Essential skills for humans working in the machine age

The quick advances of robotics may cause disruption as artificial intelligence gradually grabs hold of many industries. However, there are still so many things workers can bring to the table. If we break it down there are five categories that echo the five senses. These are speech, mind, hearing, writing and sight. Here is a list of important skills that we have which machines will find hard to replace. So by keeping these abilities we are able to stay relevant as technology evolves.

Speech:

·         Oral expression (the person’s ability to express wants, thoughts and ideas meaningfully using appropriate synaptic, semantic, pragmatic, and phonological language structures)

·         Speaking (the action of conveying information or expressing one’s feelings in speech)

·         Speech Clarity (the quality of speech transfer to listeners. In a reverberant room with disturbing background noise, it can be difficult to pick up speech)

Mind:

·         Problem Sensitivity (is the ability to tell when something is wrong or likely to go wrong. It is not solving a problem it is recognising a problem)

·         Deductive reasoning (uses facts, rules, definitions or properties to arrive at a conclusion)

·         Critical Thinking (objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement)

·         Information Ordering (making decisions on what information is strict and what is flexible when placing into categories)

·         Monitoring (observe and check the progress or quality of something)

·         Social Perception (the study of how people form impressions and make interfaces about other personalities. An example; understanding when one disagrees when they roll their eyes)

·         Complex problem solving (usually involves knowledge rich requirements and collaboration among different people)

·         Selective Attraction (the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously)

Hearing:

·         Active Listening (involves listening with all senses, as well as giving full attention to the speaker. Interest can be conveyed through using both verbal and non-verbal messages such as eye contact, nodding, smiling and encouragement)

·         Speech recognition (The process of enabling a computer to identify and respond to the sounds produced in human speech)

Writing:

·         Written/Reading Comprehension (The ability to process text, understand its meaning and integrate with that the reader already knows. Knowing the meaning of words, context of words and references in sentences)

·         Written Expression (The ability to convey meaning through writing. Low level skills such as spelling, punctuation, capitalisation etc)

Sight

·         Near/Far Vision (The ability to sense when objects are closer)

·         Coordination (the organisation of the different elements of a complex body or activity so as to enable them to work together effectively.