Upskilling has gained prominence in recent times with working professionals increasingly realising the importance of expanding their abilities and closing the current skill gaps. According to the World Economic Forum, almost half of the existing workforce has to upskill/reskill by 2025 to stay relevant in the changing business realities. There are different methods and ways for upskilling to ensure continuous learning that helps employees expand their skill set to confidently take on new roles and responsibilities across functional domains and operational areas. A learning organisation always defines and deploys the best learning solutions for building capability to stay relevant. The world of workplaces has undergone a massive transformation in the last couple of years.

Metaverse is the latest tech innovation that both businesses and individuals are getting used to. People who remember the movie series "Matrix" would realise that it depicted a Metaverse. The metaverse is a digital universe where everybody lives, works and socialises through their digital avatar. This presents a very interesting situation. Geographical boundaries melt away and the ability for humans and organisations to connect and work unhindered is something phenomenal.

How are you evolving your skills for the future of work? This is one of the most pertinent questions workers are asking themselves. However, the answer is constantly changing. With every new technology, innovation, regulation, and system, the most in-demand skills shift. The capabilities that employers are looking for today are no longer the capabilities of last year, and in many industries this has created a significant skills gap.

As we navigate the roadmap drawn by COVID-19, we know there will continue to be accelerated digital transformation and rapid innovation of education intended to positively impact student outcomes in 2022. This will take many forms, from institutions evolving their operations to students optimizing their learning with technology to caregivers connecting directly with their children's education through edtech services. To support both new and existing solutions, while delivering engaging learning experiences, developing forward-thinking data strategies and building new revenue streams, edtechs are using Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. Offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally, AWS helps these organizations lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster technology solutions that support students and educators every day. Early stage edtechs are also participating in the AWS EdStart program, the AWS edtech virtual startup accelerator, designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud.

There are at least two clear patterns that show a demand-supply mismatch in tech occupations in front line IT fields, for example, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. One is by means of industry predictions that gauge growth in the AI market from $21.46 Bn to $190.61 Machine learning and AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity and data science are the most pursued fields of knowledge and skills, and as innovation experts contend in the digital space quickly being surpassed by automation, huge numbers of them are upskilling themselves. As indicated by the report from Gartner, AI-related job creation will arrive at 2,000,000 net-new openings in 2025. Notwithstanding, there aren't that numerous experts with the range of abilities to match this requirement.

Conventional wisdom has it that a coming onslaught of industrial robots will throw millions of current factory workers out of their jobs. The direst predictions envision whole classes of people permanently locked out of the working world. As I detailed in one of my earliest articles, robots eliminating manufacturing jobs is nothing new. It's been going on for decades. But as technological development accelerates and robots become better and cheaper, the risk to current employment is intensified.