The New Core Skills
The skills AI can't replicate, like leadership, social influence, creativity, and resilience, are on the World Economic Forum's list of fastest-growing skills for 2030, right alongside technical skills. Calling them "soft skills" was always the wrong framing. There's nothing soft about corralling a room full of client egos, walking the line between vulnerable and professional with your direct reports, or building trust in a toxic environment. Most organizations are still investing almost entirely in technical training because it's easier to systematize and measure, which means developing these core skills is on you, not your company's training program.
Core Skills are human skills
I have never liked the phrase “soft skills.” There’s nothing particularly “soft” about corralling a room full of client egos, walking the line between being vulnerable and professional with a team of direct reports, or building trust in a toxic environment. In recent years, the kinds of skills needed to pull those things off - curiosity, empathy, communication, creativity, problem-solving - have come to be known collectively as “core skills.” Specifically, core skills are meant to identify areas that are valuable and can be applied across all working sectors.
In the most recent jobs report from the World Economic Forum, the look ahead to 2030 dove deep into the core skills most prevalent at the time of the study (2025) and those that would be most needed in the future. And while the need for technological skills is growing, as you would expect, also among the top 10 skills on the rise for 2030 are leadership, social influence, creativity, and resilience. These are core skills that AI cannot replicate.
The response from most organizations has been predictable: to double down on the technical side because it's easier to systematize and the results are easier to measure. Non-technical core skills are more difficult to package into a curriculum and test for competency, which is part of what got them saddled with “soft” in the first place. But learning and growing these skills is too important to wait for your company’s training program to catch up. Here are a few ways to take that development on yourself:
Study design thinking.
As a former User Experience leader, I’m partial to this, but design thinking is a valuable tool to give you a creative framework with which to attack problems. A design thinking lens can help you break down complicated knots of problems into iterative, data-informed steps that move quickly.
Be bad at something new.
Take a class at a local community center. Sign up to run a 5k when you’ve never so much as jogged. Try your hand at an improv class. Science shows that stepping outside of our comfort zone to learn new things increases our capacity for creative thinking, and the try/fail cycle of learning is crucial to becoming more resilient.
Learn to give and receive feedback.
This is a skill that is going to be useful at work and in your personal life (trust me). The art of giving feedback in a timely way that lands as intended to the receiver, or the skill of listening to feedback and really processing it well, is not common and is very likely to set you apart from your colleagues, AI or otherwise.
Every newsletter, event, and post in my LinkedIn feed is screeching that we're already behind in learning and using new technology. Don't let that panic crowd out the importance of growing your non-technical skills, because they will be just as valuable, if not more, in a future where AI can take care of more automated tasks, and humans will need to step up into their humanity even more. And if you're not sure where to start, let's connect.