In the first blog post of the series, I explained why the distinction between the future of work and the future of employability matters and why the future of employability deserves more attention. In this blog post, I define what the future of employability encompasses as a field of inquiry by proposing what it should include, what it should exclude, and its time horizon. I will also introduce employability futures as a methodological approach grounded in strategic foresight. This post is not intended to end the conversation about what the future of employability means. Instead, I hope that this energizes the conversation and makes clear why the future of employability is just as important a concept as the future of work.
Here is a starting point for a definition of the future of employability based on what I shared in the first post: The future of employability explores the skills, attributes, and professional habits that enable individuals to gain initial employment, sustain employment as work evolves, and transition to new roles throughout their careers. This requires understanding present requirements while anticipating how employability will evolve as work itself changes.
What the Future of Employability Includes
The good news is that there are numerous employability frameworks informed by research and employer surveys that describe what employability means in the present. I use these frameworks most often: the Quality Assurance Commons Essential Employability Qualities (EEQ) and the National Association for Colleges and Employers (NACE) Competencies for a Career-Ready Workforce. These frameworks are grounded in extensive employer research and widely used. Both frameworks emphasize communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and professionalism. They also recognize technology fluency as essential and include the capacity to learn and adjust as conditions change. The convergence between the frameworks is not accidental. It reflects what research on employability consistently identifies as essential.
These two frameworks reflect the skills, attributes, and professional habits essential to employability in the current workforce based on employer research. A future of employability approach examines these skills, attributes, and professional habits over a five-to-ten-year horizon, which is long enough to anticipate meaningful change but close enough to inform decisions. This might mean that the definitions of some of the terms, such as communication, change due to the use of AI. It might mean that the term itself changes to better reflect what the skill, attribute, or professional habit means. A term could also decline in priority or even drop off the list. And it might mean that a new skill, attribute, or professional habit is added. It is important to note that because of the uncertainty associated with the future of employability, the list will not be as definite as current frameworks. The key will be to develop skills, attributes, and professional habits that enable employability in multiple futures.
Employability Futures
One of the field’s core goals is identifying skills, attributes, and professional habits that promote employability across multiple futures. It is not enough to focus on one conception of the future. We must account for uncertainty of the future. This makes employability futures an essential component of the future of employability. The future of employability is a domain of inquiry parallel to the future of work, whereas employability futures is a methodology grounded in strategic foresight that uses futures tools to consider the skills, attributes, and professional habits essential for employability in an uncertain future. These tools help us envision, explore, and learn from alternative conceptions of the future to consider what employability means in those futures.
Scanning, scenario planning, and the three-horizons method are just some of the futures tools that will be used for employability futures. Scanning involves exploring a wide range of areas using frameworks like STEEPLE, which looks at social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical factors. Examples of what is discovered during scanning include political changes that impact employers, technological advances that enable different ways of working, and societal shifts in values. Broad, continuous scanning using STEEPLE prevents us from overlooking factors that may initially seem irrelevant to the future of employability.
Scenario planning takes what is found during scanning and uses it to envision different possibilities for the future. This can provide unexpected conceptions of the future that are different from just a continuation of current trends, and this can help challenge assumptions, both explicit and implicit, that we hold about the future. Developing scenarios on how work could change and then considering what this means for a particular person in terms of employability is helpful and can inform efforts to identify skills, attributes, and professional habits that support employability in multiple versions of the future. Particularly helpful are future personas. Alex Fergnani describes them as follows: “Future personas are fictional individuals living in the future scenarios they live in. They are created from scenarios.” Future personas make abstract scenarios concrete by asking: What would employability mean for a specific person living in this future? What skills would they need? How would they demonstrate value?
Finally, the Three Horizons framework makes clear the current system of work (Horizon 1), the possible future that is already showing up through signals in the present (Horizon 3), and the transition (Horizon 2) that reflects a clash between Horizon 1 and 3. Think of Horizon 1 as today’s workplace, Horizon 3 as an emerging work future already visible in early signals, and Horizon 2 as the turbulent transition between them. Understanding all three horizons helps identify which employability skills will endure and which will need to evolve. The Three Horizons framework can demonstrate different ways employability is changing and how best to support people in these different horizons. Employability futures is just one of many possible methodologies for use within the future of employability field of inquiry but is central to ensuring that conceptions of employability take into account uncertainty associated with the future and jobs that do not yet exist.
Here is how these foresight tools work together. While scanning, we might identify uncertainty related to how AI-driven automation will reshape knowledge work and whether remote work will become standard. Using scenario planning, we develop multiple futures that account for this uncertainty for 2030 work environments. We then create a future persona, Hudson, who is graduating in 2030 with an undergraduate business degree.
In one scenario, AI handles routine decisions and data synthesis. However, employers place premium value on human judgment for strategic decisions, even more than today. Hudson needs to demonstrate not just analytical skills but sound judgment. Collaboration in making these decisions is not just valued; it is viewed as essential. Through the Three Horizons lens, we see Horizon 1’s emphasis on individual task completion giving way to Horizon 3’s model of human-AI collaboration for information synthesis and team-based strategic decision-making. This reveals that employability in this scenario means being able to use AI to gain the information needed for sound strategic decisions and then work with others to make strategic judgments.
This methodology does not seek to predict one definite future. Instead, it identifies skills, attributes, and professional habits that enable employability across multiple futures. This futures-oriented approach differs fundamentally from how we typically assess employability. Most conventional approaches rely heavily on employer surveys, which remain useful but have an important limitation: they reflect how employers view employability in the present. This is important because there was a time when employers were saying that everyone needed to know how to code, but this is no longer the case. Employability futures looks out five to ten years to determine what is possible in terms of employability, and this can help higher education institutions, alternative education providers, and employers ensure people are prepared for what is possible.
What the Future of Employability is Not
The future of employability is not the same as the future of work, although it relies on an understanding of how work might evolve in the future. One example highlights this. Because undergraduate degree programs typically take four years, the future of work is important when thinking about what work will be like when students in these programs graduate. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find jobs, a clear signal that institutional reputation alone doesn’t guarantee employability. The job market these students entered looked different from the one they prepared for four years earlier. Just going to a good school is not enough. The future of employability also extends beyond job search tactics or keeping pace with AI. While both job search skills and technical fluency matter, the future of employability encompasses something broader: the full range of skills, attributes, and professional habits that enable people to build sustainable careers across changing conditions.
What’s Next
Defining the future of employability as a distinct field of inquiry and introducing employability futures as a foresight-based methodology creates the foundation for more intentional preparation. Current employability frameworks like EEQ and NACE reflect what employers value today, but employability futures helps us anticipate what will matter in 2030 and beyond.
Without this futures-oriented approach, we risk preparing people only for today’s workforce while tomorrow’s work continues to evolve. In Part 3 of this series, I will explore how educators, employers, and individuals can apply employability futures to strengthen career preparation and professional development.