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According to the report Young graduates and Employability, presented by Randstad Research and the Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU which we talked about in a previous post, the needs of the labour market in the coming years will be the result of several change trends occurring simultaneously, such as digitalization, demographic change or environmental transition. Trends that will favour the creation of new jobs and the obsolescence of some occupations we know today.
Digitalization is creating and will continue to create new jobs, which are necessary for digitalization itself to take place. Many of these jobs are new, such as specialists in the Internet of Things, cyber security, Artificial Intelligence or Big Data, or robotics engineers, e-commerce or social media experts, or FinTech engineers in the financial sector. In addition, digitalization will indirectly create many jobs in other sectors.
In turn, digitalization makes some jobs obsolete or significantly reduces their demand by automating a significant proportion of their tasks. The sectors most affected could be hospitality, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, agriculture, retail, financial services, construction and mining. In terms of specific jobs, examples include accountants, auditors, payroll technicians and financial analysts.
For its part, environmental transition is creating and will continue to create the so-called green jobs needed to achieve an increasingly less polluting and environmentally friendly economy, in areas such as energy efficiency, renewable energies, sustainable mobility, water or resource management. Some examples are the jobs of engineers in renewable energies or electric mobility.
Jobs with the greatest demand for professionals in the future
In this sense, the study Young graduates and Employability points out a series of jobs that, in the future, may suffer a greater imbalance between the needs of companies and the availability of profiles. There are certain positions categorized in the traffic light of the report with the red colour i.e., whose demand will increase drastically and for which there will be few professionals available, which means great opportunities for professionals who want to train in these skills.
Among these positions are experts in the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; software and application developers or engineers in renewable energies, aeronautics or industrial and environmental chemistry. Once again, they have in common digitalization and environmental transition, which are the key to employability in the coming decades.
Skills acquisition, a need
The study conducted by Randstad Research and the Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU reminds us that higher education alone does not guarantee employment, but must be combined with the acquisition of skills.
On the one hand, digitalization transforms the organization of production processes, affecting an increasing number of tasks performed in the workplace. For this reason, digital skills are and will be increasingly necessary for any professional, and not only for experts in the digital sector. Although this demand for digital skills is growing across the board, the level required varies considerably between sectors and occupations, and for most occupations an expert level is not necessary. However, a higher level of digital skills can lead to improved employability in a wider range of jobs.
On the other hand, digitization also increases the demand for a set of skills of a non-digital nature.
