The internet is full of lists of skills and knowledge that you—or better yet, your children—will need to succeed in tomorrow’s economy.

At the federal level, Canada’s Department of Employment and Social Development has even created the Future Skills Centre, an organization tasked with strengthening the links between training and employment, but above all, with anticipating what tomorrow will require in terms of strategic skills.

It is work that is both speculative and highly uncertain.

But strangely enough, that is exactly what we need most.

Learning how to learn

For decades, some education programs have been going on and on about the need to “learn how to learn.” When I was young, it was even the guiding value of the school I attended.

Trite? Absolutely.

But since we are at the starting line of major economic, technological, and demographic transformations—whose outcomes are profoundly uncertain—drawing up a list of the specific occupations and skills that will be valued by the economy in 2035 is practically impossible.

Faced with this great uncertainty, with these uncertain futures for our organizations, our economies, and our workers, we are left with this key skill: knowing how to learn.

From this flows a whole series of aptitudes and mindsets that are difficult to instill, but absolutely necessary.

Finally, a list!

What does it take to learn well?

The first element is curiosity.

As Francesca Gino writes in the special issue of the Harvard Business Review dedicated to the topic, “most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: they are the result of curiosity.”

In practice, this means that we must instill in people, young and not so young alike, a desire to turn toward the strange, the misunderstood, and the new. It is certainly a skill, but almost an appetite.

And we observe—or at least this is the conclusion reached by the researchers cited by HBR—that curiosity 1) tends to decline with age, and also 2) decreases as one rises in an organization’s hierarchy.

Are CEOs less curious than frontline employees? There is a worthwhile debate to be had here!

The second element is the ability to make decisions despite uncertainty.

In the managerial tradition, we tend to think of leadership as the exclusive domain of bosses. That is increasingly less the case. The ability of all employees to make smart, fast, and relevant decisions, even in the absence of information, is crucial.

When the goalposts move regularly, it is less important to “be right” and more important to act. Perfect is the enemy of good.

How many organizations today are paralyzed by analysis, by their systems, by their endless decision-making mechanisms? Knowing how to decide quickly, based on weak signals and multiple scenarios, will certainly be a skill to refine.

The third element is the ability to take action

It is increasingly clear that the employees and managers of tomorrow will stand out through some form of skill, whether manual or intellectual. Several studies show that the main driver of employment growth over the past 50 years has been in occupations that require non-routine tasks. In other words, taking action.

A recent Statistics Canada study also clearly shows that the occupations where artificial intelligence represents the greatest opportunity are those focused more on execution than on repetition.

The resulting challenge is that many industries have had little—or no—exposure to these technologies. It is therefore necessary, by using platforms such as Illuxi’s, to place in the hands of the key players in these sectors the tools, content, and inspiration capable of stimulating exposure to these technologies and complementarity with their work.

At the intersection of curiosity, the ability to make decisions despite uncertainty, and the capacity to implement certain innovations lie three major skills for the latter part of the 21st century—and perhaps even beyond!

By Francis Gosselin, Ph.D., ASC

Consultant, economist, and speaker since 2009, Francis supports strategic planning and leadership development initiatives, as well as the delivery of economic analyses across a wide range of industries. He has extensive international experience, having led strategy, research, and training mandates in Europe, Asia, and North America.