The future workforce needs technical confidence, but it also needs the human capabilities that help people keep learning, thinking and working well with others.
The future skills question
Every few years a new list of future skills arrives. The technologies change, the platforms change and the job titles change. The more useful question for us, however, is what capabilities remain valuable when everything else is changing? That question sits behind this article. When technology, platforms and job titles keep changing, which human capabilities continue to matter?
The argument
The challenge is not simply to teach people the latest digital tools. It is to develop the human capabilities that help them keep learning, make sense of information and work well with others as technology changes. This matters because the labour market, and the world around it, is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. In a VUCA environment, the most useful skills are not only technical, and in some cases they may not be technical at all.
They are the skills and capabilities that help people respond well when the tool, process, customer need or operating model changes. Whether we are looking at this from the education and skills sector, or from a future service management perspective, what we are really exploring is the set of capabilities that will help us, and the future workforce, stay ready for the years to come.
Learners leaving education, early career professionals and those of us who have been around the block a few times all have much to learn and adapt to. The world of work is changing at a rate unlike anything we’ve seen before. We need to embrace AI as a partner in business and learning, but not without thought, governance and clear accountability. That governance needs to operate at every level: personally, organisationally, sector-wide and nationally.
Where the article came from
In August 2026 I had the great pleasure of hosting PeopleCert’s ITIL Community Clinic, joined by two industry experts and fellow ITIL Ambassadors, Sumit Jha and Michael Fosong. Sumit and Michael brought perspectives from enterprise transformation, service management, training and professional certification, where organisations are trying to connect technology, people, governance and value in practical ways.
The clinic used a Lean Coffee format, a lightly structured approach where participants shape the discussion around the topics that matter most to them, and the conversation develops from there.
August’s clinic predictably covered AI. After all, we’d just had the launch of ITIL AI Governance and I wanted to talk about the AoC Digital Transformation & AI Roadmap, and how these two publications are interlinked and can support our own sector.
What quickly emerged, though, was that we moved beyond the talk of AI tools and into a wider discussion about future skills and career development. The discussions built a clear theme that as AI takes on more routine work, human judgement, creativity and communication become more valuable. The future skills identified in the clinic included data literacy, critical thinking, adaptability, communication and business awareness.
That discussion stayed with me because it reflected something wider than service management and technology. It pointed to a labour market question that education institutions and employers are all now facing: what skills remain valuable when the technology keeps changing?
What labour market intelligence is showing
For FE and skills audiences, this matters because labour market intelligence is already pointing in the same direction.
In the latter part of 2026, UK labour market intelligence is pointing to demand for people who can learn, interpret, communicate, adapt and use technology responsibly. Skills England’s 2026 analysis points to a fast-changing labour market shaped by AI and digital technology but also highlights the continuing need for transferable skills alongside advanced technical capability.
The same pattern is visible in Service Management and Technology. PeopleCert’s ITIL Digital and IT Strategy guidance links digital leadership with the ability to respond to VUCA conditions, while the SDI qualifications now place communication, customer experience, continual improvement, AI and automation alongside core service management practice. That matters because these frameworks reflect what many employers are already experiencing: digital work increasingly needs people who can combine technical confidence with judgement, communication, governance and service thinking.
In volatile and uncertain conditions, learners and workers need more than tool knowledge. They need the ability to adapt, assess information, make sense of change and work with others. Technical capability has more value when it is combined with judgement, confidence, curiosity and communication.
Technology changes faster than skills frameworks
Now I wouldn’t be able to hold my head up as a technologist without agreeing that tool-specific skills matter, be that programming languages, a deep understanding of network architecture, or skills in the deployment of software to hundreds if not thousands of devices. Equally, it’s imperative that as professionals we recognise that, though these skills matter, they undoubtedly can become outdated at a rate we may never have expected.
As a late teen learning Visual Basic and creating my first online platforms I probably didn’t foresee that the technology would evolve and be replaced at what has become a relentless pace.
The same pattern has been seen with cloud, mobile, automation and earlier waves of digital change. The risk is that education providers and employers chase individual platforms rather than building durable capability. We might fall out of love with one tool, only to fall into the same trap with the next, forgetting to stop and think critically about the problem we are desperately trying to solve.
