The landscape of continuing skills development (CSD) is facing profound transformation, driven by interconnected global forces including climate change, demographic shifts, evolving labour markets and the accelerating influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Cedefop’s foresight study explores these dynamics, concluding that AI stands out as the most influential and yet unpredictable force shaping CSD by 2040.
Based on extensive engagement with policymakers, social partners, civil society organisations and education, training and career guidance providers across EU Member States, the study develops four AI-powered scenarios. These are not predictions, but exploratory tools to identify opportunities, threats and urgent priorities for shaping a desired future for CSD. They span a wide range of possibilities:
Scenario A: A future of opportunities – An optimistic vision where AI enhances human potential, drives inclusive growth and creates purpose-driven careers.
Scenario B: Left alone to ride the tide – A society divided by AI shockwaves, where responsibility for skills shifts primarily to individuals, leading to skills-based polarisation.
Scenario C: Staying afloat – A future where AI is adopted slowly, avoiding major disruption but missing much of its economic and social potential.
Scenario D: AI unleashed – A dystopian future marked by large-scale job destruction, with AI deployed primarily for control and profit maximisation, undermining worker rights and societal cohesion.
Navigating the cross-cutting red flags
A key message emerging across all four scenarios is the urgent need for innovative, inclusive and adaptive approaches to CSD. The study identifies several "cross-cutting red flags" that policymakers must address to ensure that technology translates into inclusive, sustainable and equitable societal outcomes:
1. AI’s dual potential: AI can empower people, but unchecked deployment risks concentrating power and wealth, undermining democracy and social cohesion.
2. Workplace transformation challenges: AI can augment human work and enable higher-value roles, or accelerate replacement and job degradation.
3. Learning, guidance and counselling transformation: AI can personalise learning and guidance, but only if deployed ethically and with safeguards for human agency and well-being.
4.The individual responsibility gap: Growing expectations for individuals to manage their own skills development may empower some, while leaving others behind.
5. Changing employment landscape: New, often precarious forms of work may enable flexibility or increase insecurity, weaken collective bargaining and erode social protection.
6. Widening inequalities: Unequal capacity to adapt to technological change risks deepening disparities between people, places and organisations.
The call for a paradigm shift
To steer towards a future where benefits are broadly shared, the study argues that traditional models of continuing vocational education and training (CVET), centred mainly on institutional provision, are no longer sufficient. A fundamental shift is needed, recognising lifelong and life-wide learning as inseparable.
Policies must strategically leverage all learning contexts — institutional, self-directed and workplace — through collaborative governance involving policymakers, social partners, civil society and education, training and career guidance providers. Such collaboration is essential for harnessing AI’s potential to enhance learning, careers and lives.
The scenarios demonstrate that strategic choices made today will shape whether Europe builds a future-ready workforce capable of thriving in an AI-driven world.
