Institute For The Future

The global workforce is in transition, and the way we’ll learn the skills we need and find the work we want will disrupt decades of formal education and workplace training. Already, young people around the world are pioneering new distributed pathways to learning, working, and living. At the same time, inequities in access to work—income inequality, discrimination, and high-risk labor—will require us to reinvent the “good job” for this new distributed global workforce. IFTF’s Work+Learn Futures Lab is helping learners, workers, educators, and employers get #futurefit for a new workable future.

REAL POTENTIAL

In the 2030 workforce, everyone has real potential…and real purpose.
The magic is in the match.

In a future of distributed learning and work, traditional standardized tests and scores will no longer tell the story of who’s ready for work and how they can build their unique potential for unexpected tasks and unprecedented projects. Over the coming decades, workers and learners will discover their real potential on gaming platforms and social learning apps. They’ll use recommender systems and blockchain-based network graphs to forge their paths to the #futurefit lives they want.

Real Potential is the work of educators and entrepreneurs, impact investors and foundation leaders, to forge a new vision of trusted services for talent development in 2030. Explore their insights and IFTF’s four Real Potential scenarios here.

GLOBAL YOUTH SKILLS TOOLKIT

New work+learn paths for future-ready youth

Tap into the secrets of lead learners around the world. Discover nine future work+learn archetypes—personas that show the way in a work+learn world. In a global study of future youth skills, IFTF researchers interviewed young people, aged 16-30, in six innovation cities around the world: Austin, Berlin, Chongqing, Jeddah, Lagos, and Mexico City to uncover leading-edge learning and working pathways in a labor economy where traditional paths are disrupted by digital learning, gig work, automation, and globalization. The Global Youth Skills toolkit features nine archetypes—fictitious future personas from 2030—who illustrate the range of future skills and learning stacks pioneered by today’s lead learners. The Global Youth Skills report provides an in-depth look at 24 new work+learn paths across the six cities in the study, as well as the spectrums of skill that will support them.

FUTURE SKILLS: GET FIT FOR WHAT'S NEXT

The work+learn future starts here with five peak performance zones

Building on more than a decade of IFTF research, the Future Skills map offers a #futurefit workout design to help everyone anticipate the skills they will need to live richer and more fulfilling lives in a society that’s undergoing unprecedented change and an economy unlike any we’ve seen before:  Where intelligent machines are rapidly displacing human workers. Where job gains in medium and large firms have been shrinking for more than two decades while part-time, impermanent work has mushroomed. Where the prospects for employment of our young adults around the world are uncertain, indeed.

Today, we find ourselves at the starting line of what will surely be a marathon to transform both work and learning, to turn a destructive cycle of income inequality into prosperity with a new kind of workout: a training circuit of five peak performance zones and 15 super skills.

We call this the #futurefit2030 workout. Join us to build the skills we need!

HOST A WORK+LEARN FORESIGHT WORKSHOP

Use foresight to gain insights that will enable you to meet your work+learn goals, whether you’re an educator, employer, entrepreneur, or policy maker. 

Building on our work+learn research, IFTF has developed a provocative workshop process that will help you design and prototype new impactful offerings for the changing learning styles and work opportunities of the coming decade. Our forecasting and facilitation can help your organization:

• Think broadly to gain an “outside-in” perspective on long-term forces and trends shaping the future
• Anticipate opportunities for new impact and service offerings
• Gain agile positioning by questioning your assumptions and systematically considering alternative futures
• Jump-start strategic thinking by immersing you in future possibilities and identifying flexible long-term actions
• Prototype new offerings that leverage your expertise while aligning with the future

View the Foresight Essentials training here »

• Lumina Foundation's Holly Zanville reports on IFTF Future of Assessment convening. Read the blog post here.
  
  
• W+L Futures Group Director Parminder Jassal podcasts on why she thinks the future of work and learn is already here
• SNHU releases strategic plan inspired by IFTF forecast
• Holly Zanville from Lumina Foundation shares her thoughts on the Work +Learn Ecosystem in 2030
• Van Ton-Quinlivan, Executive Vice Chancellor, Workforce & Digital Futures for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, joins IFTF as Executive in Residence.
• IFTF partners with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to convene change-makers to build a shared vision and toolkit for a more equitable future.
• Fast Company features IFTF’s future skills
• Holly Zanville from Lumina Foundation reports on the first of two conversations on AI Future Skills, hosted by IFTF.
• In Spring 2018, IFTF in collaboration with Lumina Foundation, assembled a roomful of experts to co-create possible visions of the human-machine future.
• This campaign grew out of Future Skills, in partnership with Cornerstone. Start navigating the future, today!
• What will we NOT do in the future? You might be surprised. Take a look at the least essential skills in the AI future. 
• In the rise of automation, the traditional role of an employee and that of a learner is merging everyday - transitioning into a working learner. What's an organization or manager's role in this transition? Brett Christie at WorldatWork explores these shifting landscapes.
• Discover how working and learning may be a path toward a more equitable future in this post by the Work + Learn Futures Lab.