Gearing up for Change Makes Sense

To stay afloat the digital tsunami today, we need a full set of advanced skills to secure a safe, stable, and satisfactory future on the labour market for the working population of Poland. The OECD report entitled “Future of Education and Skills 2030” presents three key areas for the future, referred to, to use a term coined by modern business, as “Competences 4.0”, which will become standard on the Polish market within the next few years. These include: cognitive competences that enable, as defined by well-known futurist Alvin Toffler, “learning new and unlearning old ways”, social skills, also called soft skills, that facilitate efficient collaboration and team management and digital competences related to handling new technologies and a readiness to work with AI solutions.

Although it may seem that in the third decade of the 21st century, an awareness of the significance of digital competence is a given, Poland still ranks third from last in the DESI (Digital Economy and Society Index), followed only by Bulgaria and Romania. According to Eurostat data, only 21% of Poles have above-average digital skills, while the EU average is nearly twice as high. Poland is not much more proficient in terms of problem-solving skills, which only one in two Poles have mastered at a more than basic level (47%, which relegates our country to 21st place in Europe).