The World Economic Forum just published the skills that will matter most by 2030. Number two on the list is what most leaders have spent years unlearning.
Every two years, the World Economic Forum surveys over 1,000 of the world's largest employers to understand what skills will matter most in the years ahead. The 2025 Future of Jobs Report was published in January. It covers 14 million workers across 22 industries and 55 economies.
The headline findings are about AI, automation, and the green transition. But buried in the skills data is something that should get more attention than it does.
The top ten most important skills for 2030, according to the employers surveyed:
Analytical thinking
Resilience, flexibility and agility
Leadership and social influence
Creative thinking
Motivation and self-awareness
Technological literacy
Empathy and active listening
Curiosity and lifelong learning
Talent management
Service orientation and customer service
Technology sits at number six. Empathy and active listening at number seven. Self-awareness at number five.
Six of the top ten are human skills. The kind that cannot be automated, cannot be trained in a weekend, and cannot be measured by a certification.
What the data actually says
The report also looked at which skills are growing fastest in importance compared to the previous edition. Leadership and social influence rose 17 percentage points. Resilience, flexibility and agility rose 17 points. AI and big data rose 17 points.
Leadership and AI growing at the same rate. That is not what most conversations about the future of work sound like.
The report notes that 59 out of every 100 workers will need retraining by 2030. Most of that conversation focuses on technical skills, coding, data literacy, working with AI tools. That conversation is necessary. But it leaves out the fact that the skills gap at the top of organisations is not primarily technical.
The leaders who are struggling in fast-growing companies are not struggling because they do not understand machine learning. They are struggling because the pace of growth has outrun the quality of the conversations they are having with their teams. Because the culture they built for ten people does not scale to fifty. Because the decision-making that worked when everyone was in one room breaks down when the room gets bigger.
The skills that are hardest to develop
Resilience, flexibility and agility. Motivation and self-awareness. Empathy and active listening. Leadership and social influence.
What these four have in common is that they cannot be learned by reading about them. They develop through experience, through reflection, through someone pointing out the pattern you have not been able to see in yourself.
They also share something else. Most high-performing leaders have spent years building defences against them. Resilience becomes rigidity. Self-awareness gets replaced by self-confidence. Empathy gets treated as a nice-to-have that takes time away from the actual work.
I see this in almost every first session. The leader who describes himself as resilient but has not changed his mind in a meeting in two years. The one who says he values honesty but whose team has quietly learned what not to say.
The report calls these "engagement skills" and "self-efficacy skills." I would call them the things that determine whether a leader is actually present in a room or just performing the role of being present.
That distinction matters more than any technical skill. And it is almost never what leadership training programmes focus on.
What this means for fast-growing companies
The companies that will navigate the next five years best are not the ones with the most sophisticated AI strategy. They are the ones where the leadership team can have honest conversations under pressure. Where people can say what is actually happening without calculating the political cost first. Where the founder has enough self-awareness to know which of their own patterns are assets and which ones are costing the organisation something it cannot afford.
The WEF data points at this without quite saying it. Fifty-nine percent of workers need retraining. Leadership and social influence is the third most important skill. Self-awareness is fifth.
What the data does not say is how you get there. You do not get there by attending a course on leadership skills. You get there by having the conversation that has been waiting to happen in your team. By someone finally naming what is below the surface. By the insight that follows. Not from a framework. From finally seeing clearly what was already there.
That is slower than a course. It is also the only thing that actually works.
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025 is available at weforum.org.
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com