Realising a Lifelong Learning Nation: Global Perspectives and Opportunities

ETHOS Issue 29, Nov 2025

The New Economics of Talent in the Age of AI

Amid rapid technological disruption and growing barriers to social mobility, the need for ongoing investment in human capital has never been more urgent. With the potential of artificial intelligence to take on cognitive work, people will only be able to stay ahead of machines if they continue to refine existing strengths and develop new ones.

Indeed, the rise of AI paradoxically increases the value of human judgment. In many fields, AI is generating an upheaval in expertise. Joint research from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard University shows that as AI takes over many entry-level tasks, the efficiencies it brings make experienced workers more valuable and less replaceable. Labour becomes more valuable as it becomes more skilled.¹

Thriving in this new reality thus calls for an economic framework centred on continually enhancing the value of human labour, to boost both individual prosperity and broader economic productivity through life.

This is at odds with how the world develops talent today. Most education systems are still geared towards the young and fail to properly support lifelong learning after an initial period of education. This mindset treats human capital as a one-time deposit — and a depreciating asset — rather than a lifelong resource to be continuously developed.

For instance, we have long assumed that workers can acquire new skills on the job, but many modern demands — such as data analytics for marketing professionals — are unrelated to traditional career paths and difficult to learn informally. Moreover, today's flexible labour markets, where employers hire and fire at will, discourage long-term investment in training.

The consequences are already apparent. A 2022 study by the Burning Glass Institute and the Boston Consulting Group found that 37% of the top skills for an average job had changed in the previous five years — before the emergence of generative AI.² Without meaningful ways to retool, mid-career workers in particular struggle to demonstrate their relevance. Each job transition — in the US, the average baby boomer has held nearly 13 jobs — is fraught with vulnerability; the risk of falling back is as real as the possibility of moving up.³

Few nations have grappled with these challenges as directly as Singapore.

Its SkillsFuture movement already recognises that the future of work demands continual, skills-based renewal across one's lifetime — an idea that has become central to its economic strategy. Yet the accelerating scale of technological change now calls for taking this vision further: moving from skills acquisition to skills orchestration. Singapore's next horizon lies in building an integrated national skills ecosystem, where education systems, employers, and government data infrastructures evolve in sync with economic transformation. In doing so, Singapore offers not just a case study, but a potential global model for how societies can turn lifelong learning into an engine of competitiveness.

Four Pillars of a Lifelong Learning Nation

We need a fundamental rethink of how we develop and sustain human capital into the future. A stronger, more responsive model must rest on four interconnected pillars: reimagining education for lifelong learning, establishing credentials that convey real value, realigning employer incentives to invest in talent, and building the public infrastructure to support transitions.

A successful national system for lifelong learning must distribute risk more evenly and better align incentives across all four dimensions, integrating these within a shared economic and workforce strategy.

1. Education

Traditional education systems often define success by degree attainment. Yet degrees no longer guarantee the career outcomes they once did. Legacy degree models — typically structured as multi-year programmes — struggle to keep pace with shifting skill demands in fast-growing sectors like green technology and data science. This creates a disconnect between higher education and the needs of the labour market. Universities that are leaders in developing advanced technologies often fail to graduate students with the skills needed to work in those same sectors.

Just as importantly, despite the urgent need for all workers to acquire new skills, education institutions have struggled to serve a learner base that extends beyond the age of 30. Workers may only need to master a few targeted skills to pivot their careers or to advance within their field, but learning remains tied to multi-year degree programmes. Courses are structured around the schedules of full-time students, and curricula often emphasise academic theory over practical application. Few opportunities exist for learners to practice new skills in the workplace.

Some institutions are beginning to address these limitations. The University of Virginia's Sands Institute has designed programmes specifically for workers whose careers have stalled — including frontline workers not typically served by elite institutions — and partners with employers to embed learning into the workplace. Delft University of Technology offers a series of "MicroMasters" programmes for professionals seeking skills in emerging high-demand sectors such as solar energy. These graduate-level courses provide credit towards a master's degree while also standing alone as professional development in fast-growing fields.

2. Credentials

Non-degree credentials are a compelling solution to making learning more accessible. To fulfil this purpose, credentials must serve as effective signals: they must be widely recognised and stackable, indicating a clear progression of accumulated knowledge. Too often, workers and learners lack the necessary information to determine which credentials will actually help them advance.

