Here are some of the top quotes from leaders:
1) Skilling should start in schools – but doesn’t depend on a degree
2) In-demand skills are changing fast – but they’re not all technical
3) Recruitment should consider resilience
4) Leaders can never overcommunicate
5) Inclusive workplaces are here to stay – companies need the talent
6) We need a win-win on migration for work
‘Agentic AI’ – and its potential to boost productivity – may have been a buzzword at Davos, but humans were at the heart of discussions, with ‘Investing in People’ a core theme.
Over the course of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2025, sessions were devoted to how we go about reskilling and closing jobs gaps in the Intelligent Age.
As we head further into the year, here are some of the trends we may start to see – based on key insights from top thinkers on the future of work.
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1) Skilling should start in schools – but doesn’t depend on a degree
“We have a looming global crisis of jobs”, warned the President of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, setting out the challenge in his opening remarks to the Closing the Jobs Gap session.
In the next 10 years, 1.2 billion people in the emerging world will enter the workforce, but only around 400 million jobs will be created, he said: “It’s not just a crisis of jobs, it’s a crisis of hope, of self-belief and dignity and a crisis of solidarity.”
The key, he said, was to “start early”.
“The first three years of life are critical to addressing the jobs challenge, developing human potential early in life. What happens in school is critical.”
But it doesn’t stop there: “You don’t just address this upstream and think that it takes care of the downstream, it requires continuous investment through life in human potential.”
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One of the challenges we face all over the world is a huge “mismatch of skills and aspirations”, Shanmugaratnam added. “If we don’t solve it, we get… a whole generation feeling the system has failed them.”
He warned that China, India and much of the Western world had expanded tertiary systems to such an extent, they’re now “overly academically oriented” and have neglected technical skills.
“It’s created a hierarchy where academic skills are ranked above technical skills, or the skills you acquire through experience. That’s at the heart of the mismatch between what people are trained for and what the job market and employers want.”
We need a “reorientation in education systems, so that people come out with the benefit of skills that they know are relevant”.
Soft skills and breadth are “not the sole province of the traditional university education”, he added.
“Breadth of mind develops in the workplace and through technical education, where you’re constantly having to toggle between different concepts, different technologies, and just keep pace with the changing nature of the workplace.”
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2) In-demand skills are changing fast – but they’re not all technical
With 1.1 billion professionals on LinkedIn and 65 million companies looking to employ them, the platform’s CEO Ryan Roslansky is well placed to speak about in-demand skills – and skills gaps.
“We can at least see some objective data of what’s going on to help understand where skill gaps legitimately do exist. They’re everywhere, quite frankly.
“One of the most important things that we see right now, which isn’t new, is just the amount of change that’s happening, is truly unprecedented.”
“At the turn of the century, 25 years ago, 20% of the jobs that are on LinkedIn didn’t even exist. Even if you have a job that did exist, on average, 25% of the skills you need to do that job have already changed.
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— Ryan Roslansky, CEO, LinkedIn
“So even if you’re not changing your job, your job is changing on you. A lot of that is being fuelled by AI. Even going back eight years ago, the percentage of the LinkedIn member base that had at least one AI skill on their profile has increased by 20 times and there’s been a 300% increase in hiring for people with AI skills. That’s where the market is heading.”
But it’s not just about the technical AI skills, he added.
“The most in-demand skill that people are looking for right now are people skills, human skills, communication, collaboration, compassion, empathy. The things that you need that are truly human, that can’t be automated out.
“In this sea of uncertainty and change, the path forward is one in which people are able to obviously understand the skills they need for the employment they want. But it’s really a balance of both human and technical skills.”
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3) Recruitment should consider resilience
From a recruitment perspective, “we want your journey to be bumpy”, Bob Sternfels, Global Managing Partner at McKinsey and Co, told Davos.
Sternfels was speaking in the session Emerging Economies amid Shocks the day after the Forum and McKinsey published the joint report Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World.
“Resilience is something we need to lean into,” he said. “We surveyed over 250 institutions … and most folks aren’t prepared. 84% of respondents said they don’t think they’re investing enough in resilience.”
“I’m personally passionate about this notion of resilience as a skill.”
“We talk about resilience as a muscle that needs to be built. And unless you keep that muscle in shape, it can atrophy.
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— Bob Sternfels, Global Managing Partner at McKinsey and Co.
Sternfels believes developing resilience as a skill for leaders is an area that is underinvested in.
“Most leaders look great when the sun is shining … But when we recruit, the conversation is around the scars on your back: What were the setbacks and how did you handle those? Because that’s much more important to me than how you achieved something when the wind was in your back.”
He said resilience in leaders can be built in through planned experiments such as requiring people to work abroad, out of their comfort zone.
But, he added, “I also think increasingly there’s also something perhaps earlier in the funnel, around selection.”
The consultancy has around 1.4 million applicants each year, which gives them a big dataset to work out the characteristics that help build future leaders. It’s changed the way they recruit.
“We realized we had a bias to phenomenal performance throughout your life, the person who scored top marks all the way through.
