By 2025, some 85 million jobs may be lost to the emerging and thus far growing division of labor among human, machine, and algorithm — though, some 97 million jobs may thereby emerge that are better adapted to the new dynamic. According to a World Economic Forum report published in 2020, listed among the top ten skills in terms of prominence by the year, 2025 are soft skills, including creativity, leadership, and flexibility. 

Despite the widespread, unwritten consensus that no single skill set nor the area of expertise is likely to be able to sustain a long-term career in the future, the core soft skills of the 21st century — including not just creativity and flexibility, but also complex problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration — will be crucial for enabling people to become better able to adapt to the changing needs of the labor market. Education may serve as a foundation for self-actualization and future re-skilling, but curricula nevertheless cannot remain static; They must constantly evolve in order to keep up with career paths that continue to evolve, becoming less linear than ever before, and they should do so in a way that accommodates future workers to emerge equipped with soft skills.

Soft skills should be developed and acquired early on in schools, then later refined at colleges and universities, and, ideally, honed throughout lifelong learning as an adult. By providing a solid foundation in soft skills, an educational system can serve as a catalyst as much for increased adaptability to future employment, as for generally improved livelihood. However, shifting — or even fluctuating — demands for skills across industries require that curricula be updated and adapted on a regular basis, for they are inherently informed by the evolution of labor markets. Once again, to avoid excessive disruption and implementation time lag associated with major, infrequent overhauls, upgrades to curricula should be introduced into systems strictly in an incremental manner.

Obviously, no one organization can provide these soft skills alone — much less for the entirety of a person’s life. It takes both public and private educational institutions to contribute to the creation of adequate learning systems. In general, when designing curricula, more emphasis should be placed on collating insights from the public sector, private sector, and civil society organizations.

 

Credit: https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1Gb0000000LPFfEAO/key-issues/a1Gb00000015QJoEAM