Equipping populations to thrive in the transformed economy of the future is the space race of the 21st century. What can we learn from Asian and Middle Eastern economies?
It was Satya Nadella who first imagined a new source of competitive advantage for Microsoft in the 21st century. As the tech giant’s chief executive since 2014, he has led a cultural shift from a “know-it-all” orientation to a “learn-it-all” mindset. Its significance is now recognized widely. If the 20th century created the knowledge economy, the 21st century’s accelerated technological step-changes will rely on learning as the most valuable commodity on which nations, companies and community livelihoods are built. Hybrid and remote working have made global workforces more accessible, heightening the competitive skills race and putting a premium on skilled regions and workforce talent. As a result, we have seen major shifts in the way national governments in Asia and the Middle East are identifying, prioritizing and revisiting their stances on fostering lifelong learning and skills development. What can their approaches teach us?
Great opportunities
For educational reformists, this is a time of great anticipation. Nearly half of workers globally (46%) do not believe their qualifications are relevant to their role, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025. Global employers report that up to 40% of core skills in their organizations are being disrupted or set to change drastically by 2030. As major disruptions unfold in the fields of AI and technology, digital skill requirements are changing rapidly, causing governments and organizations globally to take stock. Making skill development more scalable, more focused on relevant future capabilities, quicker to evolve, and more accessible has become a key focus for government ministries and corporate boardrooms alike. The demand this creates means that education and upskilling are expected to add more than $8.8 trillion to global GDP by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum.
Particularly in Asia, from the Middle East to the Pacific Rim, governments, employers and individuals are taking proactive and ambitious approaches to developing highly-skilled national talent. PwC reports that Middle Eastern countries are much more ready to embrace AI and digital capabilities than their global counterparts, seeing AI as an asset rather than a risk. This orientation alone could affect the progress of nations. Equally, in many parts of Asia, upskilling is a personal quest and a cultural driver: in a recent SME Horizon survey, 77% of Southeast Asian professionals said that they intended to upskill themselves in the coming year.
Given the region’s rapid growth and development – and demographic and geopolitical shifts – governments have had to think ahead to ensure their economies continue to thrive. The benefits of skilled talent include economic growth, reductions in labor market inefficiencies, and attracting foreign direct investment. As a result, the growth rate for executive education is higher in Asia than in other global regions.
In the Middle East, many national vision statements, such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and Qatar’s National Vision 2030, have explicit, funded pillars focused on human capital development. New models of skills delivery are emerging. In Saudi Arabia’s megaprojects, such as Neom, funders have created intentional, novel educational ecosystems, which are fully embedded in unique economies and reflect their specific skills needs, such as sustainability.
Similar examples abound across Southeast Asia. In Singapore, for example, the government has assessed that the core skills needed in key job classes will have changed by 50% by the end of 2025. It has developed a proactive approach to providing the upskilling incentives and learning provision required to keep the workforce competitive and to drive Singapore’s development as an AI hub. Skills Future Singapore subsidizes ongoing lifelong learning at the employer, individual and provider level, ensuring that the workforce is primed for future needs. Some 20,000 employers per year take part in sponsoring workforce development, and all Singaporeans aged 40 or more receive a SG$4,000 grant to pursue upskilling towards gainful employment outcomes.
Singapore also illustrates the important role that governments should play in ensuring that learning provision meets demanding quality standards. The government cultivates a future-focused set of providers to enhance local provision. As a result, Singapore comes top of many rankings in the diffusion of future-critical skills: it has been ranked number one in the world for AI skills diffusion, in LinkedIn’s Future of Work Report.
Radical adaptivity: employers’ new requirements
What is remarkable is that these bold government initiatives are being shaped in a world where the types of skills required by employers are changing dramatically. The World Economic Forum’s analysis shows that while technological literacy and technical understanding are important, analytical thinking remains the most in-demand skill for employers – while there is a new orientation towards greater interpersonal and psychological capabilities, including resilience, flexibility, self-awareness, collaboration and empathy. Work is progressing across the corporate world on building AI-related capabilities into roles and capability frameworks. The significance of this shift lies not only in the new capabilities that employers require, but in the fundamental idea that knowledge is ever-changing. Today, the core behavior that organizations need their people to aspire to is radical adaptivity.
The need for constant learning has given rise to a more ‘skills-based’ orientation in organizations, with the promise of enabling a modular, flexible, recombinant approach to configuring jobs, needs, and ultimately, the labor force. Jobs may no longer be static configurations of fixed capabilities, but ever-evolving combinations of skills that require constant learning. People may no longer be lifetime specialists in one niche, but recombine their skills to apply their work in many different ways towards different projects and emerging needs. Workforce planning instead becomes a way of considering various configurations of skills, rather than fixed and more static higher qualifications.
