Why Talk About 21st Century Skills?
Aligning School Programs with Future Needs
As the world evolves, so do the skills required to survive and succeed. Schools try to prepare students for an uncertain future, where automation, artificial intelligence and other trends will continue to transform the workforce. By identifying 21st century skills, educators can design programs that ensure students develop competencies essential for adaptability.
Defining Educational Success Criteria with Future Skills
21st century skills help define the goals of education and establish clear success criteria. A school should have a well-articulated vision of the key attributes of a graduate. This vision then determines its values as well as the programs and learning experiences it offers. It is getting clearer that success should no longer be measured solely by standardized test scores. But then what is our goal, how do we prepare for it and how do we measure progress? To answer these questions, we need to determine the competencies that we want a learner to develop.
List of 21st Century Skills
We compiled a list of 21st century skills, which guide our content and work on education and learning. Rather than preparing a long list of isolated skills, we find it more effective to group them into broader categories. That's why we start with category names, provide a brief description of each and then list several skills that fall under that category.
Please note that a list of "future skills" should not be a static one. On the contrary, we should keep challenging ourselves and be open to revising this list as we experience and learn more.
Below are 9 key categories of 21st century skills followed by a brief description of each category and the essential competencies within each.
- Self-Awareness and Regulation: Understanding Myself
- Collaboration and Communication: Engaging Effectively with Others
- Curiosity and Inquiry: Asking Why
- Creativity and Imagination: Thinking Beyond What Is
- Motivation: Cultivating Drive and Determination
- Taking Action: Engaging the Mind and Body in Motion
- Adaptability and Agility: Embracing Change and Learning from Challenges
- Purpose and Connection: Developing a Sense of Belonging and Meaning
- Higher-Order Thinking: Critical Thinking and Metacognition
Self-Awareness and Regulation: Understanding Myself
The most essential work of education is to assist the learner in getting to know herself and build her character. Self-awareness and self-regulation are foundational skills that enable an individual to understand herself, monitor and manage her emotions and take intentional actions.
These skills are critical for building one's character, personal growth and overall well-being. They form a basis for identifying personal values and principles, which then help us develop an awareness of societal narratives (stories and myths) that we are subject to. Ability to distinguish these narratives from "what I truly am" is a key level of awareness needed to protect us against "getting hacked".
They also form the basis of all other skillsets. Genuine connection with others, authentic creativity, personal drive and many of the other category of skills depend heavily on an individual's capacity to understand, regulate and nurture herself.
Collaboration and Communication: Engaging Effectively with Others
As social beings, we drive our strength from connecting and working with others towards building and materializing our collective stories. Technology keeps giving us new ways to connect us to each other, but the core people skills for effective communication and collaboration remain the same. These skills include language proficiency, articulation and the ability to express ideas clearly across different media and audiences. They also include active listening and empathy to engage in meaningful relationships, fostering teamwork and leadership.
Curiosity and Inquiry: Asking Why
Every human being starts life strongly equipped with a curious, questioning mind. This is one of our core human abilities to quickly learn and adapt to our setting. Sustaining this curiosity and nurturing an inquisitive attitude is the foundation of lifelong learning and adaptive growth.
The habit of starting from an inherent "why" helps us develop the ability to critically assess existing knowledge. It encourages us to explore, question and seek deeper understanding, leading to continuous improvement and innovation. These skills also have a self-reinforcing property. Starting our learning journey from curiosity keeps fostering the joy of exploration and discovery.
Creativity and Imagination: Thinking Beyond What Is
Building on curiosity, the skills of creativity and imagination allow us to envision possibilities beyond the present reality. Creative or artistic expression gives us new ways to process and make sense of the world around us. It is simultaneously a form of release and an alternative way to process and communicate information. Creativity unlocks divergent thinking. Together with a powerful imagination, it gives us the ability to challenge convention and generate innovative ideas.
Motivation: Cultivating Drive and Determination
Motivation is the inner drive that pushes individuals to achieve their goals. This involves a sense of direction and requires persistence and perseverance in the face of challenges. Ability to set direction for oneself is highly correlated with agency and self-efficacy. This skillset is often referred to as having "grit" and is collectively an important component of resilience.
