Stop Predicting the Future. Start Preparing for It.

A couple of weeks ago, I joined educators, policymakers and business leaders in Valletta for the Future Talent Forum Malta, organised by the Future Talent Council in partnership with Malta’s National Skills Council.

Over two days, we explored what we can do today to help people navigate a rapidly changing world of work. It was a great reminder that we have more agency over the future than we often acknowledge, and that labour-market data can play an important role in turning that agency into action.

What sort of future is worth designing?

Many of the conversations throughout the forum came back to a similar underlying question: what kind of future do we want to create? 

Too much of the AI conversation treats the future as something to predict: Will AI take our jobs? Which occupations will disappear? What will happen to my region? It’s not that these questions aren’t important, they are, but the problem with them is that they imply the future is something happening to us rather than something we have some agency in shaping. Better questions create room for action: How is work changing? How do we build better pathways? How do we help our regions adapt?

The future is shaped by the questions we ask today. Technology presents possibilities, but people decide whether and how to use these possibilities. I was encouraged to hear this throughout the forum—from futurist Monika Bielskyte’s insights on the active role employers play in automation choices, to Hilton’s HR director on the influence we have as consumers, to education leader John Fischetti’s call to keep our eyes on our North Star as a society: human flourishing. It was also important to reflect on the role of work and our identity as we shape these decisions.

Being clear about the future we want gives us a direction to aim for when navigating change.

Use data to prepare for the future

This is where the value of data comes in: not to predict the future, but to help prepare for it. Forecasts have their place, but decisions about education, workforce strategy and economic policy are too important to rely on forecasts alone, and waiting for certainty isn’t an option either.

If having clarity about the future we want gives us a direction to aim for, then data gives us the signals we need to navigate towards it. That might mean looking beyond whether demand for an occupation is rising or falling to understand what is happening inside the job. Or looking beyond whether a qualification leads to a particular occupation to understand the skills that allow people to move between careers. This requires looking beneath headline predictions, triangulating sources rather than relying on one, benchmarking to understand the wider context, being transparent about our assumptions, and continuing to monitor change.

The goal isn't to predict the future perfectly. It's to know enough about what is changing to make better decisions today—and to know when those decisions need to change.  The more granular our view of change, the more useful our decisions can become.

Build the future together

But data alone isn’t enough.

Preparing for the future isn't something any of us can do alone. Educators understand learners and pathways. Businesses see how work and skills are changing. Policymakers can create the conditions for people and economies to adapt. Bringing those perspectives together is how insight turns into action—and communities like the Future Talent Council are powerful precisely because they create space for that exchange.

That collaboration also needs to happen where change actually takes place. We need to bring education, business and government together at the national level, but also within sectors, regions and local communities.

Malta offered a tangible example of what this can look like. Its National Skills Council is bringing local stakeholders together to think about how Malta can prepare for change, with people at the heart of the conversation. The Council is now taking this further through its work on labour-market monitoring—building the intelligence needed to understand how the Maltese labour market is changing and where action may be needed.

I left Malta encouraged by how much of the conversation focused not just on what might happen, but what we can do about it.

We may not have a crystal ball, but that doesn’t mean we are lost. We can ask better questions, build better intelligence, and bring the right people together to work on the future we want to design. We have more agency than we sometimes acknowledge and that means there is work we can—and should—start doing now.