Reimagining education is key to future of work

We need disciplines to interact with each other — both for structural renovation of institutions and departments, as well as to ensure holistic, multidisciplinary, and future-ready education for students

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The world is being re-imagined. We are seeing a wave of new technologies, an increased focus on skills and how we work, and career paths that are plural, nonlinear, and constantly shifting. The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly unquestionable.

The Global AI Jobs Barometer 2025, released by PwC, reveals that industries that are more exposed to AI have three times higher growth in revenue per employee, with accelerated overall growth.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) underscores this trend: By 2030, the fastest-growing jobs will be “big data specialists”, “fintech engineers”, and “AI and machine learning specialists”. Skill sets too are evolving at breakneck speed; in jobs that are more exposed to AI, the skills employers want today are changing 66% faster, with a strong emphasis on AI and technology liter~acy, and cyber skills.

The focus on AI and technology at work is clear, and rightly so, given their dramatic effects — initially overwhelming but gradually positive —on productivity and efficiency levels across roles and the nature of jobs within an organisation.

In such an age of machine intelligence and automated assistants, it is easy to overlook the degree (and quality) of human collaboration with technology that enables the “outputs” that we find impressive and useful. Al is not simply automating routine tasks and becoming a default personal assistant, it is also amplifying our distinctly human abilities to think, ideate, and solve problems.

According to WEF, analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, and leadership and social influence top the core skills needed for the workplace today. These are what people call soft — or durable — skills that are foundational to being human.