The 4th Industrial Revolution Introduction: Digital technologies have completely transformed the way we live and work, and we’re still not done inventing and refining new ways of doing things. Let’s take a look at how digital tech has changed the working world in the past few years, and why being skilled-up in these areas will set you on track for a great career. Submodule 1: Digital Skills Have Never Been So Important Technological development has been going bonkers in the past 20 years or so, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of businesses to use digital skills to survive, with many of them thriving. Retail and grocery stores have taken a hit now that people can’t go shopping like they used to. They’ve had to use digital skills to keep up, making sure that customers can seamlessly order what they want, ready for collection or delivery. Events have had a hard time as well, but you can already see companies and entrepreneurs bouncing back, with live-streamed shows and festivals using platforms like Zoom or Google Meet - even using online multiplayer games like Minecraft and Fortnite to put on events or digital walkthrough tours. For people working desk jobs, the idea of working from home may sound straightforward, but all the activities that used to take place in an office now had to find workarounds. Can people access the work files they need in a secure way to prevent viruses or data leaks? Can IT teams remotely access people’s computers to fix problems? Some companies now have teams working across multiple time zones, who want collaborative documents and projects that simply couldn’t be done with a traditional office setup. Going digital has really come to the forefront of all areas of business, and that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why employers are searching for people with a grounding in digital skills to lead the way! Submodule 2: Zooming In It’s all well and good to tell you that digital skills are being used everywhere, but as they say, seeing (or reading) is believing. Let’s drill down into some of our biggest industries and sectors to see how they’re using digital technology to take their work into the 21st Century: Retail - Adding Digital Skills To Your Cart If you’ve bought something online, you already have a good idea of what a good online store looks like. You want to be able to find what you want, pay for it using your preferred service, and get it posted to your door ASAP. Behind that amazing seamless experience is a huge range of digital tools and skills, that are generally referred to as eCommerce. A good online business will have an eye for web design, great looking images and a buttery-smooth user experience to set themselves apart from the competition. The next step that a lot of stores are adopting is getting into using data analytics to predict what other stuff you’d like to buy, based on what you’ve bought there before, your profile information, and even the sites you browsed before you started shopping. They might also get you on their mailing list to email you a discount code when you haven’t bought anything for a while, or when your birthday’s coming up. Digital skills in retail aren’t just about online shopping either - stores can use customer data to analyse how they lay out their in-person stores to attract their attention to items that need a boost or that customers forget they need. Chain stores often share this data so that they have more evidence to pull from, analyse trends or redirect supplies. Manufacturing and Construction: (Harder), Better, Faster & Stronger Big-scale industrial projects and companies involved in stuff like construction, manufacturing and logistics have been some of the earliest adopters of digital technology. Ironically, it’s because so much of their work involves physical labour, and requires precision to make sure their projects are done quickly and safely. In the construction industry, they’re already working on developing wearable technologies that can tell their workers about hazards, or show blueprints and proposed changes to their designs using Augmented Reality (AR). There are also systems where construction plans are updated with the amount of materials needed in real time! All of this work involves having skills in rendering 3D objects, machine learning and vision, and geospatial imagery. In logistics, automation and deep-learning AI are transforming the way we move goods all around the world. For example, a grocery store in London now uses a hive-mind of mechanical boxes to pack people’s purchases based not on how a person would move through a store, but how a robot could. On a bigger scale, robots are being used to carry dangerous or heavy materials from places like mines, reducing workplace injuries. Agriculture: Data Farming If you’ve never spent time out on a modern farm, you might be surprised to hear just how much digital technology gets used on a daily basis to make their work more productive (which means more high quality, tasty food in your fridge!) Depending on what the farmers are growing, they invest in different technologies. Vegetable farmers use GPS technology to guide their planting and harvesting equipment, as well as moisture probes and weather stations to help them maintain their crops. Other farmers might even use drones and satellite technology to help manage their livestock. If they’re buying supplies, they’ll use software to check that they’re getting the right price for their hard work. Organisations like the CSIRO are even working to create advanced programs which can help predict farmers’ yields, and help them use precious resources more efficiently to reduce farms’ impact on the environment. White-Collar Work: Saying Goodbye To The Cubicle While we’re not quite at the point where computers can replace jobs in what we call the ‘knowledge economy’, they still have the power to change how we work. One of the most obvious things that businesses have done is move out of the office. While it’s nice to be able to hang out with your pets while you work, the real change is that now more than ever you can work from just about anywhere with a good internet connection. This is thanks to software such as video conferencing and cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Some people even choose to be ‘digital nomads’, working for big tech companies while travelling the world. On the business side, businesses can now find the best match for the job based on a global pool of talent, instead of who’s able to make the commute into the office. There’s also the potential for advanced technologies like machine learning and blockchain to help with stuff like predicting demand in a business, employee satisfaction and turnover rates, or even what work is most motivating for each employee. Digital technologies have the potential to help us set work on our own terms and leave some of the more boring tasks to the computers so we can continue to be creative and innovative. Submodule 3: Jobs of the Future But what will the near-future hold for people looking to fully specialise in creating the technology of tomorrow? You may not realise it, but Australia is actually a world leader in AI research such as computer vision, deep learning, field robotics, neural networks and machine learning. Here are a few areas that are still on the cutting edge of what we can do with computers, but are showing a whole lot of potential: Artificial Intelligence We usually hear about artificial intelligence as being able to copy how we think, but it’s more to do with a machine being able to ‘perceive’ a problem and come up with a solution in the best way it thinks it can. At the moment, the focus is on trying to use statistical machine learning to solve many of the challenges we have with computing. The Internet Of Things The Internet of Things is all about being able to have all types of devices ‘speaking’ to each other, to increase productivity and efficiency. At the moment, you might have something like a smart doorbell or camera system that helps you manage your security or safely get deliveries, but in the future it could be used for monitoring people’s health when they’re sick, or help manage electricity consumption in big office buildings. Data Analytics Over the past couple of decades a saying has emerged that ‘data is king’ - but we sometimes have more data than we can use all on our own. Big data studies are all about capturing, storing and analyzing data that’s too big or complex for traditional data-processing applications. In our everyday lives, it might be stuff like internet searches, trends in healthcare analytics, consumer behaviours, or studying how people move around a city. For scientists, big data technologies are working in spaces like studying genetics, complex physics simulations and studying climate change. Blockchain Blockchain is a new technology that uses complex maths to create an identification tag for an object, file or piece of data, that can be verified by a large group of people. At the moment people are using blockchain technology to make things like cryptocurrencies, but blockchain could also be used for anything where it’s super important to know if copies or alterations have been made. Things like medical histories, contracts, or even digital purchases like art, movies or video games could use blockchain technology in the near-future.