“Guess what? It turns out that the person who’s going to be a more successful leader is the person who had a setback and got back up from it. So what we’re starting to look for now is these disruptions in your path. What did you learn from that and how did you pick up?
“There may be pathways once somebody joins an organization, but there might also be some selection criteria, as we think about the kind of people that we want to bring into our organizations.”
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4) Leaders can never overcommunicate
Adam Grant, Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is a perennial at Davos and a voice of wisdom on work.
In the session Reskilling for the Intelligent Age, he explained why leaders can never talk too much.
“There’s a recent Frank Flynn study showing that leaders were, on average, nine times more likely to be criticized for under-communicating than overcommunicating.
“It’s so easy to understand why this happens, because once an idea makes sense to you, you explain it once and you think everybody else has got it, and you suffer from a curse of knowledge, not realizing how unfamiliar that idea is.
“What a lot of leaders don’t realize is, if you overcommunicate, the worst thing that happens is people say, ‘Shut up, we get it’. And then you know the message has landed.
“If you under-communicate, people think that either you don’t know what you’re doing or you don’t care.
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— Adam Grant, Wharton Professor
“And the reality is that being able to frame that message in a way that resonates with a particular audience, is something the human brain is still pretty good at.”
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5) Inclusive workplaces are here to stay – companies need the talent
Sander van ’t Noordende, CEO and Chair of the Executive Board of Randstad, a global talent company, told the Flexibility 2.0 session about the findings of its latest Workmonitor report, which surveys employees’ work expectations:
“2025 was a marquee year, because for the first time in the many years we have done this research, work-life balance scores a bit higher than compensation … in the mature markets.
“The labour market has been challenging over the last couple of years, COVID-19 was a massive peak, now the number of vacancies has come down, the quit rate has come down, so the market is stuck.
“Employers say come back to the office, but the employees say we want something that works for us, for me as an individual. That means I want to work for a company where the values are aligned with mine and I want a work-life balance.”
There’s a mismatch of the expectations around working in the office – with employers wanting employees in on average 0.5 days more than employees want to come in, according to van ’t Noordende.
“This whole debate is going to settle down over the next year or so,” he said.
“Employees are looking for a sense of community at work … where they can feel comfortable, where they can be their best because they don’t have to leave anything by the door,” he added, pointing out that the new US administration “has a different view on that”.
“I think companies will stay the course on inclusive workplaces and it makes a lot of sense, because if talent is scarce in the world and it is, we need everyone on board …
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— Sander van ’t Noordende, CEO and Chair of the Executive Board of Randstad
“We might need to use different words here or there … but I don’t think all the efforts companies have made on equity and inclusive workplaces are going to go away because that would be very, very bad for business.”
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6) We need a win-win on migration for work
Across several sessions at Davos, there was discussion of the imbalance of workers across the world between countries with ageing populations and countries with growing young populations.
Gilbert Fossoun Houngbo, Director-General of the International Labour Organization (ILO), pointed out the “contradictions that globally we are going through” in the session Closing the Jobs Gap.
“In the Global North, you can see that the communities are worried about migration. We have to recognize it and face it. On the flipside, we know there are gaps between job shortages and availability of skills.
“At one point, we will have to sit down to try to find at least a minimum way of moving forward where we can really have a win-win approach to what is acceptable and what could help fill in those gaps, including a combination of human being, decent jobs together with robotics.
“We have got to see how we deal with this labour migration in a way that will not cause fear on one side, and that will also not cause a brain drain on the other side, and that can be somewhat of a circular win-win situation.”
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In the session Redrawing the Geography of Jobs, IMD Business School President David Bach said: “The jobs mismatch, the attempt to match jobs and people, is going to be one of the defining features of our global politics over the next decades.”
Hisayuki Idekoba, President and CEO of Recruit Holdings, which owns job platforms like Indeed and Glassdoor, said the data is showing “huge, long-term demographic changes in all developed countries: an ageing population.”
By comparison, Africa will account for one in three working-age people by 2050, said Erika Kraemer Mbula of the University of Johannesburg – “a beacon of youth in the labour force.”
In the US, “the unemployment rate in construction is 0%,” pointed out Amy Pope, Director-General at the International Organization for Migration (IMO). In many cases, roles in these sorts of sectors are filled by immigrant workers, some documented, others not.
In some countries – like Canada, where Idekoba said around 26% of workers are immigrants – this then leads to “a backlash moment, where people are saying, wait a minute, do we have too many migrants coming in because we don’t have enough housing,” pointed out Pope.
Technology could offer something of a solution, helping connect people with relevant jobs, no matter where they are.
Nacho De Marco, Founder and CEO of BairesDev said: “If you really allow different geographies to get quality jobs, not only are they going to be better off, but this conversation about migration may just almost entirely go away.”
Pope had a different take: “I don’t think it’s going away. I think it’s going to be a different conversation. At some point we’re going to have the economies of Europe and the US and Canada fighting over migrants to come and work in these jobs where they do not have the talent they need to meet the workforce needs.”
Source – World Economic Forum Davos 2025
