Digital Age: New Competencies and Occupations that Define a Sustainable Development Amidst the Industrial Revolution 4.0

Abstract

The paper focuses on the challenges of training a new generation of statisticians with the core 21st-century competencies for life, work, and creativity in a digital society amidst the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). Along with the economic feasibility, the attractiveness of improving the quality of life, and new possibilities for developing the creative potential of human beings, Industry 4.0 freights with risks of destabilization of the world socio-economic system, but also creates a new cultural and historical context of the advancement of the humankind, where the network becomes a new human habitat, when digital technologies penetrate all spheres of human activity. It requires the development of «digital» skills that have never been more important than today. Summarizing the results of digital skills projects, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics developed the «Digital Literacy Global Framework» as a basis for creating national digital literacy frameworks and digital competence models for various occupations. The article substantiates the importance of digital competencies and the feasibility of developing common requirements for digital literacy in the EAEU member-states and establishing a system for its development with a single scientific, educational and methodological center that will at the same time become the core of a new ecosystem of continuous statistical training, designed to correct the situation when it is almost impossible to find a statistician with the necessary competencies in the labor market. One of the reasons for this is that the existing system of statistical education does not meet the needs of the digital age, which requires new approaches to the organization of continuing education. However, the digital agenda implies not only the development of digital competencies, including statistical literacy but also the emergence of new «digital» professions, to which the profession of a statistician can be assigned if it is filled with competencies listed in the paper. This will allow statistics to take its rightful place among the occupations determining sustainable development in the digital age.