Frameworks and skills in our digital worlds have evolved from traditional IT Service Management towards digital product and service management. That matters because modern work is no longer just about managing technology. It is about managing products, services, data, people, value, experience and change together. Eighteen-year-old me would probably have rejected that thought, convinced that one person in a room could code their way out of almost any problem.
Learning
In the past, maybe some people completed their studies, or undertook an apprenticeship and those skills and behaviours stood the test of time and took them to their retirement happily. Nowadays, and most certainly in the future, our ability to learn may become more valuable than any of us know or realise today.
We need to consider that the workforce of the future needs to thrive on curiosity, adaptability and continuous learning. CPD and growth mindset alongside data literacy will become even more essential than we see right now.
Thinking of just data literacy on its own, we’re going to see AI augment all of us to be Data Analysts. Facts and figures will be generated and thrown at us faster than we’ve known, and in volumes that previously we maybe didn’t have the time to generate or consider. This is an example too of where we may want or need to adapt quickly, if we have a dataset, whether that be sales figures from a Catering Service, data from Satisfaction Surveys or maybe an extract of our class Markbook, tools at our fingertips are there to turn this into insight. We just need the curiosity to try it out, to learn to write the prompt and load the data. Just one example but you can see the pattern emerge.
In a VUCA labour market, the ability to keep learning is not an optional extra. It is part of employability.
Understanding
We touched on data analysis in the previous section. Information is becoming abundant, but understanding is still scarce. AI can turn data into summaries, patterns, reports and recommendations at a speed we’ve not had before. That does not automatically make those outputs right, useful or wise.
Understanding is the ability to recognise what the information means, what might be missing, what assumptions sit underneath it, and what decision it should or should not lead to. That is where future skills become less about access to information and more about judgement.
Our future selves, future workforce and future learners will need critical thinking, context awareness, information literacy, risk awareness and an understanding of responsible AI use. AI can provide answers, but humans still need to determine which answers are useful, appropriate and trustworthy. We need people who can ask where the information came from, whether it is current, what has been left out, and whether the answer fits the real problem.
Those of us who are critical by nature, who are wary of AI outputs that arrive like Trojan Horses with hidden assumptions, errors or weak reasoning inside, will have an important role to play. It’s time for some transparency; I’m writing this article with my favourite LLM to hand. The tool is not writing for me though. I’m arguing with it, challenging its assumptions and making it challenge mine. We are each other’s critical friend. That is something that teenage me may well have wished for: a Star Trek style computer I could talk to and that would help me.
We’ve been working in this way for coming on a year now, and it has helped us produce better reports, clearer insight, individualised workload reviews, practical improvement suggestions and automations that save time and money while keeping humans in the loop. The point is not passive acceptance of AI output. It is active, thoughtful use of it. If we keep working through value, outcomes, costs, risks, governance and decision-making, we can shape our use of technology, so it makes work better for people and organisations. We need to understand the outcomes we want, then choose the outputs, tools and skills that will help us get there.
Connecting
This is the capability often overlooked in future skills discussions. It’s the topic that we looped back to time and time again in our Community Clinic.
Starting with the obvious one communication, and moving on to collaboration, empathy, influence, relationship building and change adoption. In a world where the machine maybe does more now than the human, being able to understand each other is right at the top of the skills need in my mind.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and again if I look back at my own journey, I thought I was going to be that software developer who sat in that darkened room, writing code, testing applications and fixing bugs. As a young freelancer, making tools and platforms for yourself, your own micro enterprises that might work…until you come across a customer, a supplier, a third party who’s interested in your work for some reason. Then suddenly human skills are what’s needed, in abundance.
A period in the hospitality sector early on in my working life helped me with this, as well as my first real technology job, where I found myself answering the phone to customers for a part of the business I’d not experienced at all. Some of my favourite non-technology, non-service-management writing is on customer centricity, or that’s what I’m calling it. If you’ve not yet read Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality, it’s worth a look because it makes a strong case that service is remembered less for the transaction itself and more for the human connection around it.
