Future-Proofing Work-Skills and Agility in the 2030 Workplace

My talk at Regional Scrum Gathering Dubai 2025.
As we approach 2030, the world of work is evolving at an unprecedented pace, bringing both challenges and opportunities for organizations worldwide. Recent reports highlight that every employee will need to develop three additional skills to stay effective in their roles over the next decade. Agile teams already recognize the power of cross-functionality, but this adaptability is becoming essential for everyone.

The pandemic accelerated the shift to remote and hybrid workby a decade, and this new flexibility is here to stay, helping companies retain talent and reduce their carbon footprint. Meanwhile, the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence is rendering jobs focused on a single, repetitive task increasingly obsolete.

So, how can both organizations and workers navigate this complexity and stay relevant in the future?

In this session, we tackle this pressing question by exploring the critical role of skill development in fostering agility, employee retention, and equitable opportunities. Research shows that companies that prioritize skill-building retain employees twice as
long.
We dive into practical strategies for cultivating a learning-driven culture, empowering individuals and teams with the mindset, skills, and practices needed to thrive in an ever-changing world—no matter the size of the organization.

1. Future-Proofing
Work
Skills and Agility in the 2030 Workplace

Giuseppe De Simone
Consultant, Coach and Trainer

3. Happy to be here ??????
linkedin.com/in/giuseppedesimone
@giusdesimone
[email protected]

4. Learning is critical to
succeed
●Everyone needs to learn 3 new skills by 2030

●Average shelf life of skills is 5 years

●Skill development doubles employee
retention
○Employee turnover costs billions every
year

●Learning is the top motivator for employees

5. 5th Principle of Agile
Manifesto
Build projects around motivated individuals.

Give them the environment and support they
need, and trust them to get the job done.

6. Why more skills?
Project resourcing: the challenges of allocating people to work
●Finding people with the competences which fit that specific project
●Finding people who are available to work on that project
●Finding people who are willing to work on that specific project
Solution: Small multi-disciplinary
teams of multi-skilled individuals

7. Which skills?

8. In-demand skills
On a scale of 1-5, how hard is to find people
with the right combinations of skills?
2023 Skills in the New World of Work report

9. Both core today and expected to grow:
●Analytical Thinking
●Resilience, flexibility and agility
●Leadership and social influence
●Motivation and self-awareness
●Creative Thinking
●Systems Thinking
●Curiosity and lifelong learning
Core Skills in 2030

10. Autonomy and hybrid work
Three fundamental team competences to learn for autonomy:

●Ability to navigate conflicts

●Collective decision-making processes

●Ability to give each other constructive feedback

11. Agility in the era of AI
Practices and skills used for decades will
become EXTREME:
●Customer collaboration
●Frequent releases
●Experimentation and validated learning
●Refactoring

But also:
●Attitude to fail fast
●Aware ignorance (Humility)
●Improvisation (Flexibility)
●Serendipity (Intelligent luck)
●Social perceptiveness

12. In other words…
The key to winning in the era of AI is
not to try to compete with machines,
but to become more human, to be a
better listener, collaborator and to
support other humans as they work
to identify and pursue their own
intentions and ambitions.

13. How to get hired in 2030
“If you take two people, one of them a learn-it-all and the other one a
know-it-all, the learn-it-all will always trump the know-it-all in the long run”
1.Broaden your horizons - even
with counterintuitive skills

2.Deepen your knowledge

14. A role model

15. If your job is about
executing ONE
specific task, it is
already dead: it just
hasn’t stopped
breathing yet!
Giuseppe De Simone

16. Challenges with learning
…and countermeasures

17. Our experience
What we have learned from:
●Educating and coaching 5 000+ teams
●Running 2 000+ classes
●20+ coaches and trainers
●15+ years
●30+ countries

18. Challenge #1
●Many education programs are
ineffective

●Wasted time and money investment

●Passive consumption

●Don't address concrete job
challenges
“The Great Training Robbery”
Michael Beer

19. Accelerated
learning
Effective approaches for learning:
●Flipped responsibility
●Experiential learning
●Reflection and conceptualization
●Building relationships

20. Challenge #2
●A lot of push from the top

●Demanding compliance does not
motivate

●Missed opportunity to care for
people as human beings

●Backward thinking
Individuals have different needs and
preferences

21. Co-creation
Different learning for different people:
●Shared understanding of what, why
and how
●Leveraging individual motivation to
learn
●Respectful, not prescriptive

22. Challenge #3
●Humans tend to significantly reduce
memory of new knowledge in a matter
of days

●Various affecting factors:
○Meaningfulness of the learned
material
○The way it is represented
○Physiological factors (e.g. stress
or sleep)
Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

23. The neuroscience of retention

3 stages of knowledge retention
●Encoding
●Storage
●Retrieval
3 brain areas mainly involved
●Hippocampus
●Neocortex
●Amygdala


Neocortex
Hippocampus
Amygdala

24. Blended learning
●Reinforce the learning regularly

●Connect it to something learners already
know

●Make it relevant for the job

●Deliver it in multiple ways
○E-learning
○Workshops
○Assignments
○Group reflections
○Mentoring/coaching

●Make it more fun and interactive
Time
Retention

26. 3 challenges to effective learning
1.Ineffective education programs

2.Individuals have different needs

3.Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
Summarizing
3 countermeasures
1.Accelerated learning

2.Co-creation

3.Blended learning

27. Endless opportunities
●E-learning creation
●Real-time tutors
●Role-play scenarios
●Coaching agents
●Planning agents
●Pattern analysis
●Product Management simulators
●Integration with wearable devices
●……
What about AI?
…and risks
●Focus on tools and processes
●Cargo cult
●Excuse to cut jobs
●Abdicating critical thinking skills
●De-humanizing workplaces even more
●……

28. What did YOU learn?
One word

29. How will YOU take
action TODAY to
future-proof your
skills and stay
relevant in 2030?

30. Contact:
[email protected]
Thank you!