The fourth industrial revolution: Opportunity to reboot Namibia

Sheldon Subeb



Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, is famously known for saying: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and connect to one another”. Safe to say we are past that brink. In its scale, scope and complexity, the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) will be unequalled to previous global economic transitional points experienced by the world.

Beyond simple productivity and growth, the 4IR has also become a sign of optimism for Namibia’s social and developmental challenges. It offers transformative opportunities for government, businesses and people.

There are several strategies a country can use to mitigate the disruptive nature of the 4IR, one being a concerted effort on skilling and reskilling its polity. The idea of an overarching national skills and talent agenda for a developing country like Namibia is not complicated and there is a general agreement on the central role a skilled, enterprising, and capable workforce has on economic expansion. Designing for new capabilities and prototyping a national skills' strategy in the fourth industrial era requires constantly prioritising and pivoting skills from existing, emerging, and novel skills trends.

Our current world and the change coming from the future, require skills that equip citizens for continuous disruptions in technology, increased connectedness, and new forms of employment. Knowing how skills are changing and their demand in the labour market has never been more important and the current approach of responding to the labour market by coordinating the demand for and supply of skills may not be sufficient. Estimating the skills required in a constantly changing economy is the real challenge; there is a level of complexity in developing the transformative skills required to shape talent for a future economy. Instead of inquiring on the specific skills that are required; it is more prudent to understand the context in which change is happening because although a significant amount of disruption is coming from technology, changes in globalisation, demographics and climate mitigation are gaining importance with the rise of green skills and culture-oriented social skills.

This requires a fundamental rethinking of the common linear approaches set in best practices employed to identify skills gaps, whereas this new generation of skills advocates for a more holistic and experimental approach to mapping and developing the skills landscape with a focus on cooperation among a diverse group of actors.

In a complex economy, macroeconomic patterns are emergent properties of micro-level interactions and behaviours, in the same sense, macro-level skill proficiencies are emergent properties of micro-level skills acquisition, application, and transference. This dynamic context of skill acquisition and loss across sectors and industries creates particular challenges for tracking available skills at the national level. Such efforts need to be expanded and made more systematic by including continuous research, data analysis, experimentation, and recognising that implementation is an iterative process requiring flexibility and adaptive management.

There is a level of ambiguity that comes with the 4IR, but one thing is clear: The response to it must be integrated, involving all stakeholders of the national community, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society. With numerous actors involved in skills development, their efforts often overlap and are not well-coordinated. Focusing on the diverse needs of stakeholders requires a coordinated, coherent approach across different policy areas, multiple levels, and multi-perspectives to achieve improvement and adaptation to the local context. Collaborating across industries provides opportunities to build relationships, create networks of expertise, improve implementation of initiatives, open several pathways for economic breakthroughs and manage change together.

As countries grapple with rapid transformation and the demanding conditions of a digitised, decarbonised, and globalised knowledge economy, people are looking to their government to guide change and make sound decisions, though they cannot act on their own. They need to leverage a national network to design and deliver innovative alternative skills development policies, that will create the necessary fitness required to thrive in the future world of work. The task is turning cross-industry skills information to not only respond to imbalances but to tackle key issues that enable an uninspiring skills system.

* Sheldon Subeb is an organisational and social change specialist with an honours degree in industrial-organisational psychology. He writes in his private capacity on the impact of change and the future world of work on organisations and society. Follow him on LinkedIn @SheldonSubeb.