Hardwired to Learn

The Fourth Industrial Revolution demands massive employee reskilling and upskilling across the workforce. 

Digitization, now in its sixth decade, ushered in a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend to digital transformation, with more organizations ramping up their efforts at digitization, remote work and automation. 4IR could prove even more disruptive than the three previous phases of the Industrial Revolution, in which society and the economy transitioned from agriculture to industry, then factory to services, and thirdly toward information, computerization and data.

These broad shifts, and the current 4IR transition to digitization, usher in requirements for new skills and knowledge. The jobs of the future demand massive re-skilling throughout the labor force, and a transition toward humans working more closely with machines and artificial intelligence (AI). As firms like Amazon – with more than a million workers – automate more of their operations, they are planning for the enormous learning employees will need to perform the higher-level cognitive functions required to ...