The future of employee development in the emerging fourth industrial revolution: a preferred liberal future

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is a socio-technical, ideological, and rhetorical construction rooted in the neoliberal discourse that reflects key tenets of global capitalism, is believed to have considerable implications for the development of employees in advanced manufacturing environments. This paper aims to explore the ways in which the learning needs of employees in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be appropriately identified and how employees could further develop their skills through the design of suitable development curricula. To this end , the paper seeks to interrogate the ways in which the employees’ learning needs are likely to be identified in the middle-range future, and problemate the focus of highly specialised and exclusively focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula that are likely to be designed to help employees respond to the perceived demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The paper further seeks to explore a preferred liberal future, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, to create the possibility for an alternative future guided by a more holistic conception of employee development through the establishment of learner-centred, liberal – and liberating – interdisciplinary Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) curricula.