Globally, consistent standards and outcomes reporting for non-degree credentials are lacking. Many credentials may appear relevant on a syllabus but fail to deliver real value in the market. Research by the Burning Glass Institute and the American Enterprise Institute found only one in eight non-degree credentials in the US results in a meaningful wage increase.⁵

New approaches are emerging to help learners make better decisions. In the US, the Credential Value Index analyses the career histories of tens of millions of workers to evaluate over 20,000 non-degree credentials based on their actual outcomes.⁶ The Index functions as a kind of "nutrition label" for credentials: it enables workers to identify which options are likely to unlock real opportunities, helps employers assess whether a credential demonstrates true skill mastery or career readiness, and provides policymakers and educators with insight into which credentials merit investment.

3. Employers

Viewed across the span of an entire career, investment in human capital makes sound financial sense. However, high attrition rates — especially in roles where employees often stay less than a year — make employers hesitant. Their return on training investments may not materialise before the employee leaves. This leads many employers to focus on what economists call a "free rider" problem: why invest in training if the benefits may accrue to a competitor?

Yet data suggest this concern may be overstated. The American Opportunity Index, developed by the Burning Glass Institute in partnership with Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Schultz Family Foundation, finds that US companies excelling in internal promotion and training have retention rates 1.6 times higher than their peers.⁸ The Index also finds a strong link between promotion and retention: employees are far more likely to stay when they see a clear path to advancement.

Several barriers continue to hinder greater employer investment in talent. Many companies lack forward-looking workforce strategies that anticipate future needs, leaving little time to train existing workers once skills gaps become evident. Even when such plans do exist, they are seldom communicated clearly to employees, who are often left unaware of where opportunities are likely to lie or the training required to pursue them. Small- and mid-sized employers in particular often lack the resources to offer training at all.

Addressing this misalignment of time, cost, risk, and capacity requires structural solutions. New financing models and partnerships can help distribute risk more equitably among employers, workers, training providers, and public institutions. For example, a value-added tax credit — tied to wage increases, even if the employee moves on — could offset training costs and be funded through corresponding growth in income tax revenue. In addition, "market makers" could help reduce risk for both workers and employers by aggregating demand and supply and offering clearer labour market signals. Staffing firms, tertiary education institutions, and public agencies are all well-positioned to take on this intermediary role.

4. Public Infrastructure

While employers, training providers, and workers each play a critical role, building a nation's human capital base also requires substantial public infrastructure. Beyond funding education and training, government investment is essential for identifying labour market trends, developing career pathways, and guiding workers to new learning opportunities. These depend on foundational functions that government is uniquely positioned to provide: including forecasting, standards-setting, and definitions.

Closing gaps between skill supply and demand requires detailed, up-to-date information about labour market changes. This information must be granular and timely, offering insight into trends affecting specific roles, sectors, and skills — including how emerging technologies, like AI, are reshaping job requirements. Unlike the work of most national statistics bureaus — which focus primarily on collecting data — these insights must be designed to support real-world decision-making for a wide range of stakeholders. In many countries and multinational organisations, labour market observatories have arisen to produce more of such actionable data.¹¹ Private-sector providers of real-time labour market data are also playing a growing role, though their output may need significant modelling and interpretation to become useful for the broader public.

Efficient labour markets benefit from a shared language for skills and jobs. Currently, job titles often vary across employers, with the same title referring to entirely different roles, or different titles describing the same one. Meanwhile, education institutions describe learning outcomes in terms that may not align with the skill requirements of employers. This lack of standardisation impedes collaboration across stakeholders — educators, employers, and workers — and leaves all of them without a clear sense for labour market needs or the talent available to meet them.

To address this need, the Burning Glass Institute is leading a coalition of a dozen major US companies — including Google, Walmart, Bank of America, Microsoft, Verizon, PepsiCo, and Johnson & Johnson — to define common role profiles for key occupations. The aim is to provide clearer signals: helping educators understand which skills to teach and enabling employers to assess which skills candidates bring. With such a framework in place, a worker's career history itself can serve as a meaningful form of assessment, offering insight into the skills they have likely acquired and their level of proficiency.

Singapore's own investments in a national jobs-skills architecture position it as a global model in scaling such efforts. Through its Jobs-Skills Portal, Singapore is building a shared skills language at the level of an entire economy, turning what many companies attempt individually into a coordinated national capability. This integration underscores how a well-structured data infrastructure can knit together employers, educators, and policymakers around a common understanding of skills demand and supply.

Taken together, these initiatives illustrate the architecture of a lifelong learning nation — an idea now reaching its fullest expression in Singapore's emerging leadership on skills.

Extending Singapore's Global Leadership on Skills

Singapore's approach to workforce development exemplifies the global transition toward a lifelong learning economy. The nation is already recognised as a global leader in helping workers adapt to change. The country's pioneering SkillsFuture Credit scheme has become an international model, shifting the economics of upskilling and reskilling by reducing the financial burden on individuals.

