The seventy subskills

The seventy subskills are the working detail underneath the seven SuperSkills: ten named capabilities grouped under each one. They come from a slide headed Grounded in Subskills in Rahim Hirji's keynote deck of September 2025, and they are published here for the first time. Almost every name on the list belongs to somebody else. The arrangement is the claim, and the only one this page makes.

Where the list comes from#

One slide, in a ninety-four-slide deck titled The SuperSkills Era: Thriving in the Age of AI, delivered in September 2025. It sits immediately after the slide that introduces the seven, and it carries seventy items in seven columns of ten. A second deck from October 2025 reproduces it as a seven-column grid, same items, same order, same ten per column, and that second copy is what settles the grouping: the column headers on the original are graphic labels that do not appear in the text layer at all, so a machine reading the file sees seventy names in a row and no indication of where one column ends. Both decks were read at source on 16 September 2026 and the October grid was rendered and read as a picture.

That matters more than a provenance note usually does, because the estate had already recorded twice that this material did not exist. A search of the Desktop on 9 September returned four files discussing the seventy and none listing them, and the conclusion drawn was that an agent could not build this without Rahim supplying the list. The conclusion was sound and the search was not: the deck that had been searched was a different deck. The lesson is the one already written into the corpus rules after the European Business Review error in September, which is to doubt the instrument before concluding the thing is absent.

Say one difference between the slide and the book out loud, before anybody tries to reconcile the two. The deck runs Curiosity, Change Readiness, Big Picture Thinking, Global Adaptability, Empathetic Communication, Principled Innovation, Augmented Mindset. SuperSkills runs them in three parts and puts Global Adaptability sixth and Augmented Mindset fifth. The order below follows the deck, because the deck is where the seventy come from. The fifth SuperSkill is given here under its current name, Empathy, which shortened from Empathetic Communication after the essay of 10 August 2025.

Almost none of these names belongs to this research#

Metacognition, growth mindset, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, active listening and abductive reasoning all have literatures older than this book, in several cases by a century. Reading a list like this as seventy coinages would be a straightforward misattribution, and the estate has caught four of those in a month. So the rule applied here is the one applied to every other term on this site: a name is credited to Rahim Hirji only where a dated first publication exists, and none of the seventy has one.

The overlap with existing taxonomies is close enough to name rather than to leave for a reader to notice. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 asked more than a thousand employers which core skills matter most and returned analytical thinking first, then resilience, flexibility and agility, then leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness. Four of those five map onto items below with a word or two changed. Go further down the Forum's own top ten and the overlap stops being a resemblance: technological literacy, empathy and active listening, and curiosity and lifelong learning are all there in those words, and systems thinking joins them in the Forum's 2030 quadrant. The Forum classifies against its own Global Skills Taxonomy, so its list is a unit of measurement rather than a discovery, and the same is true here. Graded entry.

What is left once the vocabulary is handed back is the arrangement: which ten sit under which of the seven, and the decision that seven is the right number of parents. That is a taxonomy, dated to the deck and to the book, and it counts for something, because the seventy names are freely available to anybody and the useful part is the structure imposed on them.

The seven, and the ten under each#

Each gloss below was written for this page. Thirteen of the seventy already have a research page here, and those are linked; the rest are defined in a line and left there, because a thin page on emotional intelligence would add nothing to a literature that has shelves.

Curiosity#

Curiosity is the drive to explore, question, and keep learning in a changing world. The curiosity page.

1. Lifelong learning. Keeping the habit of learning past the point where anybody makes you. Read the research.
2. Active learning strategies. Studying by doing the work rather than by reading about the work.
3. Open-mindedness. Holding a position loosely enough that new information can still reach it.
4. Metacognition. Knowing what you know, and how well you know it. Read the research.
5. Information synthesis. Putting several sources together into one account that is yours. Read the research.
6. Asking better questions. Getting the question right before spending any effort on the answer. Read the research.
7. Independent research and exploration. Finding things out without first being pointed at them.
8. Learning agility. Reaching working competence quickly in a subject you have not met before.
9. Self-initiated discovery. Starting an enquiry nobody commissioned.
10. Growth mindset. Treating your current ability as a position rather than a ceiling.

Change Readiness#

Change Readiness is the ability to adapt quickly and stay grounded when things shift. The change readiness page.

