Bangladeshi youths are excited about future digital job prospects but still prioritise human-centered skills when it comes to workplaces of 2020, finds a Telenor Group online survey.

Telenor Group, the parent company of Grameenphone, yesterday released the pilot online survey across six nations in Asia, including Bangladesh, assessing the youths attitudes about their future career, impact of technology and the skills they need to be best prepared for the jobs of tomorrow.

The results indicate that the nation's young adults see the importance of technology in their vocational paths, yet believe that career success requires both technical and human skills, even if results show that 100 percent of the respondents think robots in the workplace will be a part of future.

The multi-market 'Jobs of the Future' survey obtained 4,200 respondents aged between 15 to 25, in Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Myanmar and Pakistan, where Telenor currently has telecom business.

The study was conducted via Telenor Group Facebook with a sample size of 700 secondary school or university students per market used in the results analysis.

“Our Facebook channel reaches an active, young – and largely Asian – following, so we felt that this would be a great place to pilot such a survey,” said Sheena Lim, director for social media at Telenor Group.

“We thought this would combine the fun, engaging side of social media surveys with potentially interesting insights into Asian youth attitudes on technology and their future careers.”

According to the survey, 60 percent of Bangladesh's youth said they were excited about future opportunities in the internet and digital sectors with the rest saying they were extremely excited.

Additionally, 59 percent said mobile/internet technology will be important in their career by 2020, mirroring the average of 63 percent of youth aggregated in all six nations who agreed with this.

Indicating how significant youth in Bangladesh think it is, only 1.4 percent said technology is not really important for their future.

The surveyed youth in all but one of the countries agreed that non-technical skills will also be important for jobs of the future.

The highest numbers of Bangladeshi (34 percent), Pakistani (37 percent), Indian (36 percent) youth said the most important skills to a great future job will be the ability to inspire others and leadership capability.

All of the Bangladeshi youth surveyed agreed that robots will replace humans in many future professions, as did all the participating countries.

Bangladesh's millennials also appeared enthusiastic for a technology-driven future and 30 percent youths said it is important to understand all kinds of technology.