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The new currency of work: how skills will define our future
Work is always changing. In the late noughties, when confronted with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, I had many conversations with customers who were downsizing their headcount. One of the more enlightened, acknowledged that the biggest challenge facing their workforce wasn’t that they were going to lose 20% of their headcount in the next few years, but that 50% of those remaining would be doing dramatically different roles by the end of the same period.
Today, our challenge isn’t the scale of change, it’s the speed. Careers have been a helpful construct for lifelong progression and security, but in 2026 feel like an alien concept. Employees, employers and society need to create a different, data-led framework to navigate these turbulent times.
The labour market has a quality problem
Research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) explains that labour markets shouldn’t be judged solely by employment quantity as job quality also matters, including development, earnings, security and working conditions, which affect well-being and economic performance.
As our insight into labour markets improves, we need to predict how assignments impact short and long-term earnings. This is not a new concept; internships have long been a short term / low pay career choice to accelerate lifetime skills and earnings. We are now at a pivot point where skills, rather than earnings become the primary currency.
Skills are becoming the defining economic driver
Policymakers, educators and employers therefore need to support lifelong learning, and career transition events, enabling and informing people to reskill and upskill throughout their working lives. The UK’s “AI Skills for Life and Work” projections highlight the importance of preparing people for roles that will continually evolve as AI becomes embedded across professions.
Alongside technical competencies, human capabilities remain indispensable. Workforce research from Adecco Group consistently highlights digital literacy, creativity, communication and critical thinking as essential skills for the future workplace. As well as overtaking earnings as the key measure of future career success, in the AI-enabled workplace, skills are displacing experience in the modern workplace
At Sopra Steria, we put this principle into practice. Through our partnership with The King's Trust, we deliver the Get into Tech programme, it provides structured training and on-the-job opportunities with minimal barriers to entry, helping young people and career switchers from diverse backgrounds access digital careers.
If skills are the currency of the future, the risk of skill stagnation becomes similar to unemployment. This is difficult to confront in a time of low economic confidence, as fear of unemployment inhibits job mobility and therefore learning and growth opportunities!
What are our next steps?
We’re all in this together, sometimes with dual responsibilities as both employees and employers! Collectively we need to:
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Build honest, psychologically safe cultures: where we can juggle the immediate task at hand alongside our longer-term development needs.
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Predict and quantify future skill demand: we already have tools that help recruiters understand their competitiveness and help identify transferable skills. Big data and AI allow us to build collective access to this supply and demand insight to help jobseekers and employees understand their current and future relevance to the labour market.
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Empower fractional working and career transitions: this can be both formal talent mobility programmes and job sharing as well as informal education by experience, mentoring and volunteering.
The future won’t wait for us to catch up. But if we choose to prioritise skills, embrace mobility and build cultures that reward reinvention, we won’t just survive transformation of work, we’ll shape it.
If you want to be part of a community that’s building the next generation of talent reach out to Nick Heckscher to get started.
About the campaign
In our pursuit to shape a more equitable future, our March TechTogether campaign will focus on supporting the next generation by joining the National Careers Week campaign, empowering women in tech, advancing equity by design, and evolving the landscape of online safety.
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