Answered means a dedicated research page exists. Partial means the closest research covers part of it. Open means it is on the roadmap and not yet written. Every question has its own link. Last reviewed: 3 November 2026 · Next review due: 3 November 2027.
AnsweredWhat are core skills?#
The World Economic Forum's unit: the skills employers say workers need today, classified against the Forum's own Global Skills Taxonomy so the figure is comparable between editions.
AnsweredWhat does the 39 per cent figure about skills actually mean?#
The share of a worker's core skill set employers expect to be transformed or become outdated by 2030. Restating the whole of it as obsolescence drops half of what the report says.
AnsweredIs skill disruption accelerating?#
Not on this measure. The series runs 35 per cent in 2016, 57 in 2020, 44 in 2023 and 39 in 2025, so it has fallen through both editions covering the period since ChatGPT.
AnsweredWhat are human skills?#
A contested term. Defined and defended here rather than assumed, because most usage is decorative.
AnsweredWhat is a SuperSkill?#
A capability that governs the other capabilities: durable across technological cycles, transferable, governing how you work with intelligent systems, and compounding. Four tests, and seven that pass them.
AnsweredWhat are the seven SuperSkills?#
Curiosity, empathy, big picture thinking, change readiness, global adaptability, principled innovation and an augmented mindset.
AnsweredWhat is an augmented mindset?#
Working with capable machines without surrendering the judgement that makes the work yours.
AnsweredWhy does curiosity matter more now?#
Because answers became cheap and questions did not. The scarce input moved.
- What makes us different: Where curiosity was first placed at the top of the list, before it became the first of the seven.
AnsweredDoes empathy still matter at work?#
Yes, and the evidence that AI is rated as more empathetic than clinicians makes the question sharper rather than settled.
- The Thing That Proves You're Human: Argues squarely for trained capacity over feeling, which is the position the research pages describe more cautiously.
AnsweredWhat is big picture thinking?#
Holding the shape of a problem when every component can be generated separately and convincingly.
AnsweredWhat is change readiness?#
The capability that decides whether a shift is absorbed or merely survived.
AnsweredWhat is global adaptability?#
Working across contexts that do not share your assumptions, which is most of them.
AnsweredWhat is principled innovation?#
Building things on purpose, with the consequences treated as part of the design rather than as an afterthought.
AnsweredWhat is deskilling?#
Braverman to Bainbridge to now. Established, and not a SuperSkills coinage.
AnsweredCan you regain a skill you have lost?#
Usually, and faster than you built it. Relearning beats learning at every interval tested, though never yet tested on professional judgement.
- Skills in the AI age: Institutional treatment of training and reskilling at population scale, where this research works at the level of the individual and the team.
- Are You Flying, Or Are You Being Flown?: Argues the recovery question is the wrong one to be asking, because by the time it occurs to you the practice that maintained the skill is gone.
- Wisdom & Unlearning: Comes at it from the other side: the harder problem is knowing which hard-won expertise to deliberately drop.
AnsweredHow fast do skills decay?#
From d = -0.01 immediately after training to d = -1.4 after a year of non-use, across 189 data points. Cognitive tasks decay faster than physical ones, which is the finding that matters.
- The Half-Life of Skills: The argument alongside the evidence: what matters is not the average rate but that the slowest-decaying skills are the ones built by the practice AI is now most efficiently removing.
AnsweredWhat is judgement?#
Recognising what a situation is before any option is weighed. Klein, Dreyfus and Polanyi on where it comes from, separated from decision, reasoning and skill, and where Kahneman says it should not be trusted.
AnsweredWhat is the difference between a skill and a capability?#
A skill performs an activity. A capability achieves an outcome, which needs skills combined with knowledge, judgement and the ability to adapt them to a situation they were not learned in.
AnsweredWhat is an organisation's capability, as distinct from its people's?#
It lives in routines, in Nelson and Winter's sense: coordinated sequences that persist beyond the individuals running them. So it can be lost with nobody leaving.
- Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: The origin of the distinction the research relies on. Capability is held in routines and configurations, not only in individuals, so it can be lost without anybody leaving.
AnsweredWhat is the difference between skill erosion and a skills gap?#
A skills gap is what people have not yet learned; skill erosion is what they are ceasing to be able to do as AI takes the underlying work. IBM's 2026 survey found 60 per cent of employees worried about erosion and 80 per cent of organisations with a roadmap for the gap, which is the older deskilling distinction in a vendor's vocabulary.
AnsweredWhat is the Curiosity Loop?#
The Curiosity Loop is Rahim Hirji's three-step discipline for practising curiosity: See, surfacing a fracture in reality and recording it without explaining it away; Seek, running one small test rather than convening a discussion; and Sh...
AnsweredWhat is listen, label, ladder?#
Listen, label, ladder is Rahim Hirji's three-step sequence for empathetic communication: listening without preparing a reply, naming the emotion aloud so it has language, and laddering by asking what would make this better.
AnsweredWhat is small rules that scale?#
Small rules that scale are Rahim Hirji's three habits for building empathy through repetition: the three-second pause before replying in a meeting, one felt metric recorded beside every performance goal, and a repair conversation schedul...
AnsweredWhat is the adaptability cycle?#
The adaptability cycle is Rahim Hirji's four-stage rhythm of adaptation: Spot, noticing the signal before it becomes a crisis; Sense, deciding honestly what it means; Shift, acting before certainty arrives; and Shape, consolidating what ...
AnsweredWhat is the getting global drills?#
The getting global drills are Rahim Hirji's three weekly practices for global adaptability: the seventy-two hour context scan before entering a new market or meeting, the local mirrors roster of trusted advisors who review work before it...
AnsweredWhat is the stillness paradox?#
The stillness paradox is Rahim Hirji's account of change readiness: the capacity to adapt quickly depends on something fixed at the centre, because flexibility with nothing settled in advance produces motion without direction and resolve...
AnsweredWhat are complementary skills?#
Complementary skills are the OECD's term for teamwork, autonomy, problem solving, creative thinking, communication, collaboration and emotional intelligence: the capabilities that enable high-performance work and the ability to keep lear...
AnsweredWhat is ai literacy?#
In the European Union, yes. Article 4 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 February 2025 and requires providers and deployers of AI systems to take measures to ensure, to their best extent, a sufficient level of AI literacy among their s...
AnsweredWhat is substitution myth?#
The assumption that new technology can be introduced as a simple substitution of machines for people, preserving the basic system while improving it on some output measures.
AnsweredWhat is tacit knowledge?#
Knowledge that resists full articulation, acquired through experience and practice rather than instruction, and typically transmitted through shared work rather than documentation.
AnsweredHow do you practise curiosity?#
See a fracture and write down what deviated without explaining it away. Seek by running one small test this week. Shift by changing something and recording we learnt X so we will Y.
AnsweredHow do you make empathy change a decision rather than a mood?#
Listen without preparing your reply, name the feeling aloud, then ask what would make this better. The third step is the one people skip, because the first two improve the room and the third produces work.
AnsweredWhat small habits change how a team feels?#
A three-second pause before replying, one felt metric recorded beside every performance goal, and a repair conversation within forty-eight hours of a rupture.
AnsweredHow do you adapt without losing the point?#
Spot, sense, shift, shape. The purpose survives while the method changes completely, and adaptation that keeps the form and loses the meaning is the failure the cycle is built against.
AnsweredHow do you prepare for a market or culture you do not know?#
Seventy-two hours on the local context, a standing roster of local mirrors who review the work before the public does, and an apology and fix written before publication rather than after.
AnsweredHow do the seven SuperSkills fit together?#
Under pressure they compete: curiosity against efficiency, empathy against speed, principle against pragmatism. What holds them together is a rhythm that decides what gets priority, what gets delegated and what must stay human.
