Originally written in Traditional Chinese: 真正保值的，不是你會什麼，是你學得會
On September 29, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report estimating that roughly 11 million US workers might need to shift occupations by 2035.
That is the headline number. The one I keep coming back to is smaller and closer to home: more than 70 percent of workers could require some level of reinvention, whether or not they change jobs.
Put simply, the title on your business card may stay the same. The work behind it will not.
I see this in my own job as a school leader, most clearly in meeting minutes. Minutes used to record one thing: the final decision. With AI, they can still capture the decision, but also the path of the discussion and what each person cared about most. It is not just faster or better. It opens possibilities that simply did not exist before. The old minutes told you what we decided. The new ones can also tell you how we got there, and what mattered to each of us.
McKinsey also tracked which skills employers are asking for in job postings. Since 2022, demand for AI fluency has grown 11 times. Adaptability, five times. Willingness to learn, resilience and curiosity have roughly tripled. None of these is a degree or a subject. McKinsey describes them as the skills that help workers continuously adapt to evolving technologies.
The lasting asset is not what you know. It is how well you learn the next thing.
This is not a reason to panic. The 11 million are workers who may need to change occupations, not people who will lose work. McKinsey estimates only about 3 percent of those transitions would require a pay cut, and that the US economy could create more jobs over the next decade than automation replaces. These are US figures, and other countries may look different.
What it does give us is a clear practice list. Two small things to try this week:
- Write down the ten tasks you do every week and mark the ones AI can already help with. Those are the lines to redesign first.
- Learn something new alongside a young person in your life. Break it into three small pieces and practice one at a time. When you get stuck, try twice on your own before asking AI.
Willingness to learn is hard to teach by talking about it. Young people learn it by watching adults be comfortable as beginners.
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