Future Skills
AI is not taking the human out of work. It is moving where the value sits.
We will not tell you these skills are AI-proof, because the research does not support it. What the evidence does support is more useful, and more specific.
The honest version of the argument
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 finds employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. On its arithmetic, 59 of every 100 workers need training by 2030, and 11 of those 100 are unlikely to receive it.
In the Middle East and North Africa the figure is higher: employers expect 46% of on-the-job skills to change by 2030, against 39% globally. Saudi employers expect automation to reach 45% of work tasks by 2030, and the UAE 43%.
What is actually changing
Stanford research using payroll microdata found employment declines concentrated in AI applications that automate work, and not in those that augment it. The International Labour Organization finds the least-exposed tasks are those requiring group dynamics, spontaneous decision-making, professional judgment and real-time adaptability.
That is the argument. Not that human skills are armor, but that AI is redistributing which parts of a job carry value, and it is moving value toward judgment, adaptability and working with other people under conditions a model cannot observe.
What we will not tell you
Three we are building out first
Emphasis
Critical Thinking
Not the version that pretends AI has not changed anything. What critical thinking consists of now is verification, integration and stewardship.
Emphasis
Decision Making
41% of 6.8 million US job postings analyzed between 2022 and 2024 explicitly reference decision-making skills, with a wage premium of up to 23% for risk-related decision competencies.
Emphasis
Creativity
Creative thinking ranks fourth among WEF core skills and fourth among the fastest-rising. We are candid about what creativity training can and cannot be shown to do.
The full set
Each runs at two levels: Foundation at 6 hours, and Advanced at 18 hours with an assessed outcome. Cohorts of up to 20. Delivered in-house or as a pooled open course.
How to read these figures
Sources
- Future of Jobs Report 2025World Economic Forum, January 2025. A survey of 1,043 employers representing 14.1 million workers across 55 economies.
- Canaries in the Coal Mine?Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, November 2025. ADP payroll microdata covering millions of US workers.
- ILO Working Paper 140International Labour Organization, May 2025. Generative AI and jobs: a refined global index of occupational exposure.
- Decision Skills in the WorkforceThe Burning Glass Institute with the Alliance for Decision Education, November 2025. Analysis of more than 6.8 million US job postings, 2022 to 2024.
- Hubert, Awa and Zabelina, Scientific Reports, 2024The current state of artificial intelligence generative language models is more creative than humans on divergent thinking tasks. 151 human participants against GPT-4.
- Goh and colleagues, JAMA Network Open, 2024Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning: A Randomized Clinical Trial. The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points above the conventional-resources group (95% CI, 2 to 30; P = .03).
