Future Skills Concepts – the Basis of Perspectives for the Future of Adult Education?

Introduction

The world is undergoing rapid changes, and the future is likely to lead to many more challenges. This may be due to developments on the labour market, digitalisation, climate change, migration movements or demographic change, for example. There is widespread agreement that learning is a key to successfully overcoming both known and also still unknown challenges and can help ensure people make the most of the opportunities presented to them by changes.

The Think Tank TRANSIT has taken up the topic of future skills because, according to a survey, it seems particularly relevant for the development of adult education for people connected with TRANSIT and interested in future issues. On the one hand, these people stated they would like to discuss what they consider to be particularly important competences for the future. On the other hand, the topic of future skills provides a suitable framework for thinking about the challenges we might face in the coming years and decades.

Under the term “future skills”, the Think Tank TRANSIT addresses the question of what kind of adult learning is needed to deal with the challenges of the future. This article aims to show what TRANSIT understands by future skills and the approach the Think Tank intends to take to develop perspectives for adult education.

What are future skills?

Future skills are the competences, attitudes, values and knowledge that are or will become important in a changing society and working world in order to be successful in the future. They are crucial for achieving professional success, developing innovative solutions and contributing to sustainable social development. This also includes developing awareness of local and global challenges. Ehlers (2020, S.7-8) defines future skills as competences that enable people to organise themselves so they can solve complex problems in emerging action contexts and to take (successful) action. Future skills mean creating a specific profile of existing ideas of competences.

This definition is based on the idea that the education systems of the present, including adult education, cannot meet all the requirements of future society because the future will bring changes with it and will therefore bring new requirements. Future skills discourses are an attempt to anticipate future requirements to be able to react to new requirements or conditions as early as possible. They often contain a list and categorisation of future-oriented competences. Building on this, various actors are calling for the listed competences to be promoted to a greater extent among various groups of people (e.g. pupils, students and employees), including the necessary adjustments to the education system.

However, the term “future skills” is not used in a uniform manner in the literature. Instead, it is a reference point which various actors refer to when trying to describe which competences could be important for shaping the future. In addition to the term “future skills”, there are also various terms which are not clearly distinguished from each other, such as key competences, core competences, transversal skills, 21st century skills and future competences.

Comparison of competences across future skills concepts

Despite their similar motivation, many future skills concepts hardly relate to each other in the arguments they bring forward and do not make any attempt to develop a standardised concept of future skills. It is therefore difficult to compare the listed competences across the concepts. Nevertheless, due to the difficulties described, some authors have had to aggregate the competences to a large extent. Pellegrino and Hilton (2012) have divided the competences into three categories: cognitive skills, intrapersonal skills, interpersonal skills. Ehlers (2022), Lamb, Maire and Doecke (Lamb et al., 2017) and Kotsiou et al. (2022) have also developed overarching categorisations. With reference to transversal competences, Scharnhorst and Kaiser (2018) derive from numerous studies the fact that the following competences will become increasingly important in the future: complex problem-solving. IT skills, social skills, self-competences and basic skills. Overall, it can be seen that many future skills approaches emphasise the importance of transversal competences in particular. However, a synthesis seems to have hardly been achieved so far. The multitude of terms and concepts makes a uniform understanding of future skills and a systematic analysis of the relevance of individual competences difficult.

Criticism of the future skills concepts

There are a number of criticisms of the concept of future skills and its common use. A first criticism is that the term “future skills”, which has only been used in the last 10 years or so, suggests that it is based on a fundamentally new idea or new concept. However, the idea that certain competences are needed to overcome future challenges is not new. There is the danger that, on account of the new term, debates will overlook which ideas and concepts were already developed at an earlier point, albeit using different terms. When discussing future challenges and the skills required to meet them, the focus should therefore not be narrowed down to concepts called “future skills”.

Another criticism is that the concept behind the term is not very concrete. It is hardly a fixed theoretical component in any of the relevant disciplines such as educational science, sociology or economics. Accordingly, many approaches to future skills are limited to describing the skills that will be relevant in the future in the form of a list. Lai and Viering (2012) therefore point out that categorisations of future competences should not be equated with modelling, which would have to empirically examine the complex relationships between the constructs. However, models would be particularly helpful for an in-depth discussion of future social challenges and the role played by education in proactively dealing with them.