1. Agility in uncertainty. Moving usefully while the picture is still incomplete.
2. Resilience and stress tolerance. Continuing to think clearly once the pressure arrives.
3. Decision-making under pressure. Choosing on a clock, with the information you happen to have.
4. Scenario thinking. Holding several plausible futures at once instead of forecasting one.
5. Change navigation. Getting a group of people from one way of working to another.
6. Self-regulation. Noticing your own state and managing it before it decides for you.
7. Strategic adaptability. Changing the plan without losing the goal it was written for.
8. Bias recognition and belief updating. Catching the pull of a prior and revising when the evidence says so. Read the research.
9. Problem-solving in novel situations. Working a problem that has no precedent to copy.
10. Digital dexterity. Picking up unfamiliar tools quickly, and dropping them when better ones arrive.

Big Picture Thinking#

Big Picture Thinking is the skill of spotting patterns, connecting ideas, and planning with perspective. The big picture thinking page.

1. Systems thinking. Seeing the connections and the feedback rather than the parts.
2. Analytical reasoning. Taking an argument apart to find out what is holding it up.
3. Strategic foresight. Reading the direction of travel far enough ahead to act on it.
4. Judgement and decision-making. Deciding well at the point where the evidence runs out. Read the research.
5. Pattern recognition. Noticing that this has the shape of something you have seen before.
6. Abductive thinking. Reasoning to the best available explanation from incomplete evidence.
7. Synthesis of complex information. Compressing a large and messy body of material into something usable.
8. Mental modelling. Carrying a working picture of how something behaves when you push it.
9. Scenario mapping. Laying out the paths a situation could take, and what each one would require.
10. Cognitive flexibility. Switching frames once the frame you are using stops working.

Global Adaptability#

Global Adaptability is the resilience to work across cultures, contexts, and crises. The global adaptability page.

1. Cross-cultural intelligence. Working effectively where the unwritten rules are not the ones you grew up with.
2. Crisis agility. Acting usefully in a situation that has already broken.
3. Resilience in new environments. Functioning before you are settled.
4. Geopolitical and cultural awareness. Knowing what else is in the room when a decision crosses a border.
5. Self-motivation in ambiguity. Producing work that nobody has defined for you.
6. Remote collaboration. Building a working relationship through a screen.
7. Language and translation fluency. Carrying meaning between languages, including the part machine translation drops.
8. Intercultural sensitivity. Telling the difference between rudeness and a convention you do not share.
9. Ethical flexibility. Applying a principle across contexts that weigh it differently, without abandoning it.
10. Global digital citizenship. Behaving well in an online space that belongs to no single jurisdiction.

Empathy#

Empathy is the ability to understand others and express ideas with clarity and care. The empathy page.

1. Active listening. Hearing what was said instead of assembling your reply during it.
2. Emotional intelligence. Reading emotion accurately, your own included, and acting on the reading.
3. Interpersonal sensitivity. Noticing the thing a person has not said.
4. Conflict resolution and mediation. Getting two positions to a settlement neither of them arrived with.
5. Cross-cultural communication. Being understood by people whose conventions differ from yours.
6. Non-verbal interpretation. Reading posture, pause and face.
7. Storytelling for influence. Making a case that somebody can carry out of the room and repeat.
8. Trust-building dialogue. Talking in a way that leaves the other person more willing to talk again.
9. Clarity in digital communication. Writing so that tone survives the absence of a voice.
10. Inclusive language and framing. Putting a case so that nobody present has to translate themselves first.

Principled Innovation#

Principled Innovation is the discipline of creating progress that is ethical, useful, and built to last. The principled innovation page.

1. Ethical reasoning. Working out what is right in this particular case, with reasons that hold up.
2. Purpose-driven creativity. Inventing towards a stated end rather than for the pleasure of inventing.
3. Impact modelling. Thinking through who is affected, by how much, and when.
4. Foresight and futures literacy. Treating the future as something to reason about rather than something to predict.
5. Values-centred decision-making. Letting a commitment you stated in advance decide a close call.
6. Risk-aware innovation. Building something new while knowing the shape of how it fails.
7. Regulatory awareness. Knowing what the law already requires before you design around it.
8. Diversity in ideation. Getting genuinely different starting positions into the room.
9. Ethics of emerging tech. Reasoning about harms for which no precedent has been set.
10. Creating social value. Counting the benefit that falls outside the balance sheet.