This is also where Katrina Macdermid’s work on Humanising IT and Humanising AI matters. The best digital services don’t feel human because somebody has removed the technology. They feel human because the technology has been designed, explained and supported in a way that respects the person using it. That matters in education, in service management and in the labour market more broadly, because people don’t experience “digital transformation” as a strategy. They experience it as a form to complete, a system to use, a service to request, a problem to solve or a moment when they need help. Things we often site as causing friction.
The Service Desk Institute’s Chief Financial Officer, Sam Rodrigues, in parallel to his role at the helm of its finances, also runs a successful hospitality business. Every time we meet, we always end up discussing the fact that some of the best people in our industry have spent time in hospitality, retail or some other directly customer-facing role. Often, we can teach technology skills relatively quickly. The people aspect, as in my own experience, takes longer to form and even longer to perfect. It’s a journey I’m still on, and one that I realise most of us are on too.
Ultimately, we’ve seen many organisational failures where the root cause is not the technology itself, but weak communication, poor engagement or lack of trust. We need joined-up work across people, information, technology, partners, suppliers, value streams and processes. To do that, we need to work with our current and future workforce in a more human way: helping people understand change, contribute to it, question it where needed and shape services that work better for the people using them.
Connecting skills to value
The important shift is that digital capability now has to be understood in terms of value, not just technical knowledge. It is no longer enough to know how a tool works. People need to understand the outcome being sought, the risk being managed, the experience being improved and the value being created.
That is where modernised frameworks like ITIL (Version 5) are useful. They reflect the same shift we are seeing in the labour market: from IT as a technical support function towards digital product and service management, where value is created through people, services, products, data, governance, experience and technology working together.
That is why future digital skills cannot be reduced to tool training. Digital products and services succeed when people can connect technology to value, understand the outcomes being sought, manage risk, improve the experience and keep learning as the environment changes.
What this means for education
For education, the challenge is to make sure digital skills are not treated only as a set of tools, systems or qualifications. Those things matter, but they are only part of the picture. If the labour market is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, then learners need the confidence to keep learning, the judgement to evaluate information, and the communication skills to work well with others.
That means embedding digital confidence across the curriculum, not leaving it only to digital qualifications or IT specialist courses. A learner in catering, construction, health and social care, business or engineering will still need to interpret information, use digital tools, work with data, question AI-generated content and communicate clearly with customers, colleagues and employers.
The question for providers is therefore not simply, “Are we teaching the latest tools?” It is also, “Are we helping learners become adaptable enough to keep using, questioning and improving those tools as work changes?”
What this means for employers
Employers too have a similar challenge. If recruitment, job descriptions and workforce development focus too narrowly on current systems and practice, there is a risk that we select for today’s tools rather than tomorrow’s capability. Technical knowledge matters, but it needs to sit alongside curiosity, judgement, communication and adaptability.
Employers will need people who can learn continuously, work with emerging technologies, analyse information, use AI responsibly, communicate clearly and solve problems with others. That means CPD cannot be an occasional activity when a new system is launched. It must become part of how organisations build resilience, improve services and reduce digital friction.
The practical question for employers is whether they are creating the conditions for people to keep learning. Are staff handed sufficient time to develop? Are managers clear about the skills they value? Are teams encouraged to challenge outputs, improve processes and use technology in ways that make work better for people?
What endures
Let’s stop for a moment and take a deep breath.
We are unlikely to see long periods of stability in technology, platforms or job titles. They will continue to change, and probably faster than many of our current skills models assume. Many specific skills will rise and fall in demand. Curiosity, judgement, adaptability and communication are going to remain consistently valuable because they help people keep learning, make sense of complexity and help others navigate change.
The future labour market will undoubtedly be digital. The capabilities that help people thrive in it will remain deeply human.
By Alex Harding, Head of IT Services at Runshaw College
Further reading
First published at https://1takeon.blog/2026/09/19/beyond-ai-what-the-labour-market-really-needs/
Association of Colleges. (2026). Digital transformation and AI: a roadmap for the FE sector. AoC.
Skills England. (2026). Skills England annual skills report 2026. GOV.UK.
Guidara, W. (2022). Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. Optimism Press.
Macdermid, K. (2026). Humanising IT™: The Experience Distortion of IT Service Management. HIT Global Publishing.
Macdermid, K. (2026). Humanising AI™. HIT Global Publishing.
PeopleCert. (2026). ITIL AI Governance. PeopleCert.
