As we enter a period of profound economic uncertainty, presaged (预示) by recent high-profile layoffs and a culture of “quiet quitting”, thinking about the future of work might well seem a daunting (令人生畏的) prospect.

Indeed, an ever-increasing digital skills gap threatens to stop businesses adopting the game-changing technologies that will help to power growth in the months and years ahead. For instance, with each exciting new technology comes a growing concern about whether we have a digitally savvy (精明的) workforce ready to take advantage of it. After all, keeping the workforce up to speed with the latest advances is a key element of the digital transformation process, which will prove essential if we hope to improve business productivity and efficiency alongside our efforts to achieve sustained growth.

Likewise, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the cybersecurity skills gap was named as one particular area of concern. There’s good reason for this focus: if businesses can’t protect themselves against external threats, they risk going backwards. And that’s before they even start thinking about achieving growth. This is why we need to address the digital skills gap urgently.

Well, we should start by changing the narrative to help us recruit and retain from a more diverse pool of talent, giving businesses a far better chance of finding the up-to-date digital skills they need. And, when it comes to engaging and empowering the current workforce, learning and development opportunities will be key, helping employees to improve their skills for the benefit of both themselves and their employers.

To make this all happen, leaders and employers must demonstrate a commitment to teaching their workforces digital skills by setting clear expectations and providing all the resources required. One approach, for example, would be to focus on the potential in the existing talent pool by identifying those already skilled in digital capabilities and supporting them to upskill their colleagues. Creating a culture of learning, with an emphasis on personal growth, can be an impressive motivator in the workplace.

Of course, it’s all well and good saying that digital skills are vital, but a workforce with purely hard skills will not future-proof a business. There’s a need for soft skills that support the broader goal, so as not to neglect the other competencies required in a digital transformation: communication, critical thinking, creative design skills, and leadership. To exploit the technology to its full potential, such qualities are equally important.

Fundamentally, getting the interaction right between humans and technology will be paramount if businesses are to succeed. As a result, human skills must not be underestimated. Every business will need a range of people with a variely of skills — not only those well-versed in math, engineering, and science, but also those with creative minds and leadership qualities.

Modern inventions have speeded up people’s lives amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts(吹嘘) of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.

All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet-lag: our bodies feel that they have been left behind in another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists: too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.

However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

There was a time when some people’s lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. No multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced: they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone. Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.

In 2015,the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned the world in a TED speech that highly infectious viruses would kill millions of people in the future. It remained unnoticed until recently. The video has been watched over 43 million times online so far. 【小题1】

Based on his beliefs,Gates writes a new book,How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. 【小题2】

【小题3】 He suggests that scientists, data analysts and policy experts across the world work together as a team to prepare for quick response at the future outbreaks of pandemics in different countries and regions. Schedule the arrangements before people shift their attention to other things, he says in the book.

Moreover,research and development should be further strengthened. They are to secure that lifesaving tools, effective vaccines of long-term protection,effective treatments and highly sensitive diagnostic techniques can benefit all people at a faster speed. It requires not only investment but also bigger production capacity. 【小题4】

Lastly,people need to improve health immunization system and early warning systems, especially in low-and-middle-income countries. 【小题5】 With early warning systems tracing any outbreak of infectious diseases, people can sequence the genes of viruses as soon as possible to tell how to handle them before they spread.