Technological trends, technology adoption, investment and competences in advanced technologies

The development of the professionals of the future will require a combination of advanced, digital and transversal professional competences. The combination of different competences will not only be relevant for the future of organizations, but also for each individual, as each one of us must qualify in order to keep up with emerging technologies and address the challenges of the labour market. The competences associated with new technologies are creating new paths and opportunities across all professional areas. A professional in the area of finance, for example, can develop competences at the level of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and thus create new opportunities to improve their performance. This is an alternative vision towards the prevalent vox populi that associates the new technologies with the extintion of some jobs and the subsitution og humans by machines..

In a recent overview of the demand for new and emerging professions and competences the European Union (EU) launched the "Report on technological trends, technology adoption, investment and competences in advanced technologies", offering a discussion about the impacts of technologies on the demand for professionals and competences.

The report makes an in-depth analysis, exploring trends in the generation and uptake of advanced technologies, related business activities and competences. It brings together several data sources in order to monitor advanced technologies and their applications in industry across the EU-27 and in the economies of key competitors.

The research about such advanced technologies, build on information from Linkedin network, monitoring the number of online job ads that require specific competences. The automotive sector stands out for the high demand exhibited for digital technologies, IoT (Internet of Things) and Micro Electronics. In engineering the demand for robotics stands out. In the banking sector, which has been a pioneer in the applications of Blockchain technology, the data confirms the current and future demand for this technology. The competencies related to data analysis (cloud and Big Data) are, as expected, highly sought after by sectors where information is an important asset, namely in banking and financial services.