The Bank of England’s (BoE) chief economist, Andy Haldane warned this morning the UK will need a “skills revolution” in order to face the disruption of what is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Haldane underlined the need to reskill as artificial intelligence is making an increasing number of jobs obsolete.
Big Data LDN questioned data experts last year about the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on skills and UK businesses have not been as unprepared as Mr. Haldane thinks, even if there is still a long way to go.
The report said that the skills gap could be saved by self-sufficiency. When asked how they will obtain the skill sets needed for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 60 percent will identify and redeploy staff with transferable skills, and only two percent of UK businesses surveyed will outsource.
UK organisations said that they had only short-termist ambitions for UK organisation. Four times as many UK organisations use data to analyse existing customer engagement and loyalty as to develop new products – just 13 percent.
Almost all UK enterprises have a data strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, the majority of organisations (48 percent) have only been recently delivering against it for the last year.
Data Leaders indicated Enterprise Information Management (29 percent), Self-service data preparation (27 percent and Cloud (25 percent) platforms are the technologies needed to deliver value and business growth in the new revolution.
MP Alan Mak, Chair of the All-Party group on the Fourth Industrial Revolution welcomed the report saying: “Data will be as important to the British economy in this century as oil was in the previous one, so it is vital that as we prepare for Brexit we invest wisely in the skills and new technologies needed to harness the opportunities of the 4IR.”
Still, man cannot live on data alone.