But what lies ahead, and what further investments are needed? Singapore has two significant opportunities to deepen its leadership in workforce development.

Unlocking Opportunity Through Upskilling and Reskilling

The benefits of improved public infrastructure and validated credentials can be put more directly in the hands of workers. Ultimately, individuals must guide themselves through career transitions; to do so effectively, they need something akin to a Waze app for their careers — a tool that maps routes to advancement, identifies learning opportunities, and helps them avoid dead ends.

This challenge centres on both information and motivation. Workers often worry, understandably, that if they invest in upskilling, they may still end up unemployed or underemployed. Addressing such fears requires several key components:

• Clear career pathways. Workers need to see how their careers can progress, including possible advancements from their current roles, transitions to other fields, and the specific skills required for each step. A good example is Cyberseek.org, a US initiative that offers interactive maps of cybersecurity career paths, showing demand, salaries, and qualifications.
• Learning options linked to pathways. Workers must be able to identify not only where they want to go but how they can get there. SSG already provides a strong foundation for this work, which could be further enhanced with greater investment.
• Evidence of real value. Learning opportunities should come with transparent data about their real-world outcomes. In the US, the Credential Value Index cited above and the US Department of Education's College Scorecard offer insights into graduate earnings. Greater data transparency and personalised guidance can help learners choose programmes that deliver measurable economic impact.

Aligning Economic, Talent, and Education Strategies

There should be closer links between the education system, the strategic needs of employers, and national economic planning. Singapore has ambitious targets for economic growth, both broadly and within priority sectors. Achieving those goals will require a skilled workforce — people who can develop, deploy, and maximise new technologies. Planning for that future workforce involves more than scaling today's roles. As industries evolve, job functions are often redefined: old tasks are phased out, and new ones take precedence. A forward-looking economic development strategy must be supported by a data-informed talent strategy.

One way to make this alignment tangible is through a sector skills compact — a collaborative framework in which employers, industry bodies, and training providers, including Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), jointly design the programmes and curricula needed in a specific sector. This builds naturally on Singapore's longstanding social compact and extends its Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs) — sector-specific roadmaps for developing globally competitive business ecosystems and deepening human capital — into fully fledged human capital plans. When employers and training providers work together from the start, training pathways can be mapped directly to emerging industry needs, making them faster to implement and more relevant.

Countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Japan have long used sector-based skills councils or industry-led training compacts to align education with employer needs. These models have been effective in sectors like manufacturing, health care, and the trades, though results in rapidly evolving industries have been more mixed. Singapore could pilot these compacts in priority industries — such as advanced manufacturing, green energy, and financial services — where global competition for talent is intensifying.

For such a model to succeed, consistent competency standards must be established and verified through publicly funded assessments. These provide quality assurance and build trust: reassuring employers and employees alike that credentials genuinely reflect capability, that training investments yield measurable returns, and that the labour market is structured to reward skill development. Without this foundation, even the most ambitious workforce initiatives risk falling short.

Employers also have a role to play beyond recruitment. By identifying emerging skill gaps early and defining internal advancement pathways, they can contribute to a sustainable talent pipeline that aligns national economic priorities with individual career mobility.

Education institutions, in turn, must adapt curricula to reflect sector-specific needs, while also equipping students with transferable skills to navigate change. When economic, talent, and education strategies work in concert — anchored by sector skills compacts and underpinned by trusted standards — Singapore can position itself to lead in both competitiveness and workforce resilience.

Conclusion

The portent of AI disruption and the changing demands of a dynamic labour market elevate lifelong learning from social benefit to national imperative. As technology transforms the workplace and alters the nature of expertise, the value of human capital lies not in static knowledge but in the capacity to grow and evolve. We need systems that allow people to refine their skills, pivot to new roles, and contribute at higher levels over time. This transformation will demand coordinated investment across education, the private sector, and public institutions. It cannot be left to workers or employers alone: government plays a crucial role in setting standards, guiding transitions, and ensuring that opportunity is broadly accessible.

A clear next step is to anchor this alignment through Sector Skills Compacts — collaborative frameworks that bring employers, industry bodies, and training providers together to co-design the learning pathways each sector needs. Such compacts would extend Singapore's Industry Transformation Maps into comprehensive human capital roadmaps, ensuring that workforce development keeps pace with economic priorities. Consistent competency standards, verified through publicly funded assessments, will provide further assurance that the labour market is functioning well and rewards investment in skills development. In doing so, Singapore can ensure that economic mobility and national competitiveness continue to live up to the promise set in the nation's founding.