Dive Brief:

• Workers are most interested in technology and business roles, according to a recent Pearson survey, but believe that they will need “human” skills such as problem-solving, decision-making and teamwork to find those roles. Pearson surveyed 4,000 workers in the U.S., U.K., India and Brazil.
• Among U.S. employees, 73% said they preferred to learn via their employer. Pearson found that problem-solving and decision-making were the top two skills U.S. workers were currently developing or maintaining for career advancement, while leadership, entrepreneurship and project management were the skills respondents were most interested in developing in the future.
• Lifelong learning also emerged as a theme in Pearson’s results; 81% of U.S. workers said they agreed that the world is shifting toward a model where people participate in learning throughout their lives.

Dive Insight:

Rapid changes in the tech space — of which generative artificial intelligence platforms are the most recent examples — continue to change the nature of jobs and the skills needed to perform them.

A February report published by Coursera and the Burning Glass Institute noted that these advancements make some skills obsolete, putting pressure on employers to determine what areas training programs should invest in. The same report noted that risk management and project management were seen as relatively safe investments given that these skills can pay off throughout a workers’ entire career.

Yet creative skills also have been shown to attract higher wages, according to research published in 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM Watson AI Lab, especially as tasks that are more suitable for machine learning become automated.

The focus on skills has not always translated to hiring, however, even as employers increasingly demand specific skill sets. A 2022 Deloitte report found that many employers still struggle with transitioning away from hiring models that prioritize candidates with certain degrees rather than those with needed skills.

Read the full report here