Out of Focus: What a Skills Report Gets Wrong

Over the holidays, I found myself reading a new World Economic Forum report on “human-centric skills” titled New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage. It’s the sort of document I’ve learned to approach with both interest and caution: polished, data-heavy, earnest in tone, and widely circulated among people who shape policy and education. Buried in the report was a neat little matrix ranking skills by current importance and future demand. I almost skimmed past it. Then I stopped.

In the bottom-left corner, labelled “out of focus”, sat three things I couldn’t quite reconcile with the rest of the document’s rhetoric: teaching and mentoring; reading, writing, and mathematics; and global citizenship. Less essential now, the chart suggested, and not expected to matter much more in the years ahead. I stared at it longer than I meant to. Not because I disagreed immediately, but because I realised how much that simple visual was deciding without any explanation.

On the surface, the matrix is perfectly reasonable. Employers are asked what skills matter today and which ones they expect to matter more tomorrow. The responses are plotted. Patterns emerge. In a world that prizes evidence-based decision-making, this feels responsible. No one is saying these skills are unimportant, the report reassures us. Some are “assumed.” Others are “supported by technology.” The chart simply reflects reality.

But that reassurance is precisely where the trouble begins.

What does it mean for a skill to be “out of focus”? Out of focus for whom? Employers? Education systems? Societies? The chart slides between these categories as if they were interchangeable. Employer demand becomes a proxy for social value. Labour-market signals begin to masquerade as guidance for education’s deeper purposes. A descriptive snapshot starts behaving like a prescription.

This is a familiar move, and a consequential one.

Employers, understandably, optimise for productivity within existing systems. They value adaptability, resilience, analytical thinking, and creativity because these qualities help individuals function in fast-moving, uncertain environments. None of this is objectionable. The problem arises when those needs are allowed to define what education itself is for.

Education does not exist primarily to satisfy employer demand. It exists to prepare people for participation in a shared world: economic, political, cultural, and moral. Sometimes those aims align neatly. Often they do not. When we collapse the distinction, we end up mistaking short-term utility for long-term value.

This is especially evident in how the report treats “assumed” skills. Reading, writing, and mathematics are described as foundational, so foundational that they no longer require emphasis. Teaching and mentoring are described as important but no longer central. Global citizenship barely receives an explanation at all.

History suggests that assumed skills are not stable. They are fragile precisely because no one feels responsible for them. When literacy declines, it does not announce itself dramatically. When mentoring weakens, it does not trigger alarms. These capacities erode through neglect, through crowding-out, through the steady accumulation of more “urgent” priorities.

We have seen this dynamic before. Over the past few decades, many education systems downgraded civic education, history, and public reasoning in favour of competencies that were easier to test and align with economic outcomes. The result was not a generation of hyper-rational citizens. It was a thinning of the shared language needed for disagreement, a growing difficulty in distinguishing argument from assertion, and a public sphere increasingly shaped by outrage rather than deliberation. These outcomes were not planned. They emerged from a series of reasonable-seeming prioritizations whose costs only became visible later.

Global citizenship belongs firmly in this category, but for a different reason. It is not a skill in the narrow, operational sense. It refers to a set of capacities that only become visible when they are missing: the ability to recognise how events in one part of the world shape lives elsewhere, to take responsibility for consequences that do not stop at national borders, and to reason about obligations to people we will never meet. This is what we usually mean, in practice, when we talk about global citizenship.

We don’t have to imagine what happens when these capacities weaken. We watched it unfold during the pandemic, when appeals to shared global responsibility collapsed almost instantly into vaccine nationalism. Countries spoke the language of cooperation while competing fiercely for limited supplies, as if interdependence were a slogan rather than a structural reality. The problem was not a lack of intelligence or technical capacity. It was the absence of a practiced sense of obligation beyond national borders.

These are not abstract virtues. They show up in how societies respond to pandemics, climate disruption, migration, and conflict. When they are weak, technical competence is rarely enough.

There is an irony here that deserves attention. The report repeatedly emphasises that human-centric skills are those least likely to be automated. Machines, we are told, cannot replicate empathy, judgment, creativity, or ethical reasoning. And yet one of the most deeply human capacities we have, the ability to imagine responsibility beyond ourselves and our immediate group, is set aside with barely a comment.

What remains in focus are traits that help individuals adapt to unstable systems. What slips away are capacities that might lead people to question those systems, challenge their assumptions, or imagine alternatives. This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural bias. Systems tend to reward what sustains them.

This is exactly how global citizenship slips out of focus.

If education systems take this logic seriously, nothing dramatic needs to happen. No one has to abolish civics classes or ban discussions of global responsibility. All that’s required is that these things stop being named, tracked, and defended when time and resources feel scarce. Over time, what is out of focus becomes out of practice.

This pattern should feel familiar. For decades, we organised education around “useful knowledge,” around what could be measured, monetised, and deployed. That made sense in an industrial economy. But we are now entering a world where machines increasingly outperform humans on precisely those dimensions. The danger is not that we will double down on usefulness, but that we will narrow our conception of usefulness even further.

The report is not wrong in the usual sense. It captures real employer perceptions. It offers thoughtful analysis of trends. But it is incomplete in a way that matters. By treating labour-market demand as the primary lens for judging educational priorities, it risks encouraging systems to forget the very capacities that make shared life possible in a complex, connected world.

Education has always carried a tension between preparation and formation, between helping people earn a living and helping them understand how to live together. When that tension is flattened, something essential is lost, even if nothing obvious breaks.

Perhaps the most important skills are the ones that never sit comfortably on a chart.