‘40-year skill shelf life is over’: WorldSkills chief on AI-era jobs

SHANGHAI: Learn a skill, get a job and rely on it for the next 40 years. That model of working life is over. Artificial intelligence may wipe out some entry-level work, but the bigger challenge is not to predict which jobs will disappear — it is to keep workers learning throughout their lives, WorldSkills president and chair Francis Hourant said, arguing that “human skills” must remain at the centre of the AI revolution.Speaking to The Times of India at WorldSkills Shanghai 2026, Hourant said the pace of AI made even a 10- or 20-year forecast of jobs difficult. “We don’t know what we need in two years, in five years, in ten years,” he said, arguing that lifelong learning was no longer a choice.His advice to young people entering the workforce was simple: when discussing a new job, don’t only ask about salary and benefits — ask the employer what its plan is for your training. Without continuously acquiring new skills, he said, workers may find it difficult even to move between jobs or roles within the same company.WorldSkills members, Hourant said, have already adopted an AI policy that will evolve every year. The organisation will now examine how AI can be incorporated into its occupational standards, competition projects and assessment systems.But he cautioned against seeing AI as a substitute for people. “Human skills first,” he said, recalling companies that had chosen to retrain workers instead of replacing them. In one case, he said, a large company retrained 8,000 employees so they could move from simply selling products to becoming advisers to customers — and ended up improving business.The same principle, he said, should guide the use of robotics. The challenge is to decide “where is the right place for the robot and where is the right place for the human”. Automation, he suggested, could take over some of the most difficult or undesirable work, while people move into roles demanding judgement, creativity and human interaction.Hourant also underlined the role of international skills competitions as a benchmark for education systems. He cited the example of a Belgian expert who returned from a WorldSkills competition and told his training centre that teaching methods, equipment and investment had to change if it wanted to match international standards.Finland, he said, routinely brings experts together after competitions to share what they have learnt, and that feedback can even lead to changes in curricula.International mobility will add another layer to the challenge. Countries whose workers seek jobs abroad, Hourant said, can benefit not only from remittances but also from skills, training and technology flowing back home.On India, Hourant avoided a detailed assessment, saying he did not know the system closely enough. But he said India was strongly associated in Europe with technology, particularly IT, and cited European companies recruiting talent from the country.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.