20.12.2025
The OECD Future of Jobs report 2030 shows which skills will be increasingly in demand in the 2030ies. This will create new development needs and it will have an effect on the work of academic institutions and companies. We will discuss, what these findings imply for the learning and development departments in economic organizations, and we will show how various soft skills will become even more important in the future.. Enjoy reading!
Future of Jobs
SKILLS FOR 2030
Sure, no one really knows exactly what the future will bring. For that, you would indeed need one of those famous crystal balls (and the ability to read in it). But some trends can be deduced from latest developments and from current research with near certainty. Reports that describe such developments are the World Economic Forum´s Future of Jobs reports series and the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 Conceptual learning framework "SKILLS FOR 2030"
In the summary of this paper, it is stated that as computer technologies have displaced labour in routine tasks, they have also created new employment opportunities for workers with non-routine cognitive skills, such as creativity, and social and emotional skills.
To remain competitive, workers will need to acquire new skills continually, which requires flexibility, a positive attitude towards lifelong learning and curiosity.
Social and emotional skills can be equally – and in some cases even more – as important as cognitive skills [...]. Social and emotional skills, such as empathy and respect for others, are becoming essential.
Soft Skills will become even more important
Core skill sets to rise in importance:
The core skills that are already seen as essential and are expected to become even more critical by 2030:
These skills are complemented by some technology skills, cognitive and life skills:
- Resilience, Flexibility and agility (self-efficacy)
- Curiosity and lifelong learning (self-efficacy)
- Leadership and Social Influence (Working with others)
- AI and Big Data (Technology skills)
- Technological Literacy (Technology skills)
- Creatve thinking (Cognitive Skills)
- Analytical thinking (Cognitive skills)
(see: The Core Skills for 2030: What Employers Will Be Looking For – Skill Reporter)
In addition to these core skill sets that most likely will rise in importance, there are other important, steady, but stable, skills which will remain important. Here, too, several soft skills play an important role.
Steady but stable skills
- Sercvice orientation and customer service
- Empathy and active listening
- Resource management and operations
- Dependability and attention to detail.
Taken together, in both skill-sets, fundamental soft skills such as empathy and other interpersonal skills, customer-orientation, initiative and flexibility, resilience and managerial skills such as quality awareness, making decisions and dealing with risks, are key.
Consequences for Students, Professionals, and for Learning and Development
These findings show that there will be a massive shift in demand for skills. While routine tasks will be digitalized and done by machines, and other skills, such as language skills will also lose importance, other skills will gain importance and the demand for these will be high. For experienced professionals as well as for job-starters, and consequently also for their educators, managers and leaders, this wil bring a lot of change.
- Passive knowledge acquisition is no longer enough. Learners must focus on building adaptive, future-ready skills, such as curiosity and lifelong learning or creative and analytical thinking.
- For professionals, upskilling is the new job security. Cross-functional capabilities will be vital. The growing importance of resilience, flexibility and agility points towards a work-environment that is fast-paced and ever-evolving. Employees who can adapt quickly and bounce back from challenges will be the most valuable assets.
This, again, underlines the importance of reskilling. upskilling, learning and development, and these developments have to be profound and not just superficial at best.
Assessment of the status quo and targeted skills development to close existing gaps
Skill development
For Educations and Institutions this means that Soft Skills, such as communication, empathy, collaboration, and leadership must be empasized just as strongly as technical ones. Also, teachers and trainers themselves will need regular upskilling to stay updated with emerging pedagogies and technologies.
These changes will not happen overnight and they will not happen by themselves. So, targeted skill development on all levelswill be key for companies and organizations everywhere to remain competitive and fit for the future.
Soft Skills, which are the most fundamental ones that need to be strengthened, can be assessed and developed in a professional and targeted way.
- The first step to professional skill development is the development of new competency models, defining the future skills that an organization and their members need to develop. How such competency models can be out into practice, we recently described in an article of the same name.
- Here, we already described how valuable professional assessment-tools are in this context. With those, you can assess the current level of (soft) skills, identify skill gaps and development needs.
- In a next step, aided by professional learning and development specialists, trainers and coaches, missing skills can be developed in a targeted manner.
- For this purpose, the results of the status-quo-analysis of skills, are discussed in an individual feedback session, first. Here, development areas are identified and background information is gathered in order to understand the deeper-rooted, underlying causes for lacking skills and skill gaps.
- Finally, after these sessions, individual and collective development plans are derived and implemented, aided by the senior managers (who, themselves, went through these development cycles themselves, first), and internal and external development specialists.
- Renewed assessment and development cycles finally sustained development of future skills.
Now, if you are looking for the right kind of instruments to help you in this process - DNLA - Discovering Natural Latent Abilities provides a series of established, science-based tools which are valuable for the targeted development of future skills. These tools have proven their value many times already (see international references, testimonials and case-studies here).
If you are interested to learn more about what DNLA can do for you and for the development of your organization, don´t hesitate to get in touch with us!
Conclusions:
- The transformation of the jobs and skills landscape anticipated by this year’s Future of Jobs Survey respondents will have significant impacts on businesses, industries, [...] and workers worldwide.
- [...], the report finds a strongly net-positive global employment outlook, with a continuing decrease in the rate of skills obsolescence, as reskilling, upskilling and redeployment initiatives implemented in recent years begin to register in the data and materialize their global workforce impact.
- However, skills gaps remain the predominant barrier to transformation across most industries and economies, and this year’s edition of the Future of Jobs Report captures some early signals of likely future priority areas for constructive multistakeholder engagement, including a need for proactive and dynamic job transitions across a wider and growing range of job roles [...].
All this, again, underlines the constant need for a broad-scale and deep, sustainable skill development.
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