Previously posted on Workera's LinkedIn Newsletter

Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 2025 Future of Jobs Report. The report surveyed more than 1,000 employers across a range of topics, including the skills those employers expect to be core to their workforce in 2030. The top four skills identified in the report were analytical thinking, cited by 69% of respondents; resilience, flexibility, and agility (67%); leadership and social influence (61%); and creative thinking (57%).

As AI transforms the operations of today’s businesses, those results might be surprising. Each of those skills are deeply human; paradoxically, it seems that the increased focus on AI technologies has caused human skills to become more in demand.

Even as organizations embrace AI and apply new solutions to their workflows, they need to foster human skills like analytical thinking and creative thinking in their workforce. But can creative thinking be trained? Can employees upskill to become better leaders? How do you turn abstract concepts into applicable techniques?

To answer these questions, and to provide employees with the skills they need in 2025, 2030, and beyond, organizations need to assess their employees on a more granular level. By breaking down large concepts like “creative thinking” into smaller, measurable skills, organizations can take stock of their workforce and chart more effective paths to skill development. 

AI is a transformational, once-in-a-generation technology. But to truly capture the value offered by AI, organizations must equip their employees with the skills needed to maximize the outputs of their AI tools.

Understanding human skills

There’s a fundamental problem when it comes to developing the skills listed in the WEF report.

Analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, and creative thinking aren’t skills — they’re massive, complex concepts. Creative thinking is a concept that comprises dozens of smaller, granular skills — the ability to think about the same problem along parallel pathways, or the ability to identify points of leverage for a creative intervention. These are granular concepts that ladder up to the larger idea of “creative thinking.”

On Workera, our skills assessment platform, we can analyze the aggregated anonymous data from thousands of users who assess their skills across dozens of domains and hundreds of individual skills. That data allows us to pinpoint an employee’s actual area of weakness when it comes to large human skills like the WEF’s core skills for 2030.

Problem Solving is a large, overarching concept, but it can be broken down into multiple techniques: for example, analytical thinking, computational thinking, creative thinking, and system thinking. Each of these techniques maps to measurable, task-oriented skills and behaviors. Creative thinking requires someone to be able to apply principles to resolve contradictory problems, implement parallel thinking methods, and identify optimal leverage points for interventions.

These detailed maps of skills are crucial for modern organizations that seek to upskill their workforce. Why? Because they provide the nuance and detail needed to actually understand your employees’ capabilities; you can use assessments to verify their skill levels and then prescribe the next steps required to make improvements. It’s one thing to say an employee struggles with problem solving; it’s another thing to say that they’re able to resolve contradictory problems, but they lack the ability to identify optimal leverage points for interventions. That granularity allows you to make targeted improvements that deliver outsized value.

Identifying opportunities with verified skills

The first step to developing a skill is measuring it. 

Verified skills allow you to understand the granular abilities of your workforce, identify the areas that most urgently need improvement, and track each employee’s skill growth velocity — how quickly they learn and improve skills. Whether you believe technical skills or non-technical skills are more important, no skill is more valuable than learning, because it impacts your ability to acquire every other skill.

When you analyze skill data within a particular subdomain, you can see larger trends in terms of your workforce’s abilities. For example, our analysis of thousands of Workera assessments shows the percentage of employees who have demonstrated strong ability levels in the individual skills that comprise Creative Thinking:

This data demonstrates that a majority of employees don’t possess strong capabilities in any of the four measured skills. However, the most significant weakness can be found in identifying optimal leverage points for interventions. 

Business and learning leaders armed with this information are in a much stronger position to help their employees improve. When learning is self-guided, employees may waste time studying skills they already have or skills that won’t deliver direct value to the business. Verified skills data allows you to direct employees to the skills they need to develop that will help the business succeed.

From intangible to tangible

In the current AI-defined era, every employee needs the ability to acquire technical skills. However, the WEF survey shows that businesses must also focus on the human skills — creativity, resilience, leadership — that no machine can replace. These human skills are undoubtedly harder to define and measure than technical skills, but organizations can’t afford to ignore them. Creative thinking, leadership and resilience will always be in high demand, and there’s little potential for these skills to be replaced by AI. 

To build a successful workforce for the future, business and learning leaders need to make the intangible tangible. They need to turn concepts like creative thinking and leadership from abstract goals into small pieces of attainable skills. By measuring employee capabilities and putting them on an informed path to improvement, every business leader can ensure they’re receiving maximum value from their workforce.