SuperSkills and the WEF Future of Jobs Report

Any organisation writing a skills plan meets two kinds of document. One is a survey of what employers say they want. The other is an argument about what people need to be able to do. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report is the most quoted example of the first. The seven SuperSkills are an example of the second. Read as rival lists, they produce a plan that satisfies neither.

What the survey found#

The 2025 edition surveyed more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers, across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies, on expectations for 2025 to 2030.

Employers expect 39 per cent of workers' core skills to be transformed or become outdated by 2030. The core skills named as required today, in the report's order: analytical thinking, which seven companies in ten call essential, then resilience, flexibility and agility, then leadership and social influence, then creative thinking, then motivation and self-awareness.

The movements against the 2023 edition are more informative than the ranking. Leadership and social influence rose 22 points. Resilience, flexibility and agility rose 17, as did AI and big data. Manual dexterity, endurance and precision shows a net decline for the first time in the series, with 24 per cent of employers expecting it to matter less. Skills gaps are named the biggest barrier to transformation by 63 per cent of respondents. Per 100 workers, 59 are expected to need training by 2030: 29 upskilled in role, 19 reskilled and redeployed, and 11 unlikely to receive it at all.

That last figure is the one a board should sit with. It is the report saying, in its own respondents' words, that roughly one worker in nine is expected to fall outside the training their employer plans to provide.

The number everybody quotes is quoted wrongly#

The report's own words are "transformed or become outdated". Restating the 39 per cent as skills becoming obsolete drops half of what the sentence says, and the two halves carry different implications for a training budget. The Forum's own popular write-up of the same finding widens it again, to 39 per cent of key skills required in the job market, which is a claim about the market rather than about the skills a given worker holds.

Two further cautions travel with the document. Box 3.1, the generative-AI substitution analysis, rests on GPT-4o assessing its own capacity to perform some 2,800 skills, so it is a system's self-report carrying no external validation. And several secondary sites now publish a Future of Jobs Report 2026, recycling these figures under a year that has no report behind it, so the date on the summary somebody forwards you is worth checking before the content is.

The series is falling#

Expected churn in core skills, by edition: 35 per cent in 2016, 57 per cent in 2020, 44 per cent in 2023, 39 per cent in 2025.

Anyone citing the 2025 report as evidence that skill obsolescence is accelerating is citing a number that has gone down twice. The taxonomy is held constant across editions, which makes the direction between them the most usable thing in the series.

One caution against reading too much into the shape. The 2020 edition was fielded in the first pandemic year and is dominated by that disruption, so the peak is explainable and the fall since may be a return to a baseline rather than a trend. The modest claim the series supports is that employer expectation of churn is not rising. That is still the opposite of how the report is generally used.

What the survey does not do#

It measures no worker and it tests no skill. It records what a large, defined population of employers says it values and expects. Stated preference and hiring behaviour diverge routinely, and nothing in the instrument closes that gap.

This matters for anybody building a programme from the list. A ranking of what employers say they want is a demand signal. It tells you what to put in a budget and how to describe it. It does not tell you what your own people can currently do, which is a different measurement and one that almost nobody takes.

Where the seven differ#

Three of the seven map onto the Forum's six closely enough that arguing about the wording would be idle. Change Readiness sits against resilience, flexibility and agility. Augmented Mindset sits against AI and big data. Curiosity and Big Picture Thinking sit across analytical thinking and creative thinking.

Two of the seven have no counterpart among the six named as core today. Principled Innovation is about whether a decision should be made, which the Forum's core list does not address. Global Adaptability is about working across contexts that do not share assumptions, which the list treats as a market condition rather than a capability.

The structural difference matters more than the overlap. The Forum's items are demand signals gathered by asking employers. The seven are claims about what a person can do when the machine is taken away. One is an answer about budgets. The other is an answer about testing, and it carries the harder obligation, because a capability claim can be checked and a stated preference cannot.

What would settle it#

An instrument that tests the seven on people who do not know they are being tested, unaided, against a control group, and reports the failures. I have not published one. The Forum has not published one for its own list either, and its 2025 white paper on human-centric skills says the open question is how such skills are assessed and credentialed rather than whether they matter.

Until somebody runs that work, both documents are arguments. The Forum's has several thousand employers of survey data behind it. Mine has less. That asymmetry should be stated by me rather than discovered by a reader.

How to use both#

• Use the series for direction, not for a curriculum. The movement between editions is the measured part. A single edition's ranking is a snapshot of what people said in one window.
• Translate any figure back into the report's own words before you cite it. If the restatement is shorter and stronger than the original, it is wrong.
• Check what your own people can do unaided before buying training against anybody's list. A programme bought against a global demand signal and delivered to a population nobody measured is a budget, not a plan.
• Check the date and the edition. A number recycled under a year with no report behind it has been through at least one hand that did not look.

Where this sits in my own argument#

The seven exist because production stopped being the constraint and judgement did not. A list of skills employers say they want is downstream of that shift and describes it from the demand side. The thing my own work keeps running into is that organisations will buy against a list far more readily than they will measure what they already have, which is drift carried out with a budget and a plan attached.

Related SuperSkills research#

On the skills themselves, the seven SuperSkills and human skills in the age of AI. On what a core skill is, what are core skills. On the measurement problem this page keeps returning to, how do you assess capability rather than output. On the entry-level half of the Forum's own work, missing rungs.

Key sources

• World Economic Forum (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025.
• World Economic Forum (2023). The Future of Jobs Report 2023.
• World Economic Forum (2020). The Future of Jobs Report 2020.
• World Economic Forum (2018). The Future of Jobs Report 2018.
• World Economic Forum (2025). New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage.

About this research#

Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company.

How this research works · Reviewed quarterly · Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.