Upskilling for Shared Prosperity is a call to action. It makes the economic case for providing employees with learning and development opportunities to expand their horizons while minimizing skills gaps.
Due to the disconnect between current education programs and the skills employers, the need today and the future to look at upskilling as an advantage to embrace including its wider social benefits triggered by the development of specific skills that prove beneficial for the future success of the global and local economy.
Upskilling offers recommendations for businesses and policy-makers and shares examples of successful collaborations that can be replicated and expanded.
According to the World Economic reports of 2021, regions and economies with the biggest gains from upskilling are those in which the skills gaps are larger and the potential is greatest to improve productivity through skills augmentation aligned with new technology.
COVID-19 has accelerated the need to implement an ambitious global upskilling agenda because it is forcing digitalization and automation at a more rapid pace. Rising to this challenge could result in faster progress and even larger economic benefits by 2030.
This is at Kahill Insights Company Limited, we have focused the last quarter of 2021 on training our clients’ teams and ours on how to do digital marketing better in a hybrid economy that keeps on shifting focus as per the virus’s effects to the people.
It is well known that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is already reshaping the future of jobs, hence a good percentage of the additional GDP that could be gained through it can be earned/ must be earned in upskilling in business services and manufacturing sectors.
Unemployment is expected to rise as economies continue to experience the effects of the pandemic. In Uganda, we are already experiencing as night businesses are no longer working as our unofficial working hours are 3 pm in reference to over-the-counter services in banks that close at that time. There is a need for a common vision across governments, industries, and the education sector to develop comprehensive national upskilling agendas. The pandemic provides an
opportunity to reform education systems and rethink skills training to benefit more people. To do this, however, governments, industries, trade unions, and educational institutions need to work together.
Uganda Employment agencies and human resource organizations need to look at the future of their economic capital investment and how having schools closed with no real direction of how pupils and students can learn will affect their businesses. Alongside the future workforce, the present workforce needs investment in anchor upskilling and make it a core business principle with timebound pledges to act in line with
– Developing clear “people plan”, using a people-centric approach in which technology is aligned to the needs of workers and society,
– Make long-term commitments to upskilling employees,
– Promote multidisciplinary collaboration (with a diversity of perspectives) across internal and external stakeholders,
– Work with labor representatives to ensure good jobs and agree to worker’s forums and common standards.
Upskilling could propel the transition to an economy where human labor is increasingly complemented and augmented – rather than replaced – by new technology, thus improving the overall quality of jobs. The number of jobs that require creativity, innovation, and empathy will rise, as will the need for information technology skills.
Education providers in Uganda, can you embrace the future of work as a source of reinvention to normalize lifelong
learning for all? Like can you
– Prioritize vocational and higher education curricula that are “just in time” rather than “just in case”, working with business?
– Scale up the provision of self-directed learning and nano-degrees for lifelong learning
– Build bridges between national qualification systems and lifelong learning so skills are recognized globally
– Connect schools and places of learning with each other globally.
I like that more parents and educators are adopting the ACE curriculum and others in its forum to develop their children and student in a more involved education that provides long-lasting learning experiences in the children.
Can government adopt an agile approach to driving national upskilling initiatives, working with businesses, non-profits, and the education sector
– Prioritize funding for upskilling in national recovery plans
– Recognize the economic, skill-building, and inclusion potential from government-sector employment and associated supply chains
– Support and provide incentives for green investments and technology innovation
– Nurture a pipeline of industrial investment projects via a “bottom-up” approach
– Encourage broad transparency of the types of skills and jobs that each economy is most likely to need
in the medium and longer-term?
Then as a people who are the rest of the stakeholders, let’s build a strong and interconnected ecosystem committed to a comprehensive upskilling agenda and give people the opportunity to participate in
– Mapping the evolving job landscape and forecasting future skills demand
– Collectively determine a set of indicators that measure the quality of employment at the industry, national and subnational levels
– Establish a common research framework to understand the dynamics and projections of labor markets and skills mismatches
– Identify policy levers that succeed in guiding labor market transformation and the provision of good jobs.
All the above ideas were adopted from the World Economic Report on Upskilling for Shared Prosperity Insight Report of January 2021.
