Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 24, 2020 - March 1, 2020

UPSKILLING is no longer a luxury but a necessity in today’s world. The four key forces driving the upskilling imperative today, says Sridharan Nair, managing partner of PwC Malaysia, are increasing job automation, decreasing talent availability, decreasing mobility of skilled labour and ageing talent.

“People are no longer questioning the need to upskill. As we can see, job automation is one of the driving forces as businesses look to reduce cost,” says Sridharan, better known as Sri.

PwC’s latest 23rd Annual Global CEO Survey, “Navigating the rising tide of uncertainty”, highlights that the percentage of jobs at risk of automation cuts across education levels.

In the early 2020s, 1% to 3% of existing jobs that require low to high education are at potential risk of automation.

That percentage of jobs at risk of automation increases to between 10% and 23% in the late 2020s. The survey shows that 19% of jobs requiring a low level of education are at risk of automation in the late 2020s, whereas it is 23% and 10% for the medium and high levels respectively.

In the mid-2030s, the percentage rises to 44% of jobs at risk (low education), 36% for medium and 11% for high.

The data reinforces the findings of another PwC survey “Will robots really steal my job?”, which showed that less educated workers could be particularly exposed to the risk of automation in the long run, emphasising the importance of increased investment in lifelong learning and retraining.

“The world of work is changing, as shown in our ‘Upskilling Hopes and Fears’ research. We surveyed 22,000 people across the world last year and found that more than half of them expect automation to significantly change their jobs or make them obsolete in a decade or so.

“About 77% say they are willing to learn new skills or completely retrain to improve their future employability, but only 33% said they had been given the opportunities to develop digital skills outside their normal duties. That’s the conundrum — to find time and opportunities to do upskilling,” says Sri, adding that, over the next four years, PwC is investing US$3 billion (RM12.5 billion) in training its people, and developing and sharing technologies to support its clients and communities.

There is also the misconception that upskilling is limited to acquiring digital knowledge, he adds.

“Yes, for many of us, digital knowledge is an area that needs upskilling, but it’s not just that. For technical and digital skills to be relevant, one needs to [combine] them with human skills such as soft skills, learning agility and the ability to interact, connect and engage,” he notes.

Sri points out that a concern regarding upskilling was that it involved a huge investment outlay and may not pay off when the upskilled talent leaves.

“But another way to look at it is: What if you don’t upskill your talent and they stay? You will have an unskilled labour force,” he adds.

“Corporations need to be clear on why they are upskilling. Communicate it effectively to employees and, most importantly, give people time to train and retrain themselves. There is a need for businesses … to work with governments and organisations or chambers, and drive this from a broader perspective. It needs to be a top-down and bottom-up approach.”

In its Budget 2020 announced last week, the Singapore government allocated S$1,000 (RM2,988) SkillsFuture Credit top-up for mid-career workers and increased the capacity of reskilling programmes.

Aside from upskilling, Sri says the Global CEO Survey shows that CEOs are equally split on privacy regulations in striking a balance between consumer trust and business competitiveness.

“It’s clear that society will no longer tolerate self-regulation. Privacy regulation is necessary to safeguard consumer interest, which boosts consumer trust in businesses,” says Sri.

“The burden of compliance needs to be moved from individuals to companies, because data protection is currently an ‘opt out’ experience and people have to toggle their privacy settings to turn it off. Businesses need to understand that, if customers can’t trust them to protect their information, they don’t want to do business with them.”

While businesses accept that regulation on data privacy is inevitable, Sri points out that they need guidance on when the information they collect can be used to serve the public interest, fuel innovation or solve problems.

In Malaysia, data protection and privacy are covered under the Personal Data Protection Act 2010. The government announced last March that the PDPA was being reviewed to streamline it with international requirements on personal data protection.

Sri observes that, in Malaysia, awareness of data protection and privacy is still low among smaller enterprises as well as businesses whose products and services change faster than legislation can be implemented.

He believes that guidelines for the PDPA need to be made more objective, so that it is easier for companies, especially small and medium enterprises, to interpret, implement and comply with data privacy policies.

“Smaller companies that work for larger global companies may also be the ‘weak link’ in data breaches. If their safeguards are less rigorous, a breach in their data would also impact their larger parent company; for example, the data breach at one of the local air carriers happened within one of its contractor companies in India,” he says.

“Clearer guidelines in the PDPA would also allow regulators to accurately determine when a breach of the guidelines has occurred, so courts are able to convict wrongdoers.”

To make privacy laws effective, Sri reckons that any new legislation needs to have common standards on data storage and customers’ rights.

“This makes it easier and more effective for companies to comply with legislation, particularly if their operations span across borders. At the national level, we could leverage regional platforms such as [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] to encourage regional dialogue on data privacy frameworks to promote a stronger digital economy,” he says.

 

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