Transcript
SOPHIE HOWE
It’s so important for us to be thinking about the sorts of skills that are going to be relevant for people to be able to enter into the world of work in the future, but also to lead good lives. And the world of work is changing exponentially. We know that we have a huge number of skills gaps in industries that we will need to meet our climate targets, for example.
We know that digital is becoming increasingly important. And yet, perhaps in our schools, the digital skills are not as good as they could be. We know that, increasingly, rote learning and regurgitation of knowledge are not the sorts of things that people are going to need in the future. Already, automation and artificial intelligence is outperforming humans in terms of knowledge.
And so the things that we will need to focus on are those human skills, so the things that robots can’t do, cooperation, collaboration, teamwork, empathy, critical thinking. And that means that our whole education system is going to have to shift from where it has been in the past towards helping people to develop those skill sets. It also means that lifelong learning is going to have to become the new normal if we are all to keep up with the changing nature of technology and the changing nature of work.
So we need a big shift in the way in which we’re thinking about skills for the future if we’re going to meet our climate change targets. We know that across the industries in terms of the jobs that are going to be essential to meet those decarbonisation targets, there are huge skills gaps. So we’ve got gaps in terms of skills for people working in nature, gaps in terms of skills of engineers, the people who are going to install our electric vehicle infrastructure, the people who are going to be rebuilding our public transport networks.
And my analysis shows that there are the possibility of creating around 26,000 new jobs in the green economy here in Wales in the next two years. But we need to do that quickly in order to be able to deliver against our climate change targets. We also need to do it in a purposeful way because at the moment, the people who occupy those industries are predominantly white men.
And there is a risk that if we do not focus on targeting underrepresented groups, women, disabled people, those from Black ethnic minority communities into those jobs, there’s a real risk that we exacerbate existing inequality in the workforce. If we get this right, however, there’s a real opportunity for us to be tackling inequality whilst also doing what we need to do to meet our climate change targets.