IFSI Seminar # 3 Recap: Skills and the future of work

A brief recap of July´s Seminar 3 on the Future of Work and AI.  The highly diverse backgrounds and experiences of the presenters contributed to a very rich, transdisciplinary and complementary discussion, examining the problem of what skills to teach in the age of AI from various perspectives.

In a focused 60 minute dialog, there is not enough time to truly go deep, but this packed session was able to capture some very important signals and add them to the ongoing debate across higher education institutions worldwide.  It was great to see some consensus around the need for human agency and human centred skill development, in the context of an agentic-driven workforce and AI augemented learning environments, and what that means for human collaboration and learning.

Carles Bruguera and Gonzalo Ignacio Cubillos Ríos laid a great foundation for the discussion with their recent Labour Market report on AI and curricular Transformation. Please stay tuned to UPAL´s Open Repository where we will publish the open access version soon.

Follwoing, Mairead Pratschke engaged with OCED´s recent report and framing Skills Intelligence as a design problem at many different levels, while presenting her Agentic Community of Inquiry model of learning which will be published soon.

It was great to see Juan Freire´s framing around human agency and a move toward generalists, while also sharing his vision of University Zero, which likewise has the potential to inspire UOC’s current Agentic AI-driven organizational transformations.

It was likewise enriching to hear from Johanes Schleiss on the Npuls story regarding agile curriculum reform in response to labour market transformations—impressive system-level work!

A special thanks to Glenda Quintini and Patricia Navarro-Palau from the OECD for their continued support of IFSI´s webinar series throughout 2026.