Work, Employment Relations and the Development Agenda - The Dynamics of Change

One of the first objectives in dealing with the changing global environment must be on preparing the workforce for a virtually unknown world in which they must possess the technical skills to survive in this new world of work. Also, our education system must seek to graduate new entrants into the workplace with attributes which provide critical thinking, global awareness, and digital literacy.

Evidence from available research and existing body of literature clearly indicates that in the next five years, the changes to how we work, and the kinds of work we perform will be markedly different from any other five-year period in recent history. From the time of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, mankind has made advances through technology, from the electric power to the digital era of the 1980s to our present encounter with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Scholars have described this fourth revolution as fundamentally different from the previous three due to emerging technology breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, biotechnology and autonomous transport.

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