If 39% of Skills Will Be Obsolete in Five Years, What Are We Actually Building in Our Classrooms?
The future of work can be shaped for better outcomes, and it is the decisions made by leaders today that will determine these outcomes.
— World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025
When a Global Report Knocks on Our Door
In January 2025, the World Economic Forum published the Future of Jobs Report 2025, a report gathering the views of more than 1,000 employers around the world, representing over 14 million workers across 55 countries. Read carefully, this report is an open letter to anyone who carries responsibility for educating children today.
And one number made us pause for a long time: 39%. It means that nearly two in every five skills a worker holds today will have changed, or become obsolete, by 2030. Not ten years from now. Five. The distance between our children sitting in their classrooms today and the day they step into the world of work.
So here is the question we want to ask in all seriousness: if more than a third of what we teach today will lose its relevance within five years, what exactly are we building in our classrooms?
What the World Needs from Our Children
By 2030, the report projects, the world will create 170 million new jobs while 92 million of today’s jobs disappear. The fastest-growing jobs are the technological ones: Big Data Specialists, FinTech Engineers, AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Software Developers. The fastest-declining are the clerical roles: cashiers and ticket clerks, administrative assistants, data entry clerks.
But more important than the list of jobs is the list of skills, because job titles change, while core skills travel across professions. And this is what the world is asking of our children:
Analytical thinking remains the number-one skill, considered essential by seven in ten employers. Close behind come resilience, flexibility and agility; leadership and social influence; creative thinking; and motivation and self-awareness.
And the fastest-rising skills? AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, technological literacy, creative thinking, and curiosity and lifelong learning.
Look closely at that list. Not one of the top ten can be built through drill worksheets. Not one grows out of a culture of memorizing and repeating. What the world needs are people who can think, adapt, collaborate, create, and never stop learning.
What Machines Cannot Take Over
Here is the finding that should give every educator hope. Of the more than 2,800 skills the report analyzed, not a single one has a “very high” capacity to be replaced by current generative AI. The majority (69%) have very low or low replaceability.
The hardest skills to replace are the most human ones: empathy and active listening, resilience, creativity, the ability to lead and to guide others. Even more striking, teaching and mentoring is rising in demand, and environmental stewardship has entered the top ten fastest-growing skills for the first time in the history of the report.
What does this mean for us? That education aimed at forming the whole person is not old-fashioned, it is exactly what this moment demands. The more human the skill, the more future-proof it is.
What This Means for the Classroom
The report also notes that 59 out of every 100 workers will need training by 2030. Learning does not end at graduation. The children in our classrooms today must carry enough curiosity to keep learning for the rest of their lives, because the world will not stop changing just because they received a diploma.
And the skills gap is named by 63% of employers as the single biggest barrier to transformation. Read that again. The biggest obstacle facing organizations worldwide is not capital, not regulation, it is skills. What happens, or fails to happen, in our classrooms today shows up tomorrow in that number.
So the question for us as educators is no longer “Can the child answer this question?” but “Can the child think, adapt, and keep learning when facing something they have never met before?”
How SJMES Answers
At SJMES (Saint Joseph Montessori School), we do not begin with the question “What should we teach so our children pass the test?” We begin with a different question: “What kind of human being is growing here, and will this person be able to think, adapt, and keep learning when the world around them never stops changing?”
From that question, everything else follows.
We build thinking, not just filled heads. Children do not come to school to receive information; they come to learn how to think. We give them room to ask, to explore, to discover on their own, because a child who learns how to think can face any problem, including problems that do not exist yet.
We build resilience, not perfection. In our classrooms, confusion is not the enemy; it is the doorway to understanding. A child who is never allowed to be confused will never know the joy of understanding, and will never have the resilience to face the unfamiliar. A wrong answer with sound reasoning behind it receives the same appreciation as a correct one.
We build leadership and collaboration as lived experience, not theory. Children of different ages work side by side; the older ones learn to explain, to listen, to guide. Leadership here is not taught from a textbook, it is lived.
We build curiosity as a habit, not an obligation. The child who asks “why?” is not disrupting the class. That child is doing the most human thing there is: trying to make sense of the world. We do not switch that question off with instant answers. We let it grow, because that is where lifelong learning begins.
We build care as part of who we are. The fact that the WEF report has, for the first time, placed environmental stewardship among the fastest-growing skills confirms what we have long believed: caring for the world is not an extracurricular add-on. It is part of how we understand education itself.
Closing
This report is not a prophecy. It is a projection built from the views of more than a thousand employers worldwide. And its message is clear: the world needs people who can think, adapt, collaborate, create, and keep learning, not people trained to compete with machines.
We cannot promise that our children will know all the answers. But we can promise that they will be able to search for answers, face uncertainty with courage, and contribute with meaning.
Because at SJMES, we are not preparing children for the world of work in 2030. We are preparing them for life.
Antonius Widitrianto
Reference
World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025. Geneva: World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
Posted on 13 August 2026