Due to the lack of modelling, most future skills concepts do not establish a link to academic work. This lack of a link means there is only a rudimentary empirical examination of the connection between the listed competences and their effect on social developments and their individual usability. These could be, for example, educational success, employability, life satisfaction, social commitment or mental and physical health. To date, there has hardly been any empirical research on any of the listed concepts that clarifies the extent to which the competences have actually proven to be relevant and, if so, for what purpose and in which context. This is worth considering because the future skills concepts aim to influence the educational system or individual educational institutions in their orientation and effective goals. However, without valid studies on the benefits of future competences, any action geared towards these competences has no foundations based on evidence (Kalz, 2023). We can learn from this that future skills concepts do not provide a formula for the education and learning of the future, but rather serve as an inspirational framework for dealing with the future.

The lack of empirical evidence is probably due in part to the fact that future skills approaches have hardly been developed by researchers, but are mostly based on political or commercial initiatives. They are therefore paid little attention in research. However, whether business organisations should play a key role at all in the development of concepts for education is highly controversial. Behind 21st century skills, for example, is a global network of actors from the education sector, politics and, in particular, business. There is therefore the danger that future skills will replace the primacy of pedagogy with competence requirements from the business world. To counteract this criticism, it would make sense to broaden the discussion on future skills and involve experts from different disciplines.

Research on skills without “future”

As many future skills approaches are not very well incorporated in research, there is hardly any link to related approaches or empirical evidence that could also be valuable for evaluating future skills approaches. In the economic and sociological research literature, the demand for and use of skills has been intensively discussed for some time. However, the focus here is not on which competences are needed to meet future challenges, but on how the demand for and impact of competences has developed in recent decades. In addition, there is no consensus here on how competences should be categorised and named. Moreover, the literature often makes little distinction between activities, required competences and qualification levels. Nevertheless, a link to this literature can, to some extent, compensate for the lack of empirical research behind future skills concepts. This is because it provides certain indications as to which competences are gaining in importance, which also allows some conclusions to be drawn about the near future.

One strand of this literature deals with changes in the demand for certain competences. It is assumed that digitalisation is a key driver of these changes. On the one hand, digitalisation is leading to a restructuring of the professional world. The argument here is that digital technology can replace labour and, in this way, reduce the demand for workers in those occupations that involve a high degree of routine activities (e.g.  Autor et al., 2003; Autor & Handel, 2013). On the other hand, digital technologies can lead to shifts in the competences required within the occupations (Atalay et al., 2020; Bisello et al., 2019; Spitz‐Oener, 2006).

Overall, demand for almost all competences has grown over time. One of the most visible changes in qualification requirements is the increased demand for ICT skills (Bisello et al., 2019; Buchmann et al., 2020). The literature suggests that ICT skills also influence the demand for other types of skills such as social and cognitive skills (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2019; Bisello et al., 2021; Deming & Kahn, 2018). Researchers have also pointed to an increasing complementarity between cognitive and social skills (Borghans et al., 2013).

Conclusion

Future skills concepts offer a suitable framework for thinking about the future and, due to their focus on competences (of adults), also establish a connection to adult education. However, since the concepts have a number of disadvantages, such as their particularity, the lack of a connection to research or partial influence by economic interests, they cannot provide a programmatic approach. Future skills concepts are hardly suitable for providing formulas on how individuals, educational institutions or society can prepare for the future. On the other hand, they reveal the urgency of discussing emerging challenges at the level of society and developing perspectives on how to deal with them. Future skills approaches are therefore suitable for generating stimulus for the actors involved in adult education.

Ideally, future skills discussions are not about ranking the most important competences because it is hardly possible to create such a ranking. This is also connected with the fact that the future will offer not just one challenge, but several interlinked ones. Depending on which challenge the focus is on, different competences will also be more or less important. Due to the complexity when interlinking different future challenges, it should be fruitful to reflect on future skills with a view to individual challenges. Ideally, this will be done in an interdisciplinary manner in order to avoid a one-sided focus, for example on economic interests.

When complex problems need to be tackled that require different perspectives, skills and expertise, collaborative approaches are seen as particularly useful. Interdisciplinary collaboration allows experts and practitioners to combine their knowledge, which enables more appropriate solutions to complex problems than specialised or purely research-based working methods. As TRANSIT pursues an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, the Think Tank can use this to initiate discussions about future skills and, in this way, to generate stimulus for the future-oriented development of adult education.

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