In this article, we will highlight five prominent research studies whose findings show the most important 21st century job skills needed for the future of work and organizations.
The future is now, as these innovation skills are needed more than ever in our world with organizations facing the disruption of COVID-19 and other forces.
In short, employees at all levels must develop their innovation skills. These include competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, communication, strategic thinking, and problem-solving to find and develop creative solutions to the complex world we live in.
Research and Key Findings
These five research studies include interesting findings about desirable skills for the future that all employees should strive to possess.
1. Bloomberg Job Skills Report
As part of its research to rank business programs, a Bloomberg job skills study asked 1,251 job recruiters at 547 companies about the skills they want in their professionals but can’t find. “Sweet spot” skills include four skills that are less common, but more desired. Across industries, these four skills are:
- Communication skills
- Strategic Thinking
- Leadership skills
- Creative Problem Solving
Other important (but not in the sweet spot) skills included:
- Analytical thinking
- Working collaboratively
- Motivation/Boost
- Adaptability
- Quantitative skills
- Decision-making
- Risk-taking
- Industry-related work experience
- Global mindset
- Entrepreneurship
The list of skills could be grouped together and described as “innovation skills,” as they are all vital to developing and launching an innovation. It takes creative problem solving, leadership, strategic thinking, and effective communication.
Bloomberg also offers an interactive tool where you can see which skills are most/least desired and common by industry. It looks similar to the following image:
Bloomberg’s job skills reports focus more on what organizations would want in recent MBA graduates in business.
Other studies shared below present a wider variety of employees.
2. World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Research
The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Future of Jobs Report identified the top 10 skills of 2025. They pointed out that 50% of people will need to be retrained in the next five years due to the “double alteration” of the impact of the pandemic as well as the growing technological automation that has been transforming work in recent years.
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies.
- Complex Problem Solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Use, monitoring and control of technology
- Technology Design & Programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.
- Reasoning, Problem Solving, and Ideation
World Economic Forum reports identifying the top skills for the future have been published every two years since they started writing about them in 2016. It’s interesting to take a look at the skill lists from the latest reports and identify relevant aspects and trends.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum published the report: The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.. “The dataset that forms the basis of the Report is the result of an extensive survey of HR directors and other senior talent and strategy executives from a total of 371 leading employers globally, representing more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas.” This was the sample described in this analysis by the World Economic Forum
From their previous research, the top skills (in order) identified as most needed for 2015 were:
- Complex Problem Solving
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- People Management
- Coordinating with others
- Emotional intelligence
- Judgment and decision-making
- Service orientation
- Negotiation
- Cognitive flexibility
From more recent research on the future, the importance of creativity skyrockets. Here are the 10 most needed skills for 2020:
- Complex Problem Solving
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- People Management
- Coordinating with others
- Emotional intelligence
- Judgment and decision-making
- Service orientation
- Negotiation
- Cognitive flexibility
The “changing nature of work” was cited as the main driver of change in what is needed for the future. As in the other studies, the core skills could be described as innovation skills….. creativity, critical thinking and complex problem solving. These three skills are essential for developing and bringing to life a new innovation that solves a real problem and provides significant value.
The World Economic Forum publishes the Future of Jobs Report 2018 which reports on the skills with the highest demand and need. In this 2018 report, the top three growing skills for 2022 were:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active Learning and Learning Strategies
- Creativity, originality and initiative
3. IBM Global C-Suite Studies
Over 10 years, 17 studies and 23,000 face-to-face interviews, IBM has obtained and published the findings identified with executives. Most importantly for those interested in the value of creativity, IBM conducted a study in 2010 with more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries globally. The main finding was that “CEOs believe that, more than rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision, successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity.”
