A scoping review of Future Skills frameworks

Abstract

Many agree that education needs new goals that reflect the demands of the future. These are often called ‘Future Skills’, referring to the knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and competencies intended to prepare learners for the future. The need to teach such Future Skills is often cited, justified by the perception that the future will present new challenges for society. However, the various frameworks discussing Future Skills, often created and published without consensus, use hundreds of terms to refer to such skills and competencies, presenting a barrier to discussion of education futures. If we are to design a better future for education, then a cohesive analysis must link and synthesise these isolated frameworks published worldwide. This scoping review utilises thematic analysis and Social Network Analysis to develop meta-categories representing clusters of future skills reported by extant research. Having started with 99 frameworks identified following a systematic search of the literature, which together included 341 different terms, our review identifies nine categories that provide a valuable overview of the field to inform the conceptualisation of Future Skills. Educational practitioners, human resource professionals, policy makers, and educational technology developers can use the meta-categories to prioritise the integration of certain skills into teaching, learning, and retraining. This will help ensure that students and professionals are better prepared to thrive in an uncertain future.