The skills you really need to learn at school

The summer vacation is over and for millions of parents, teachers, and students in France and across much of Europe, this is the week of “la rentrée” – the beginning of a new school year. That makes it an opportune time to ask a vexatious but important question: is school today equipping the next generation with the skills they will need to succeed in a new age of automation and artificial intelligence?

Much of the public debate about automation tends to focus on whether there will be enough jobs in the future, or whether our lives will be taken over by robots. That is the wrong debate to be having: just as we have seen with new technologies in the past, there will likely be enough work in the future to ensure full employment. But the powerful technologies that we take for granted in our smartphones are starting to be adopted in the workplace, and they will disrupt work. Our research shows that automation and AI adoption over the next decade or so will likely require many people to switch occupation and acquire new skills.

Indeed, skill requirements in the workplace are shifting, and shifting fast. You can already see that with digital skills: today, everyone needs some basic digital abilities, whether it be truck drivers setting their GPS devices or photographers touching up wedding photos. Some of the skills most commonly used today will be in considerably less demand in the future and, conversely, some skills that are less common today will become increasingly important.

Technological skills are an obvious starting point. Today, they are the smallest category of the 25 core skills that we looked at, when measured by the number of hours they are deployed at work. The trend we have already seen toward the need for basic digital skills will continue apace in the years to 2030, with demand growing by 65 percent. Even stronger will be the demand for advanced technological skills such as programming, which will rise by more than 90 percent. Of all the skill shifts we examined, these are by far the largest.

Other skill sets that will also see a big increase in demand are social and emotional skills, such as initiative taking and leadership and managing others, and higher cognitive skills. Creativity, for example, will see a 30 percent increase in demand to 2030, while complex information processing and interpretation will jump 18 percent.

At the same time, basic cognitive skills—the staples of the school curriculum including basic literacy and numeracy—will not suffice for the jobs of tomorrow. Machines already can carry out basic tasks including reading or generating formulaic documents, as well as processing and collecting data more competently than humans in many cases. The other skills for which demand will decline are the largest set: physical and manual skills, including general equipment operation and navigation. While these skills will remain important, in some countries they will be overtaken by cognitive or social and emotional skills, our research finds.

What are the implications for our education system? First, and most obviously, we need to ramp up the teaching of so-called STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, and math). That is a goal frequently talked about in academic and educational circles, but so far there is little sign that the acquisition of these skills is on the scale we see as needed for work.

Second, we need to rethink teaching of skills often called “soft” today, but which in fact are core to the human experience and will be the ones that machines cannot easily replicate. How do we stimulate creativity in the classroom? What can we do to enhance the social and emotional skills that we need to interact subtly and appropriately with others, regardless of the situation? Does it still make sense for students to sit in classrooms for hours on end and learn subjects passively at a time when machines can already do so much of that rote learning?

Most importantly, how do we instill in today’s younger generations the ability to adapt to shifting skill requirements and continue to press ahead on a learning journey that will last a lifetime? A key finding of our research is that the workplace will continue to be redesigned as people work ever more closely with machines, and that flexibility and resilience will be core attributes of successful workers in the future. We grew up in a generation in which “emotional intelligence” was prized alongside IQ. The next generation will need to have a high “AQ” – an adaptability quotient – to thrive in the new automation era that is opening up.

Changing education is a complex and lengthy process at the best of times. As we prepare for a new world of work, we need to start now, with some hard questions for teachers and principals, but also for parents and students themselves, about just what they learned in the classroom—and whether it will be of any use in their future work lives.