The study also found that “less than half of global CEOs believe their companies are adequately prepared to handle a highly volatile and increasingly complex business environment. CEOs are facing massive changes: new government regulations, shifts in global economic power centers, accelerated industrial transformation, growing volumes of data, rapidly evolving customer preferences, which, according to the study, can be overcome by instilling “creativity” throughout the organization. “
The updated version of this study in 2019 explored the value of leadership in implementing innovation amid changing times and widespread data use and appropriation. They realized that “data-driven leadership is determined by the levels of trust an organization can create, among its customers, the people within the company, and partners across its ecosystem.”
4. American Management Association (AMA) Critical Skills Surveys
In 2010, the AMA conducted a survey of 2115 managers and other executives about the critical skills employees need at all levels of an organization for the current state and future of work. A similar study was conducted again in December 2012 by AMA. 768 managers and other executives were part of that second study from 2012 that asked about the importance of the 4 critical skills (4Cs) that stood out as critical skills from the first survey for their organizations. 74.6% of managers surveyed believe these 4C skills will be even more important to their organizations in the next three to five years.
These skills were defined as:
- Critical thinking and problem-solving: the ability to make decisions, solve problems, and act accordingly.
- Effective communication: the ability to synthesize and transmit ideas in both written and oral formats.
- Collaboration and team building: the ability to work effectively with others, including those from diverse groups and those with opposing views.
- Creativity and innovation: the ability to see what is NOT there and make something happen.
Managers responded that their employees were currently average, at best, in terms of their development of these critical skills and competencies. These skills are necessary due to the rapid pace of change in business today.
The pace of change (61.4%) and global competence (50.9%) were the main factors selected to explain why critical thinking/problem-solving, effective communication, collaboration/team-building, and creativity/innovation skills and competencies became more critical for organizations.
5. Skills Businesses Need Most From LinkedIn Data
LinkedIn used its extensive dataset to identify the skills businesses need most in 2019 and 2020. The top four soft skills that most companies are looking for align with innovation skills. The main skills in both 2019 and 2020 are:
- Creativity
- Persuasion
- Collaboration
- Adaptability
(Emotional intelligence was added to the list at No. 5 in 2020. This fits well with Empathize, the first stage of design thinking.
Innovation skills in action
The information shown by the different studies highlights how critical innovation skills are for the future of work, organizations and employees.
How can you develop your innovative skills… integrating their problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, and communication skills together for the purpose of developing and taking action on an innovation that can have a positive impact? Can you use these skills to develop an innovation that takes advantage of an opportunity or solves an important problem? Are you trained or prepared to do this?
This requires the application of the important innovation skills shown by the various research studies. What specific innovative learning and development initiative can you create yourself?
If you don’t receive training or development of these critical skills in your organization, how can you be a change agent to help make this change happen and your organization be able to respond to the rapid change in pace and thrive in the future? Employees will be needed at all levels with higher stages of developing their innovation skills.
It may even be necessary to innovate simply in order to learn how to innovate.
Specific innovation skills
Creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication are all very general skills that, taken together, are part of a broader category that we can name as innovation skills. There are many “micro-skills” that can constitute these more general skills, as there are many different modes of communication to master for successful innovation. In the Harvard Business Review article on the DNA of the innovator, a study is included with “3000 executives and 500 people who had created innovative companies or invented new products”.
The key skills that innovators were applying were networking, association, observation, questioning, and experimentation.
Human skills in the age of artificial intelligence
The key to staying relevant and growing in an era of machine learning could be human learning. That requires focusing their own professional learning on developing and applying the kinds of skills that humans are best at and robots don’t do well. Use these human skills to leverage emerging technologies to your advantage to add value to the people you serve, your customers, and users. Focus on how to stay relevant and grow during the age of artificial intelligence. Be sure to keep an eye on research on the future of work to understand which skills are most important for the changing future of your industry. Create an action plan on how to develop those skills and put them into practice strategically. Skills such as empathy, imagination, creativity, strategy, communication or collaboration.
Adapted from the paper Innovation Skills for the Future by Darin J. Eich. (2020)