The Skills Your Child Will Need by 2030 (and How to Start Building Them Now)

What employers say is changing

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 surveyed employers representing millions of workers around the world. Among its findings:

• On average, employers expect about 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030. That's a lot, but it's actually lower than the 44% they expected in the previous report.
• The report projects around 170 million new jobs created and 92 million displaced by 2030, a net gain, but with a lot of movement between jobs.
• The fastest-growing skills are AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy.

Read quickly, that sounds like "everyone must become a programmer". Read more carefully, the message is different. Technology skills are growing fastest, but the skills employers still rank as most important overall include thinking skills and personal qualities that no machine replaces: analytical and creative thinking, resilience and adaptability, curiosity, and the ability to work with other people.

Your child's future probably needs both.

The five skill groups worth building

1. Technological literacy, not just screen time

Technological literacy isn't the same as being good with an iPad. Most children are fluent users of technology. Far fewer understand how it works.

Technological literacy means understanding, at least roughly, how the tools around you function: how a search engine ranks results, what an algorithm is, why an AI tool can be confidently wrong, how your personal data is collected and used. It also means being able to make simple things, not only consume them.

Start now:

• Free block-based coding (like Scratch) for younger children; Python from around 11 or 12.
• Ask questions together: "Why do you think the video app showed you that?"
• Let them build something: a simple game, a website about a hobby, a spreadsheet tracking their savings.

2. Working with AI wisely

Today's children will work alongside AI tools the way previous generations worked with calculators and search engines. The valuable skill isn't avoiding AI or depending on it. It's directing it, checking it and knowing when not to use it.

Start now:

• Use AI together. Ask it a question, then check the answer against a reliable source. Notice when it's wrong.
• Encourage "try first, then ask" for homework.
• Talk about honesty: when using AI is helping, and when it's pretending.

3. Thinking skills: analytical and creative

Analytical thinking means breaking problems down, weighing evidence and reaching sound conclusions. Creative thinking means generating ideas, seeing connections and imagining alternatives. AI can produce a lot of content, but it still needs people who can judge whether that content is any good and come up with directions it wouldn't.

Start now:

• Maths and science, taught for understanding, not just for answers. Ask "how do you know?" more than "what's the answer?"
• Puzzles, strategy games, debates at dinner.
• Writing and making things from scratch: stories, drawings, music, inventions. The process of creating, with all its false starts, builds creative confidence.

4. Communication and collaboration

As routine tasks are automated, more work becomes about people: explaining ideas clearly, persuading, negotiating, teaching, caring and leading teams. Speaking more than one language is a real advantage in an increasingly global workplace.

Start now:

• Ask your child to explain something they learned to a younger sibling or to you.
• Group projects, sport, clubs, volunteering: anything where they must cooperate with people who aren't their friends.
• Language learning, including keeping up home languages. Bilingual children have an asset that's hard to build later.

5. Resilience, curiosity and learning how to learn

If a large share of skills keep changing, the most important skill may be the ability to keep learning, calmly, throughout life. That means curiosity, comfort with not knowing something yet, and the persistence to stick with something difficult.

Start now:

• Praise effort and strategy, not just results. "You tried three different ways until one worked" teaches more than "you're so clever".
• Let them struggle a little before rescuing them.
• Model it yourself: let your child see you learning something new and finding it hard.
• Teach good study techniques like testing yourself and spacing out revision, which help with every subject.

What this doesn't mean

It doesn't mean every child must become an engineer. The world will still need nurses, teachers, plumbers, artists, farmers, lawyers and carers, and those jobs will also change as technology changes. Technical literacy will help in all of them, but it won't replace the core of what they do.

It doesn't mean abandoning traditional subjects either. Reading deeply, writing clearly, mathematics, history and science are exactly what build the thinking skills employers keep asking for. A child who reads widely and reasons well will adapt to new tools far more easily than one who learned a particular app.

And it doesn't mean filling every hour with enrichment. Play, boredom, friendship and rest are part of how children develop creativity and resilience.

A simple plan by age

Ages 6–10: reading together, puzzles and building toys, block-based coding for fun, a second language, lots of unstructured play.

Ages 11–14: a first real programming language, critical conversations about technology and AI, a team activity, maths understood rather than memorised, a project they choose themselves.

Ages 15–18: deeper study in areas of interest, a real project or competition (science fair, coding contest, debate, olympiad), responsible use of AI in study, part-time work or volunteering, and plenty of practice explaining their ideas.

Signs your child is building the right skills

It's hard to measure curiosity or resilience with a test, but you can see them at home. Encouraging signs include:

• They ask "why?" and "how does that work?" and sometimes go looking for the answer themselves.
• They can stick with a hard puzzle, problem or piece of music for longer than they could last year.
• They can explain something they learned, in their own words, to someone else.
• They question things they see online rather than accepting them, and can tell you how they'd check whether something is true.
• They start projects of their own: a story, a game, a small business idea, a collection, a video.
• They can work with other children to finish something, even when they disagree.

None of these require expensive courses. Most grow from conversation, time, and a parent who's interested in what their child is thinking.

Questions to ask your child's school

A short, friendly conversation with teachers can tell you a lot about how your child's school is preparing them:

• How do students learn to use AI responsibly, and what are the rules?
• Is there any computing or programming in the timetable, and from what age?
• How are students taught to evaluate information and sources?
• Are there clubs, competitions or projects where students build things?
• How can parents support this learning at home?

Asked with curiosity rather than criticism, these questions usually lead to useful ideas, and they show the school that parents care about these skills.

Where schools fit in

Schools are adapting, but many are moving slowly, and that's understandable: curricula take years to change. Some newer models of schooling are experimenting with very different approaches. We wrote about one of them, a school that compresses academic work into two hours a day with AI tutors and spends the rest on life skills, in our look at the Alpha School model.

Whatever your child's school does, the home matters enormously. The habits of curiosity, persistence and honest work are mostly built there.

The bottom line

The research doesn't say the future belongs only to coders. It says the future belongs to people who are comfortable with technology and deeply human at the same time: curious, thoughtful, able to work with others and able to keep learning. The good news is that you can start building every one of those skills this week, mostly with conversation, books, puzzles and a little guided practice.

If you'd like support with a specific skill, whether that's a first programming language, maths that finally makes sense, or a new language, our computer science teachers and teachers in many other subjects work one-to-one with children of all ages.

Frequently asked questions