The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report: What the Data Says About Skills in Demand

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report: What the Data Says About Skills in Demand Every few years, the World Economic Forum publishes its Future of Jobs Report — a survey of employers across industries and geographies that asks what skills they expect to need, what roles they expect to grow, and what roles they expect to decline. The reports are imperfect — employer surveys are not the same as labour market data — but they represent one of the most comprehensive attempts to map the changing landscape of professional skills at a global scale. The findings are consistent across editions, and they point in a clear direction: the skills that are growing in demand are not primarily technical. They are cognitive and interpersonal. And the skills that are declining are not primarily manual — they are the routine cognitive tasks that automation is absorbing most rapidly. What the Data Shows The 2023 Future of Jobs Report surveyed over 800 companies across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies, covering more than 11.3 million workers. Its findings on skill demand are worth examining in detail. The top skills identified as growing in importance were: analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, motivation and selfawareness, curiosity and lifelong learning, technological literacy, dependability and attention to detail, empathy and active listening, leadership and social influence, and quality control. Notice what is not on this list. Specific programming languages. Specific software platforms. Specific technical certifications. The skills that employers identified as most critical are metaskills — the ability to think analytically, to learn continuously, to adapt to change, to work effectively with others. The skills identified as declining in relative importance were: reading, writing, and mathematics at a basic level not because they are unimportant, but because they are increasingly assumed; manual dexterity and precision; and routine cogn