WEF’s reskilling revolution platform ignores ethics?

World Economic Forum (WEF) recently launched the reskilling revolution platform to provide better jobs, education, and skills to one billion people in the next 10 years.

   According to the Forum, this initiative will contribute to future-proofing countries, companies, and workforces to build a fairer, more inclusive world that will deliver benefits to the economy and society for generations to come. Furthermore, they mention that decision-makers from the private and public sector have a critical role to play in ensuring that people have the skills to be employable and productive in the future of work.

   Indeed, with 75 million jobs expected to be displaced due to automation and technological integration in the coming years, as WEF reports, worries around unequal opportunity, large-scale unemployment, and widening income inequality are emerging. At the same time, the transformation will create demand for million new jobs with new opportunities for people.

   By 2022, on average, workers will need 101 days of additional learning to prepare for the future needs of their job and up to 11.5 trillion dollars could be added to global GDP by 2028 if workers were better prepared to leverage the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution.

   So, by joining the reskilling revolution companies submit their commitment to invest in human capital. This can be done through reskilling or upskilling their workforce with the skills needed for the future of work. Also, reskilling over 80% of at-risk employees ensure that they are equipped for redeployment within or outside of their organization.

   However, the WEF Jobs of Tomorrow 2020 report does not emphasize ethics as one of the core elements for the future of skills. Particularly, the report has an extended set of skills that need to be taught as a priority for additional learning among online learners. But there is only one category that has ethics as a must and a mandatory feature, and this is the “Artificial Intelligence for Everyone”.

   Ethics is not the core of reskilling on terms such as the human resource management for people managers, the introduction to people analytics, recruiting, hiring, managing employee compensation, the science of well-being, or the deep and machine learning techniques. This is quite worrying and there must be some second thoughts on how to leverage ethics, in business administration and development.