There is no quick recipe to developing this skillset and learners may realize their capacity for motivation and drive at different parts of their learning journey. However experiencing real-life work and craftsmanship helps build an appreciation for sustained dedication and patience for iterative improvements. Similarly competitive sports also provide a valuable medium for unlocking the capacity for inner motivation and drive.
Taking Action: Engaging the Mind and Body in Motion
The ability to move from thought to action arises from an awareness of restlessness and a drive to take initiative. Action implies engagement. Both a physical, hands-on interaction with one's environment as well as an intellectual urge to engage. This skillset is also correlated with kinesthetic skills. Awareness through the body, movement vs stillness, nurturing intentional attention and concentration serve as valuable ways to nurture this capacity.
We need to thank Dr. Laura Jana and her "Qi Skills Framework" for helping us realize and acknowledge this distinct category of skills, which she named "Wiggle Skills".
Adaptability and Agility: Embracing Change and Learning from Challenges
Looking out into the future, the only constant we see is change. It is becoming more and more difficult to paint an accurate picture of what awaits a young adult, who will finish her schooling 10-15 years from now. The ability to adapt is essential for survival and success in such an ever-evolving world. Adaptability and agility require the following:
- flexibility and being open to new experiences and perspectives,
- the ability to learn quickly and independently,
- the ability to navigate uncertainties and setbacks.
On the other hand, they foster learning from failure and using adversity as a growth opportunity, therefore building resilience.
Purpose and Connection: Developing a Sense of Belonging and Meaning
As human beings, we have an inherent search for meaning and purpose. Sense of belonging as well as the experience of wonder and awe are triggers that help unleash amazing human capacities such as compassion, hope and love. These skills and experiences open several doors for us:
- nurture authenticity, emotional and spiritual depth,
- own the heritage of the community, geography and the time period we inhabit,
- develop meaningful relationships with our communities,
- find the meaning and sense of purpose that we crave,
- align with meaningful causes.
A strong sense of purpose, belonging and connection to others creates lifetime fulfillment and well-being.
Artists prove to be invaluable guides and mentors to help us evoke these experiences and wake these capacities in young people. That is one of the reasons why we cherish the role of the artist as "atelierista" in Reggio Emilia. However, these experiences and skills are typically left out of the traditional schooling experience. Why not actively acknowledge their value and aim to nurture this set of experiences and skills as part of our education?
Higher-Order Thinking: Critical Thinking and Metacognition
Higher-order thinking skills allow individuals to analyze and integrate complex information and reflect on their own thought processes. In general, this category of skills is about cultivating useful thinking patterns and mental models that eventually help synthesize information, approach problems and integrate knowledge across seemingly unrelated disciplines. It is a broad category, but below are a few key highlights that will hopefully clarify this skill category:
- Critical thinking is about filtering and focusing on what matters. It involves knowing how to research, navigating through misinformation and the ability to assess authenticity. It requires questioning the source of information and its credibility before embracing it as well as challenging data and inferences by filtering through noise and clutter.
- Systems thinking is about understanding connectedness and interrelatedness of beings and situations in a real-world system with complex interconnections.
- Metacognition is the ability to reason about the context and become an observer of one's own thinking.
- Negative capability is the ability to hold conflicting thoughts and evaluate contradictory perspectives. A must for authenticity and creativity.
How Do We Determine the 21st Century Skills?
There is no single authority that defines future skills, but several institutions and researchers have made significant contributions toward identifying the competencies that will be most essential in the coming decades. We synthesized many of these perspectives to build our list. Understanding these skills requires an analysis of social and economic trends, evolving job markets and advancements in education theory.
Skills Needed for Future Jobs and the Evolving Workforce
One way to identify future skills is by analyzing emerging job trends and the evolving nature of work. As automation, artificial intelligence and digital transformation reshape industries, distinctly human capacities will become increasingly valuable. For example, future jobs will likely demand creative problem-solving, empathy, ethical judgment, adaptability and emotional intelligence - skills that machines cannot easily replicate. Visit our guide on Future Jobs to see our analysis on and expectations for the future job market.
