Future Skills

CHAPTER 14ETHICAL AWARENESS

You probably have a good grasp of what it means to be ethical. Most of us live life according to our own set of principles and values. And even if we can't eloquently put our own moral “code” into words, we certainly know unethical behavior when we see it.

So why highlight ethical awareness as a future skill? It's partly because of the changing nature of work. The digital transformation and wave of fourth industrial revolution technologies have given rise to a whole new set of ethical challenges to overcome—think of the dilemmas surrounding gene editing, for example, or artificial intelligence, or the use of people's personal data. Then there's the huge potential fallout from ethical missteps in today's world, where scandals can spread across the internet faster than you can say TikTok.

As we'll see in this chapter, businesses are rapidly cottoning on to ethics as a critical issue, which means they'll increasingly want to hire the kinds of people who can help them address ethical challenges.

What Do We Mean by Ethical Awareness?

Ethics can be described as your moral principles or values. To be ethical is to be conscientious about your choices—at work, and in everyday life—and to act with good intentions in mind. In this way, ethics is concerned with questions such as:

• What is right and wrong here?
• How can I live a good life?
• If I do this, will it harm others?
• How can our organization succeed without harming individuals, society, and our planet? ...