Fadwa Alhargan, Head of Innovation at SAP, discusses cross-generation collaboration, the need for microlearning, how to support the leaders of tomorrow, and the positive impact of AI. 

What is the one piece of advice you would give the leaders of tomorrow?

For the leaders of tomorrow, I think my advice would be, imagine a world that you want to work and live in and then go about building it today. I think that this really helps me aspire to build stuff today that I want to create in the future.

How has the world of work changed during your career? How will it change in the next 5 years?

So, I’ve been working for over a decade now and we saw some emergence of phenomena. The first one is the platform economy. When you think of how there is a one-stop-shop for consumers, something like Amazon, also what I would see in the next five years is really the shift of generations. 

Today we’re going to see four generations coming into the workforce. Gen Z’s are definitely entering the workforce, but we’re gonna see people from Baby Boomers all the way to Gen Z’s working in one place and that’s gonna be very interesting to see how all these generations will come to create a lot of value for the workplace.

What are the most important skills leaders will need in the future?

So, in the future, people will need three things. The first one is their ability to learn and then their ability to relearn and then an ability to unlearn. Because the world is gonna progress so fast, we will need to adapt microskills and that will require a lot of microlearning which is very different than the past. You study in college for four, six years and then you have a 30-year career out of it. And this is definitely something that is very exciting for the future.

How would you go about building the leaders of tomorrow?

So, the leaders of tomorrow, when I look at Gen Z’s, for instance, these are a generation that’s very collaborative. They’re going to bring a lot of empathy for the world of work and what I would do is I would give them the tools to help them collaborate and create greater value and really break the silos every time that we see a silo stopping them from coming together and creating tons of value for the place they work in and the world in a whole.

How will automation and A.I. affect the jobs market?

Well, this is a very interesting question. It really depends who are you talking to you’re gonna get some input in terms of how AI is changing the world of work. AI is really helping doctors see better. They’re able to scan a patient must faster. It’s helping people in the service center to listen better. So, they’re able to capture feedback from social media, our voice sentiment, and all of that. So, I remain very optimistic about how AI and humanity will come together to create tons of value in the workspace.