Understanding 21st century skills needed in response to Industry 4.0

Exploring scholarly insights using bibliometric analysis

International policy agendas are increasingly focusing on the 21st century skills needed by future workers (otherwise called soft skills, digital skills or survival skills). This paper seeks to understand the structure of academic knowledge in this area, through is a bibliometric analysis of 2662 articles published by 6579 authors in the last twenty years.

By examining articles, documents, journals and trends in this literature in detail, we identify foundational themes from the past, current in current research and future direction of the field.

Overall, we find that research on 21st century skills has grown exponentially in the past two decades, however, few researchers focus primarily on this topic. The existing research is primarily dominated by psychologists, education researchers and technology researchers. We also find that specific disciplines such as industrial engineering and nursing are prominent contributors in the field, and that critical thinking and computational thinking are key areas of focus.