Learning & Skills

Which skills do you think will be most valuable in the next twenty years? The ones that resist automation — not because they're technically complex, but because they involve judgement in situations where the information is incomplete. Being able to work across different domains, translate between technical and non-technical understanding, manage uncertainty. Technical skills in AI and data will matter, but they'll need to be combined with genuine domain knowledge rather than standing alone. Is it better to learn a skill from a teacher or on your own? From a teacher early, then increasingly on your own. A teacher's main value in the early stages is catching the bad habits before they become ingrained — the ones that feel natural but actually hold you back. Once you're past the fundamentals, self-directed practice matters more, because you're working in territory no individual teacher can fully cover. The best learners shift between both modes as the situation requires. Should governments pay for adults to learn new skills? In principle yes. The economic case is clear enough: when an entire industry declines quickly — manufacturing, parts of retail — the people who lose jobs often can't afford retraining at exactly the moment they most need it. That's a market failure governments can address. The problem is that most retraining programmes have had poor outcomes historically because they train people for the jobs that have already gone rather than the ones that are coming. How has the internet changed the way people acquire skills? Enormously and in both directions. Access is almost unlimited now — someone in a rural area can learn things that once required expensive institutions. But the structure that made traditional learning effective — deadlines, feedback, accountability — isn't built into most online learning. Completion rates for free courses remain very low. The internet has raised the ceiling for determined learners without doing much for the average one. Do you think schools focus too much on academic knowledge? Somewhat, though I think the distinction between academic and practical is less clear than it sounds. The skills that matter in most practical work — clear reasoning, communicating under uncertainty, working with incomplete information — are exactly what academic education is supposed to develop. The failure isn't the focus; it's that academic education often doesn't actually deliver those things, so people end up neither analytically confident nor practically skilled.