Managing Knowledge About Future of Work: A Model for Higher Education Institutions

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is causing considerable changes to the world of work. The interaction between technology and work, which takes many forms such as digitalization, automation, and augmentation, is happening quickly and broadly, impacting economic sectors left almost untouched by previous industrial revolutions. In this scenario, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must be able to foresee changes to prepare future professionals to match the needs of this new digital age. The professionals that are being prepared today need to learn a new set of skills related to emerging and disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Big Data. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Management model to help manage the HEIs’ teaching staff knowledge about the future of work, specifically, the expected skills and competencies to be highly demanded from professionals in the future. Therefore, we performed a brief review of related work about Knowledge Management in the context of HEIs, Management of Future-oriented Knowledge, and the application of the Delphi method to studies concerning the Future of Work. Considering this previous work, we propose a Knowledge Management model that combines the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model framework with a Delphi process that is used during the Knowledge Generation step of the Knowledge Management process. The proposed model considers that professors are experts in their areas of concentration and, as such, are capable of helping their HEIs with their knowledge that can be used to improve the courses’ curricula. The model also considers that HEIs can help professors make this knowledge explicit, then store, transfer, and apply it. We provide detailed information about how to apply the model, how to deal with potential application problems and the model limitations. The proposed Knowledge Management model can help HEIs to keep up with the trends of demands of the labor market.