Is the workforce ready for the jobs of the future? Data-informed skills and training foresight

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Is the workforce ready for the jobs of the future? Data-informed skills and training foresight

For many newly emerging jobs, labour-market mismatches prevail as workers and firms are unable to apply precise occupation taxonomies and training lag

Publishing date: 11 May 2022
Authors: Fabian Stephany Rosemary Luckin

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This Working Paper is an invited contribution produced within the project, with the financial support of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

For many newly emerging jobs, labour-market mismatches prevail as workers and firms are unable to apply precise occupation taxonomies and training lags behind workforce needs. We report on how data can enable useful foresight about skill requirements and training needs, even when that data has not been collected for this express purpose. First, we show how online generated freelance data can help monitor labour-market developments in the short run. Second, in the long run, we illustrate how data can shed light on development of workplace-ready aptitudes among students, even when these are not the direct focus of instruction. This combination of data-intensive activities can inform the immediate and long-term needs for education and training in order to help individuals develop the ability to learn, train and retrain as often and as much as needed.

Recommended citation

Stephany, F. and R. Luckin (2022) ‘Is the workforce ready for the jobs of the future? Data-informed skills and training foresight’, Working Paper 07/2022, Bruegel

About the authors

Fabian Stephany

Fabian Stephany is a Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel and a member of the project which analyses the impact of technology on the nature, quantity and quality of work, welfare systems and inclusive growth. He is a Departmental Research Lecturer in AI & Work at the (OII), University of Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the in Berlin.

With the , Fabian investigates how we can create sustainable jobs via data-driven reskilling in times of technological disruption. He is a co-creator of the – a digital data hub, hosted by the OII and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), for researchers, policy makers, journalists, and the public interested in online platform work.

Fabian holds a PhD and degrees in Economics and Social Sciences from different European institutions, including Universitá Bocconi Milan and University of Cambridge. As an Economist and Senior Data Scientist, Fabian has been facilitating Digital Policy Entrepreneurship with partners in the international policy landscape, such as the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the ILO, or the OECD in Paris.
Rosemary Luckin

Rosemary (Rose) Luckin is Professor of Learner Centred Design at UCL Knowledge Lab. Rose’s research involves the design and evaluation of educational technology using theories from the learning sciences and techniques from Artificial Intelligence. She has a particular interest in how AI techniques can be used to enable more effective, continuous, formative assessment processes and tools. Her 2018 book: Machine Learning and Human Intelligence: The Future of Education for the 21^stCentury describes how we can best benefit from using AI to support teaching and learning, and how the prevalence of AI in our future means that we need to revise what and how we teach and learn now. She has also published numerous academic articles, authored two monographs and edited two paper collections.

Rose is also Director of EDUCATE: a London hub for Educational Technology StartUps, researchers and educators to work together on the development of evidence-informed Educational Technology; Specialist Adviser to the UK House of Commons Education Select Committee for their inquiry into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Co-founder of the Institute for Ethical AI in Education; President-elect of the International Society for AI in Education; a member of the UK Office for Students Horizon Scanning panel,adviser to the AI and Robotics panel of the Topol review into the future of the NHS workforce; a member of the European AI Alliance, holder ofan International Franqui Chair at KU Leuven. Rose was named as one of the 20 most influential people in Education on the Seldon List 2017.