas.
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Marzo says that a unique era called the Great Disruption is beginning, a labor phenomenon that demands quick action from employers to understand what skills their organization needs and how to access them, to anticipate what the market demands.
“This is why the different departments of a company must be complemented with new skills,” recommends the study.
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In just five years, the skill shift has been rapid and far-reaching. In some jobs, it has been overwhelming. Organizational leaders, human resources teams, educators, public sector agents, and employees must identify these changes, not only to apply for the new skills in vacancies, but also to retrain your teamsand thus keep them competitive.
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