# World Economic Forum Skills: What's on the List and Where You Stand Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/world-economic-forum-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/world-economic-forum-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The World Economic Forum skills employers want by 2030, from analytical thinking to resilience and influence, and how to tell which you already have. ## Key facts - Title: World Economic Forum Skills: What's on the List and Where You Stand - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Building Resilience, Influence - Primary keyword: world economic forum skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/world-economic-forum-skills/ ## What this page covers - The World Economic Forum skills employers want by 2030, from analytical thinking to resilience and influence, and how to tell which you already have. - Practical guidance for world economic forum skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation World Economic Forum skills are the skills employers name in the WEF's Future of Jobs Report 2025 as essential now or rising through 2030. Analytical thinking leads the core list. Beside it, and beside fast-growing AI and big data, stand human skills: resilience, [flexibility and agility](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/adaptability-in-the-workplace/); leadership and social influence; creative thinking; curiosity and lifelong learning; and motivation and self-awareness. Read as a ranking, a list like that can feel like a verdict on whether your skills will still count once AI has reshaped your field. It works better as a mirror, because every human skill on it can be learned. Hold it up against what you already do well, and one entry turns out to unlock the rest. ## Where the World Economic Forum skills list comes from The list is a reading of employer demand. For the Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum gathered the views of more than 1,000 employers, together representing more than 14 million workers, on the skills they expect to need through 2030. The result describes the labor market in aggregate. It shows where demand is moving across many industries and economies, but it does not say which skills your next role will hinge on, and it was never meant to be a syllabus that one person completes. The pace of change is the part that unsettles people. Employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change between 2025 and 2030, roughly two-fifths of a typical skill set, as AI and the digitalization of work spread. If you are leaving education now, some of what you bring to your first job will need updating within your first five years. That sounds like a threat until you notice what it rewards: the ability to keep learning, which is itself something you can practice deliberately. The same report projects a net increase of 78 million job opportunities by 2030, while warning that workforces urgently need upskilling. The work is shifting rather than vanishing, so the real question is whether [your skills keep pace](/knowledge/skills-standards/future-proof-skills/) with it. It also helps to know that the report ranks skills in two ways. Core skills are the ones employers consider essential for their workforce now. The fastest-growing skills are the ones rising most in importance between 2025 and 2030. A skill can be essential without growing fast, and a fast-growing skill may not yet be a requirement in your field, so weigh the two separately when you decide what to work on. ## Eight World Economic Forum skills and what they ask of you ### 1. Analytical thinking Analytical thinking is the most sought-after core skill in the report: seven out of 10 companies consider it essential in 2025. It sits at the top because almost every role involves weighing information to reach a sound judgment. Education trains this skill more directly than anything else on the list, but employers judge it by how you apply it to workplace problems rather than to assignments. In a first job, that might mean spotting that a run of customer complaints and a dip in sales share a cause, or laying out two options with the trade-offs of each before your manager has to ask. ### 2. Resilience, flexibility and agility Employers expect this skill to keep rising in importance, and the report finds it among the skills that most clearly separate growing roles from declining ones. Put plainly, it is the capacity to keep working well when your tasks, tools or circumstances change. That makes it a working habit more than a personality trait, and it is the skill most directly tested by a period in which two-fifths of core skills are expected to shift. It shows in how quickly you regroup when a project is cancelled, a system you just learned is replaced, or a round of feedback sends you back to the start. ### 3. Leadership and social influence Leadership and social influence is another rising skill, reflecting demand for people who can lead teams and [influence others](/knowledge/influence/influence-without-authority/). Note the pairing in the WEF's own label: the skill is defined by the ability to move people and decisions, not by a management title. That makes it relevant long before anyone reports to you, whether you are persuading a project group to change course or getting a colleague to try a better approach. It is also the entry many people find hardest to picture learning. > Something I feel I'm missing — and I think you can only learn it through experience — is how to gain power and influence at a workplace. In other words, how do I turn the fact that I'm really good at networking and at talking with lots of people into real influence, or into moving up more easily? > > I've sometimes seen people who are really good at positioning themselves to be the one who gets brought along. I think I'm actually quite good at that naturally, but I would like to know what I'm doing that works, and what doesn't. