Growing Global Skills Gap
The growing global skills gap and numerous labor market disruptions as reported by reputable institutions, such as the World Economic Forum (2020b), had forced organizations of all sizes to re-evaluate their needs “in an era of global” hyper-competition (Christiansen, 2019, p. 1). While higher education had traditionally been the cornerstone of personnel development to meet current and future skillset demands, corporate training had acted as an aid to address any gaps between academic instruction and organizational realities. However, recent research by bodies, such as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM, 2019) suggested that human resources professionals continue to experience challenges related to the growing global skills shortage and bridging the talent gap to find applicants with the right skills and qualifications for a substantial number of available jobs. Deficiencies range from basic skills, such as communication to applied skills, like problem solving and collaborative thinking. The purpose of this publication is to examine the various requirements organizations seek from current and future employees to effectively meet the demands of present-day global economic realities.
The continuous development of technological tools or applications brings change to the business of the day and technological improvements provide vast opportunities to learners. Technologies had played an active role in education, as these transform the way in which teaching and learning is accomplished. The evolution not only changed the way in which things are done but also the human ability to adapt and use these technologies. With digitized learning and delivery of content, the distance in terms of geography, space, and time are erased, providing learners with the freedom to choose suitable learning paths and training goals (Roll & Wylie, 2016).
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the leading applications of information systems (Enholm, Papagiannidis, Mikalef, & Krogstie, 2022). It offers modern knowledge towards understanding the nature of human intelligence and how it stimulates smart computational intelligence that is limited to processing information, but it does not have the ability to understand what it is processing (Alfarsi, et al., 2021). The role of artificial intelligence applications can be seen in a variety of fields, such as clinical, diagnostic, rehabilitative, surgical, and predictive practices, providing insight to help with improving healthcare, together with improved communication between health practitioners and the patients, having the most impact on medical informatics, as well as clinical decision-making and disease diagnosis (Secinaro, Calandra, Secinaro, Muthurangu, & Biancone, 2021).
In education, artificial intelligence had changed the way of doing things, as distance education evolved from posting hard copy study materials by using ‘snail’ mail to providing students with access to online materials using educational technologies (Goosen, 2015) for an Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the 21st century, as reported on with regard to a community engagement project in the proceedings of the South Africa International Conference on Educational Technologies (SAICET).
Teaching and learning have taken on using artificial intelligence applications to enhance the educational aspect of things.