AnsweredIs judgement an eighth skill?#
No. It is what the seven produce together. Each supplies one component of a decision, and a bad decision can be read backwards to the component that was missing.
AnsweredIs change readiness the same as being flexible?#
No. Flexibility with nothing fixed at the centre produces motion without direction. The capacity to move quickly rests on having settled in advance what will not move.
PartialWhich skills become more valuable as AI improves?#
Employer surveys say analytical and creative thinking. That is stated demand, not revealed price, and the distinction matters.
Better answered elsewhere Early evidence rather than assertion, pointing at a shift from information-focused competencies towards interpersonal ones. · Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce
Context The industry map: at every layer the winning companies are pushing AI from answering towards doing, which is the shift that decides which skills gain value. · The AI companies you should know, and why
- AI Labour Market Study and Survey: UK employer-stated demand and reported shortages, which is the demand side of a question usually answered only from the supply side.
- AI and skills: What we know so far: Cross-country institutional analysis of changing skill requirements, built on survey instruments this research has no equivalent of.
- 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer: Two futures for jobs in an AI era: Large-scale vacancy analysis of what employers are actually paying for, as distinct from what surveys say they intend to pay for.
- Knowledge Is No Longer Power: Where the SuperSkills framing was set out publicly: if knowledge is universally available then the advantage moves to judgement about which questions are worth asking.
- Being Unique in the Face of ChatGPT: Argues knowledge itself has been commoditised and uniqueness is the remaining scarce asset, before that became the standard framing.
PartialWhat is skill atrophy?#
Covered within deskilling, which is the older and better-evidenced term for the same phenomenon.
PartialAre interpersonal skills becoming more valuable than information-handling ones?#
Partly answered as an argument, and now with an early empirical signal behind it. The Stanford work reports competencies shifting from information-focused towards interpersonal. Treat it as a signal rather than a finding: it is a preprint, and the shift is inferred from task profiles rather than measured in people.
PartialDoes counting training completions tell you staff can use AI well?#
No. A freedom of information reply relayed by Resultsense on 7 October 2026 shows the Department for Work and Pensions logged 128,779 completions of AI courses in a year, a count of completions and not of people that says nothing about use. The account is second-hand. The page holds how capability is tested instead.
OpenAre human skills actually becoming scarcer?#
Listed as unknown in the state of the evidence. Eight years of surveys are not the same as wage data.
- The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI: The institutional statement of the scarcity claim, useful as the mainstream position to test rather than as settled evidence.
- Why curiosity is the only moat left: Treats curiosity as a business capability that can be measured and incentivised rather than a temperament, which is the version an organisation can act on.
OpenWhat is hybrid intelligence?#
Hybrid intelligence is the European Policy Centre's proposed basis for skills policy: technical AI literacy combined with domain expertise and distinctively human capabilities, rather than AI skills alone.
OpenWhat is research taste?#
Research taste is knowing what to study next, which experiment to run, and sensing where a new approach might lie. It has proved hard to train because the feedback loops are long and the data is thin.
OpenWhat skills should I learn now?#
The scarcity test matters more than the usefulness test: not what is useful, but what is hard to source.
The other territories
- Me and AI 39
- Thinking 40
- Judgement 211
- Learning 88
- Students and university 90
- Career 52
- Work 125
- Leadership 130
- Organisations 134
- Talent 110
- Everyday life 31
- Evidence and the wider picture 89
- What AI is and where it's going 68
- Agents and autonomy 86
- Memory, companions and the personal 12
- Professions and sectors 96
- Economics and value 24
- Operating model 19
- Boards and directors 56
The same questions, cut by who is asking: boards and directors, chros and hr leaders, school and university leaders, university students, early career and graduates, managers and team leads, regulated and expert professions, parents.
Reference · SS-2026-466 · How I use AI here
Hirji, R. (2026). Skills: questions about AI. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-466. https://thesuperskills.com/research/questions/skills. Last reviewed 3 November 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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