Augmented Mindset#

Augmented Mindset is the capacity to use technology to amplify human thinking and action. The augmented mindset page.

1. Human-AI collaboration. Dividing work between a person and a model so that each does what it is better at. Read the research.
2. Technological literacy. Understanding a technology well enough to argue with it. Read the research.
3. Data interpretation and application. Reading what a number does and does not say, then acting on the difference.
4. AI-assisted decision making. Deciding with a model in the loop while remaining the one who decides. Read the research.
5. Digital tools mastery. Knowing a tool well enough to know when not to reach for it. Read the research.
6. Responsible tech use. Using a capability inside limits you set before you needed them.
7. Prompt crafting. Writing an instruction that returns the work you actually wanted. Read the research.
8. Tool selection and integration. Choosing among tools, and making the ones you chose work together.
9. Automation oversight. Staying answerable for a process you no longer perform yourself. Read the research.
10. Critical thinking with tech outputs. Checking what a machine produced before it becomes what you believe. Read the research.

Four things a list of seventy cannot tell you#

It is not a measurement. Nothing here reports a study. The seventy are a considered selection drawn from practice and from the literature, and they should be read as an organising structure rather than as a finding. The evidence on this site sits under the individual pages, and thirteen of the seventy have one.

Ten is a round number. Seven groups of exactly ten is very unlikely to be what an unconstrained analysis of human capability would produce. Ten is a slide constraint as much as a claim, and the honest reading is that each SuperSkill has roughly this many components and that ten of them are named.

The boundaries leak. Cross-cultural intelligence sits under Global Adaptability and cross-cultural communication sits under Empathy, which is defensible and also arbitrary at the margin. Resilience appears twice in different clothes. Scenario thinking is under Change Readiness and scenario mapping under Big Picture Thinking. Anybody using this as a competency framework should expect to argue about a dozen of the seventy.

Nothing here says these are the skills AI cannot do. That claim is made about some of them on their own pages and is tested there. A list of what matters is a different object from a list of what is safe, and the second one changes faster than anyone can publish it.

Reading the structure for what it is good for#

The reason to break seven headline skills into seventy is that headline skills cannot be assessed, taught or hired for. Nobody has ever run a development conversation about curiosity. They have run one about whether somebody asks better questions than they did last year, which is a thing a person can be given feedback on. The seventy exist to make the seven operable, and that is the test to apply to any use of them.

Three uses hold up. As a vocabulary for development conversations, where the specific item is the unit and the SuperSkill is the heading. As a coverage check on a curriculum or an induction, asking which of the seventy a programme touches and which it has never once addressed, since the answer is usually concentrated in two columns. And as a hiring frame, where a role description names four or five of the seventy instead of asking for adaptability.

One use does not hold up. It happens to be the tempting one. Scoring a person out of seventy produces a number with no instrument behind it. There is a dated instrument in this body of work, the Drift versus Design Diagnostic of 31 May 2026, with ninety-four questions and banded scoring, and it measures something else. Anyone wanting a score should use a thing built to produce one.

Key sources

• Hirji, R. (2025). The SuperSkills Era: Thriving in the Age of AI, keynote deck, September 2025, slide headed "Grounded in Subskills". The primary source for the seventy and their grouping. Not published; read at source 16 September 2026.
• Hirji, R. (2025). SuperSkills keynote handout, October 2025, page 31. The same slide as a seven-column grid, rendered and read visually, which is what confirms the grouping rather than inferring it.
• Hirji, R. (2026). SuperSkills: The 7 Human Skills for the Age of AI. Kogan Page. Where the seven are set out and defended.
• World Economic Forum (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025, chapter 3. Cited here for the overlap in vocabulary, not as evidence for the taxonomy. Graded entry.

Related SuperSkills research#

The seven are introduced in what a SuperSkill is and argued in the SuperSkills thesis. For the wider question of which capabilities employers name, see what are core skills and human skills in the age of AI. For what happens to the capabilities on this list when the work that built them is automated, see the missing rungs and capability debt.

About this research#

Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The seventy names on this page are established terms from the skills literature and none is claimed as a coinage. The grouping of ten under each of seven is his, dated to the keynote deck of September 2025 and to the book.

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