Proficient human skills go hand in hand with digital competency when it comes to reshaping the economy and labour market.
As employees are expected to grasp and work with increasingly higher levels of technology — in particular, generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) — they also need to demonstrate strong social skills and cognitive awareness to connect with each other in hybrid environments and complement work undertaken alongside sophisticated machines.
Hosting a recent Ai Group webinar, Ai Group Centre for Education and Training Executive Director Megan Lilly said: “This fits in with the European Commission Statement in 2022 looking at Industry 5.0, which is the next step in the evolution of economies and societies.
“The Commission declared we will be required to adopt a human-centric approach to digital technologies, including artificial intelligence.”
Ms Lilly was joined by panellists Patrick Kidd, CEO of the Future Skills Organisation — the Jobs and Skills Council for Australia’s finance, technology and business sectors — and the University of Sunshine Coast’s Retha Scheepers.
In recently released Ai Group CET research, Listening to Australian businesses on workforce and skills 2024: The digital and AI revolution, 41 per cent of businesses — in particular, SMEs — reported ‘no engagement’ with AI.
When asked about the barriers holding them back, the top three reasons were insufficient understanding of the opportunities, skills gaps and leaders lacking the skills and capabilities.
Three in four businesses intend to focus their efforts this year on improving the digital skills of their managers, up from 60 per cent in 2022.
“There is a clear message here: a lack of human skills and capabilities is preventing many businesses from embracing and utilising AI technology,” Ms Lilly said.
Assoc Prof Scheepers outlined findings from a soon-to-be-released report produced in collaboration with the Sunshine Coast Council based on a survey of 1000 Australian employees around the country.
Employees said their optimism and trust in Gen AI outweighed their skills.
“They have a cautious optimism of what it might be able to do, but much training is needed,” Assoc Prof Scheepers said.
“It’s important we don’t neglect our human skills as we improve our technical skills.”
Mr Kidd shared insights from Future Skills Organisation’s new report, Impact of Gen AI on skills in the workforce, which explores how jobs will change and the implications for the education and training system.
The report states general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as Gen AI have the potential to drastically reshape industries, spark complementary innovations and significantly influence productivity.
“It's a super important issue and the GPT environment is evolving incredibly quickly,” Mr Kidd said.
“If we reflect on where we were 12 months ago from where we are today and where we’re going to be in 12 months’ time — it’s difficult to imagine.
“Meanwhile, the need for people to be able to communicate, think about complex problems and work in teams – none of that goes away.
“In many respects, it becomes more important.”
The report says the potential impacts of AI can be categorised in three ways:
“The challenge for the education and training sector is to keep up with the rapid pace of change of GPTs and remain relevant to economic needs,” Mr Kidd said.
“A lot of research talks at a high level about the impact on job roles, but there isn't much that looks in detail at what it means for the existing qualifications system and how it might change.
“It's the cognitive piece most impacted by generative AI; jobs that heavily rely on it are going to be most impacted compared to jobs that don't.
“If that logic holds true, you can unpack education and training qualifications and start to understand the implications of this type of technology. It follows that the higher the skill level, the greater the impact of generative AI.
“It's not a big jump to get to the conclusion that jobs tied to university qualifications are likely to be most impacted and the more traditional industrial jobs, least impacted.”
Within the Vocational and Educational Training (VET) system, graduate diplomas and graduate certificates will be more impacted than Certificate IIIs and below.
‘Skills reordering’ is becoming super important, Mr Kidd said.
“We need to understand which skills are important and shine a light on them and send a clear signal to the education and training system so they can respond,” he added.
“At the moment, we're sending quite contradictory messages which means they are still training in a relatively traditional way.
“Within the VET sector, we have a system which would probably take two years to change a skill set or qualification.
“That’s not appropriate for where we are today.
“We've got to find a way of enabling the training system to be responsive and agile to the needs of the sector as these skills start to change.
“Half the battle is knowing how to get going. We’ve been talking about things like digital literacy for years and yet we've done nothing about it at a systemic level.
“There is an urgent need to be clear about the skills employers want to see, make it easy for them to access those skills and make it easy for the training sector to deliver those skills at scale.
“Presently, we don't have solutions that can be scaled quickly across the board.”
“As AI becomes more important as an enabler of jobs, there is a need for people to have more digital skills at a generalist level,” Mr Kidd said.
“That means every worker in the workforce – not just technology specialists.
“That helps to start to put in place a structure of generalist employability skills across all industries to ensure that people can respond to an environment moving very quickly.”
It’s the rapid improvements of Gen AI that mean most workers don’t need to be technology specialists.
“GPTs enable you to be less concerned about having technical skills — digital literacy skills in a conventional sense — because Gen AI is a seamless interface with the information you're getting,” Mr Kidd said.
“It's sat in the background, enabling you to interact in a much more human way with technology, which is why those human skills are needed.
“Workers need to understand how to interact with technology and need to be critical about the information they’re getting, to get the most from it.
“We’re hearing from employers and industry that the overriding need is for people with generalist digital skills that can be applied across a range of different jobs.”
Gen AI is also impacting jobs that traditionally require specialist digital skills, such as software code development.
“With AI enablement, experienced software developers can do much more than they could before,” Mr Kidd said.
“It means traditional entry-level jobs which involved repetitive tasks now done by AI don't exist.
“It’s much harder to grow a balanced workforce when those jobs are disappearing.”
“We need to be clear that when we're talking about generalist AI skills, they are skills for everybody,” Mr Kidd said.
“These skills will continue to adjust and change into the future, so we need simple ways of delivering the training that's necessary to get to lots of people.
“At the specialist end, we need to be clear about where the skills needs are greatest.
“For example, there is a need for about 20,000 cyber professionals over the next seven or eight years.
“We should be focused on the skills of tomorrow, as well as the skills of today.
“It’s striking the right balance between what you need to ensure you're safe and compliant and ensuring you are thinking ahead about the types of people and skills you need to power an economy which is going to continue to change all the time.”
Ms Lilly added: “The challenges make the opportunity worthwhile.
“There are tremendous opportunities and tremendous scope for rethinking much of what we're already doing.”
The next Ai Group Centre for Education and Training webinar, Tafe Centres of Excellence and industry involvement, will be held in September.
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Wendy Larter is Communications Manager at the Australian Industry Group. She has more than 20 years’ experience as a reporter, features writer, contributor and sub-editor for newspapers and magazines including The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Metro, the News of the World, The Times and Elle in the UK.