This world requires a different approach from the educational and organizational models that were prominent for much of the 20th century, which were based on early specialization and an intensive (but temporary) period of higher education. As average life expectancies extend, giving rise to longer careers, a more varied pathway of lifelong learning is emerging. The organizations that can adapt, recombine and learn fastest will be at a distinct advantage.
This makes rapid continuous skilling at a national and organizational level the 21st century’s space race. As thriving service industries become the center of the knowledge economy, governments globally are preparing for the transition to a skills-led economy in a hybrid human-AI era.
The implications for leadership development
In our work with partners globally, Duke CE is witnessing and supporting some of the most significant government and corporate investments to anticipate, build and develop future skills for the next-generation workforce across Asia and the Middle East. It is a rapidly-changing landscape, but some key implications for leadership development are emerging clearly.
1. Investment in the right future skills requires an ecosystemic approach
Traditional education systems must adapt rapidly to future demands. Employers are realizing that upskilling is a constant pursuit and, in many fast-moving sectors, are increasing annual investment in training and development. Governments have a role to play in incentivizing and facilitating the right engagement between employers, individuals and learning providers, and in leveling-up the quality of learning provision through engagement with global and local providers. Governments and employers have mutual interest in avoiding the economic and social impacts of mass downsizing: the better option is to grip the challenge of more rapid and systematic human capital development.
2. Continuously evolving the policy and practice framework for skills development is essential for both governments and employers
Gone are the days of static capability frameworks. Everyone from policymakers to corporate learning and development executives are looking for what’s next. The emphasis needs to be on building a more agile and ever-evolving set of skills, developing employees with more fungible and multi-deployable capabilities – rather than trying to define the skills minutiae of every stable job role in a company and developing individuals for permanent specialisms. Employers should develop flexible skills taxonomies that can be adapted for a variety of roles and recombined to meet emergent needs.
3. Leaders everywhere can learn from Asian and Middle Eastern examples
Some of this region’s inherent challenges, whether due to natural endowments, aging workforces, geopolitical positioning or competition, have meant that countries and companies have had to adopt innovative approaches to ensure they are well-positioned for the future and mitigating inherent risks. Singapore’s multifaceted approach makes it a notable success, which other countries can learn from. Equally, the way in which Middle Eastern countries have developed their own clear capability and skills visions, driving investment and public-private partnerships, demonstrates the critical orchestration role that governments and policy-makers can play to align effort.
4. This new era requires rethinking traditional organizational hierarchies
Digital natives and technical specialists are already bringing disruption to the agendas of traditional leadership teams. The fluidity brought by more emergent, agile, skills- based teaming is redefining the future of work. Leaders need to shape their organizations to facilitate, not inhibit, this trend. Again, examples from Asia are instructive. Many companies have evolved more agile models: several Asian banking behemoths, for example, have established intrapreneurial, non-hierarchical ventures arms within their own structures, piloting AI applications on an ambitious scale by using recombinant teams and leveraging diverse skills in flatter organizational structures. This allows faster, more skillful, and therefore higher quality product development.
5. Reskilling will become the new restructuring
The endless corporate restructurings that defined previous eras look more and more cumbersome, inefficient and perilously disruptive for organizations, societies and individuals. Reskilling can offer an end to the costs and negative impacts of restructuring: it can ensure a truly adaptable and future-proofed organization that does not require years to change course. We predict looser organizational constructs, ecosystemic workforces, and less reliance on the traditional employment contract, as organizations seek new solutions to create the capability clusters they need for quickly changing needs. Learning will necessarily need to become integrated in the flow of work much more seamlessly to ensure teams are adapting constantly to new tools and applying new trials. Year-long pilots can now, with enhanced data and modeling capabilities, be conducted in just days, generating rapid feedback; historic command-and-control structures will become less important than rapidly-morphing capability clusters with short-term deliverables, which then shape-shift and re-form to meet other needs. Building high-performing teams rapidly again and again will become a sought-after leadership capability, with interpersonal effectiveness in teaming at pace in high demand.
The great skills race
The great skills race will define competitive advantage for nations and companies in the coming decades. This emergent world will favor leaders who can lean effortlessly into the enhanced demand for interpersonal skills, combined with an adept sense of how to leverage and integrate AI capabilities. There will be a premium for leaders who can seamlessly bring together complementary skills, creating psychological safety in teams and delivering high performance. More collaborative, consensus-based approaches will take precedence over internal competition and ossified silo empires: organizations that thrive will be well-networked, able to draw on a wide variety of capabilities to quickly solve problems.
This is a profoundly different way of thinking and leading. Leaders at all levels need to adapt, and fast – because this is an era that will privilege the best learners. The race is already underway. It’s time to pick up the pace.
Dr Beth Ahlering is regional managing director, strategic projects and Asia/Middle East, at Duke Corporate Education
