The Skills Employers Say Are Growing, and the One That Is Not

Every year brings a fresh list of the skills that will matter next. The most credible one comes from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey, and reading it carefully corrects two things almost everyone gets wrong.

Disruption is slowing, not speeding up

The survey asked over 1,000 employers, representing more than 14 million workers across 55 economies, how much of their workforce’s core skills would change by 2030. The answer was 39%.

That number is routinely reported as evidence of accelerating change. It is the opposite. It was 44% in the 2023 edition and 57% in 2020. The share of skills expected to change has fallen for two surveys running, partly because more workers have now been trained.

"Half your skills will be obsolete in five years" was never quite what the data said, and it is less true now than it was.

What is growing

The skills employers most expect to rise in importance, in order:

• AI and big data
• Networks and cybersecurity
• Technological literacy
• Creative thinking
• Resilience, flexibility and agility
• Curiosity and lifelong learning
• Leadership and social influence

In Sub-Saharan Africa specifically, the pattern is sharper: 89% of employers expect AI and big data skills to grow in importance, and 88% technological literacy, both well above the global average.

The skill on the decline list nobody quotes

Only two skill categories are in net decline in the survey. One is manual dexterity, endurance and precision, which is unsurprising. The other is reading, writing and mathematics.

This is awkward for a publication that argues writing matters, so we will not hide it. The honest reading is that employers expect routine literacy and numeracy to be increasingly handled by software, not that communication stops mattering. The evidence that clear writing still gets people hired is narrower and stronger than the survey, and we set it out in what actually predicts job performance.

The caveat that matters most here

The survey covers large formal employers, threshold 500 staff, and it explicitly places small enterprises and the informal sector out of scope. In Botswana, informal work is between 23% and 34% of employment depending on which official measure you use, and the single largest source of informal employment is the state itself.

So treat this as a good picture of what large global employers expect, and a poor one for most working life in Botswana. The skills that get people hired here are better read from the skills Botswana says it needs.