REVOLUTIONARY SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE
The past year has taught us that you cannot predict what the future will hold. Many unexpected factors can have an impact. However, as business professionals, you can ensure that you have the requisite skills to stay relevant in the business world.
Research shows that by 2030 the likelihood of you working in a job that does not yet exist is quite high. The University of the Witwatersrand researched key skills that you will likely need to succeed in your future career.
The five skills they identified are:
- Cognitive flexibility – the ability to adapt to change and conceptualise multiple complex ideas all at once.
- Digital literacy and computational thinking – these are SMAC skills (social, mobile, analytics and cloud). Being digitally literate offers capabilities beyond what was once thought possible when it comes to emerging technologies.
- Judgement and decision-making – although robots and automation technology may be better than humans in, for example, doing calculations and diagnostic problem-solving, it will be humans that deal with the subjective side of data analytics. Showing the world what numbers mean and their significance will be important.
- Emotional and social intelligence – for everything that can be replaced by digital technologies and AI, emotional and social intelligence remain uniquely human capabilities. And for jobs that require a human element, it will be critical.
- A creative and innovative mindset – much like having an excellent sense of social intelligence, natural creativity is something that cannot easily be replicated by the latest digital technologies.
Our cover story this month ticks the boxes of all the above skills. Over the past five years, a team of CAs(SA) have been working almost nonstop on a revolutionary next-generation digital auditor called ALICE, complete with cognitive skills and data transformation capabilities. ALICE was built to enable assurance professionals to focus on higher-level tasks that need human intelligence, while ALICE can intelligently automate processes to ‘Govern, Manage, and Monitor’ businesses. From the beginning, they knew that this kind of technology would digitally enable, and not replace, assurance professionals. Read their story on page 8.
As many of you would have noticed, SAICA launched our new website a few days ago, and we have had an overwhelmingly positive response from members. Have a look here and let us know what you think.
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