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work put that question to us, and it is a better question than it first appears. Experience does teach influence, but it teaches faster when you know which behaviors to watch for in yourself. ### 4. Creative thinking Creative thinking is one of the human skills the report expects to grow in importance through 2030, rising alongside the technology skills rather than giving way to them. In practice it has little to do with artistic talent and a lot to do with refusing the first workable answer: sketching two or three ways to tackle a task, borrowing an approach from another team, or asking what would happen if a step were dropped entirely. It is what keeps a team from reusing last year's answer for this year's problem. ### 5. Motivation and self-awareness Motivation and self-awareness is one of the WEF's core skills, and the report groups it with resilience, flexibility and agility and with curiosity and lifelong learning as self-efficacy skills: the ones concerned with how you manage yourself. This is the entry that unlocks the others. [Knowing your strengths](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/), your gaps and what drives you is how you decide which of the remaining skills to build next, and in what order. Without it, a list of eight becomes eight separate worries. With it, the list becomes a short plan. ### 6. Curiosity and lifelong learning The report expects curiosity and lifelong learning to gain importance through 2030, and it sits naturally beside the 39% figure: when the content of a job keeps moving, the person who enjoys finding things out has an edge over the person who learned the job once. You can see it early in how someone works. They ask why a process runs the way it does, not only how to run it. They try the new tool before anyone tells them to. They treat a correction as a pointer to what to learn next. ### 7. Empathy and active listening Empathy and active listening is one of the skills the report places alongside its core skills, together with technological literacy, talent management, and service orientation and customer service. It is the clearest interpersonal entry on the list: understanding other people and genuinely hearing what they say. Its place on an employer list, a few lines from the technology skills, is a reminder that how you work with people is weighed as seriously as which tools you can use. In a meeting it shows up as the follow-up question that proves you were listening, or as summarizing a colleague's concern back to them before you argue your own case. ### 8. AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, technological literacy These lead the report's other ranking, the fastest-growing skills between 2025 and 2030, with AI and big data at the top, followed by networks and cybersecurity and technological literacy. They belong to the growth list rather than the core list, and that shapes the sensible response. Unless you are heading into a technical field, the practical move is to make new tools a normal part of how you work: try them on real tasks, learn their limits, and keep your own judgment in charge of what they produce. ## Turning the list into your own plan Taken together, the eight entries show a clear pattern. The technology skills are growing fastest, but most of the list is about how you think, how you adapt, how you deal with people and how well you know yourself. Those human skills are not tied to a particular tool or job title, so they travel with you from role to role, and they are learnable behaviors rather than fixed traits. Nobody builds all of them at once, and the list was not designed to be completed. Its practical use is comparison: set your own strengths next to it and look for the one or two gaps that would make the biggest difference in the work you are doing or about to start. The report can describe what employers expect across a workforce of more than 14 million people; it cannot describe what you already bring. That is why it pays to [get a baseline on yourself](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before choosing what to practice, so your effort goes to a real gap rather than to whichever entry sounds most urgent this year. ## What helps you keep pace as the list shifts Look again at what the human entries have in common: knowing what you bring, steadying yourself when the ground moves, getting your ideas taken seriously. None of them is a qualification, yet all of them decide how well you handle the change the report describes. Underneath sit three skills you can work on directly. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns the list from a ranking into a personal plan. It starts with your natural strengths, the things you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, which show up in how a task goes, how it makes you feel and what results it produces. Feedback then supplies what you cannot see from the inside: ask a manager or colleague for specific, future-focused advice, make sure you understand it before responding, and reflect on it before deciding what to change. **Building Resilience** gives you something to do with the worry that AI will make your skills obsolete. It begins by separating what you can control, your own thoughts, actions and what you learn next, from what you cannot, such as how fast your industry adopts new technology. Then it means catching the automatic thought that your degree will be worthless by 2030 and testing it: what is the worst realistic case, how would you cope, how likely is it, and what can you act on today? **Influence** is how leadership and social influence works for someone without a title. It rests on a reputation earned by delivering consistently and becoming known for something specific. It grows when you take the initiative, such as volunteering to prepare the agenda or draft the document, and when you pitch an idea around what the other person gains from it. For a junior employee, that is how a good suggestion gets a real hearing instead of a polite nod. Skills like these are hard to judge from the inside, which is the very problem self-awareness warns about. The **free Job Skills Test** supplies the outside view, giving you [a reading on these three](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) within a wider profile of **twelve work skills**, so you can see which of them deserves your practice first. ## Seeing yourself in the list Chances are you have been practicing some of these skills without a label for them. If you have ever asked a lecturer or a manager what, specifically, would have made a piece of work better, and then used the answer on the next piece, you have already run the feedback loop that self-awareness is built from. Each of these skills grows with practice, none of them asks you to become a different person, and you decide which ones to strengthen and in what order. An unnamed gap tends to get more expensive with each step up in responsibility, while one you spot early is usually quick to work on. What helps most now is a clear view of where you begin. ## Swap the global list for your own From here, the useful move is to replace the global list with a personal one. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across twelve skills employers value, including self-awareness, resilience and influence, and highlights the ones that would make the biggest difference to your next step. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The World Economic Forum skills employers want by 2030, from analytical thinking to resilience and influence, and how to tell which you already have. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Building Resilience, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/world-economic-forum-skills/ Preferred summary: "The World Economic Forum skills employers want by 2030, from analytical thinking to resilience and influence, and how to tell which you already have." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.