Rethinking the roles and skills of information professionals in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Abstract

With the development of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4th IR), its emerging technologies and skills; there is a mismatch between 4th IR, and the skills needed by information professionals to survive. This paper bridges the gap based on the skills needed to survive and provide possible solutions to challenges faced by information professionals, which will in turn help to reduce the number of unemployed, semi-employed, non-employed, and provide economic empowerment among information professionals in this new revolution. Information professionals should adopt the missing middle model/techniques in organization which asserts that robots, by and large, will not be taking our jobs; instead, human Machine collaboration will reconfigure some of our work, making and make human skills more unique and important than ever.