Future Skills 2030: World Economic Forum’s Perspective
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2025) outlines key skills projected to be most valuable by 2030. These skills reflect the increasing demand for adaptability, complex problem-solving and human-centered competencies. According to the report, the top core skills for the future are as follows (ranked in the order presented in the report):
- Resilience, flexibility, and agility
- Analytical thinking
- Leadership and social influence
- Creative thinking
- Technological literacy
- Curiosity and lifelong learning
- AI and big data literacy
- Talent management
- Systems thinking
- Motivation and self-awareness
- Empathy and active listening
Learning, Acquiring, and Nurturing Future Skills
There are many ways to cultivate 21st-century skills, ranging from structured educational programs to self-directed learning. Here we feel the need to highlight three key paths that stand out, although the list is in no way exhaustive.
Early Childhood Education and Family Environment
The foundation for 21st-century skills is laid in childhood, long before formal schooling begins. The family environment, early sensorial and emotional experiences play a decisive role in shaping a child's sense of self and the way she perceives and approaches the world around her. Building a secure attachment and feeling safe, developing rich language skills, having opportunities for free play and experimentation are some of many building blocks. These building blocks then shape capacities and skills including self-awareness, self-regulation, curiosity, creativity, ability to communicate and collaborate.
Experiential Learning and Real-World Applications
Learning by doing and having experiences that have real-world meaning are among the most effective ways to build many of the highlighted future skills. Real-world applications carry the potential to have more relevance for the learner and give the learner opportunities to immerse herself in novel settings and situations to explore and experiment with herself and others.
Arts, Creative Work and Adopting a Reflective Practice
The self is not a static entity, but a dynamic one in constant perception, action and evolution. Creative work and introspection give us the opportunity to observe and continuously process who we are and how we change. Ability to make sense of one's own perceptions and experiences is essential for deep learning and personal growth.
Practices like journaling, meditation and structured self-reflection help develop self-awareness, emotional regulation and metacognitive abilities. Engaging in creative disciplines carry the potential to further develop valuable capacities such as flexibility, spontaneity, adaptability, patience and perseverance.
21st Century Skills and Students
There is a significant gap between the long-observed outcomes of traditional schooling and the skills required for success in the 21st century. Most educational institutions still prioritize one-way delivery of information and memorization. Assessment of learning and growth is tied to standardized test performance. These rigid structures do not permit flourishing of essential capacities such as creativity, collaboration and problem-solving with higher-order thinking. On the contrary, we watch young learners as they distance themselves away from reading, exploring and from following their genuine curiosity. Learners do learn to adapt to survive in the educational setting we present them, but this takes place by suppressing many of the key capacities that could help them thrive in the real world.
As a consequence, many of the most valuable 21st-century skills are developed outside the traditional classroom, often through extracurricular activities, creative pursuits, sports and real-world experiences. This puts the burden on students and parents to realize that they should be taking an active role in the learning journey, seeking out experiences and identifying opportunities to engage with the world in meaningful ways.
Parents and students may tend to feel worried due to excessive uncertainty, the need to adapt to an unknown future and the inability to delegate this responsibility to schools. This kind of worry and fear may become incapacitating. If you are a student, parent or a teacher, who feels such pressure, please read our article Education Beyond Fear.
We Need a Paradigm Shift in Teaching
The traditional model of teaching is no longer sufficient to prepare students for the complex and rapidly changing realities of the 21st century. Instead of focusing primarily on content delivery, educators must shift toward fostering skills that are essential for future success.
But how do we accomplish this? Are our educators properly equipped to help students build 21st century skills? Are they supported by the administrators or the processes and settings they operate with? The answer is mostly no, they are not. Many educators recognize the importance of 21st century skills, but face significant barriers to integrating them into their teaching. There is also a broader question of whether teacher training programs adequately prepare educators to facilitate learner-centered, inquiry-driven teaching that does not depend solely on content delivery.
LearnButWhy: Let's Take This Step Together
To equip learners with the highlighted future skills, educators must transition into facilitators of learning, guiding students through inquiry, exploration and real-world problem-solving. This requires a significant shift in mindset as well as systemic changes in how educators are trained, supported and assessed.
At LearnButWhy, our goal is to build professional learning communities, where educators can focus on this personal and professional journey of transformation equipped with the support they need.
Join Our Network Now or review the About Us page to learn more about our work and how you can be part of this movement.
