# Skills Outlook: The Future of Jobs Report 2023

**Publisher:** World Economic Forum  
**Published:** n/a  
**Category:** Global institutions & policy  
**Type:** Report  
**Access:** Free  
**Official source:** https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/in-full/4-skills-outlook  
**Canonical:** https://tourismintel.ai/reports/4-skills-outlook-the-future-of-jobs-report-2023

## At a glance
- Report analyzes skills currently needed for work and whether businesses expect them to increase or decrease in importance over five years.
- World Economic Forum's Global Skills Taxonomy classifies and evaluates workforce competencies to enable consistent measurement across industries and regions.
- Analysis examines the gap between currently required skills and future skills demand as perceived by organisations worldwide.

## What the report covers
This chapter of the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023 presents findings from the Future of Jobs Survey regarding workforce skills, classified using the Global Skills Taxonomy. It analyses skills currently required in employment and business expectations for skill importance over the next five years. The report details surveyed companies' reskilling and upskilling investment priorities for 2023–2027, providing intelligence on how organisations globally plan to address emerging skills gaps and develop their workforces.

## Key findings
The report examines current skill requirements across organisations globally and measures whether businesses anticipate these skills increasing or decreasing in importance over a five-year horizon. This forward-looking assessment enables stakeholders including governments, educational institutions and employers to understand evolving labour market demands and prepare workforce development strategies accordingly. The analysis captures both observed skill needs and forecasted changes in skill importance.

Surveyed companies provided detailed data on the composition and prioritisation of their reskilling and upskilling strategies for the 2023–2027 period. This reveals how organisations plan to invest in employee development and capability-building to address identified skills gaps. The report captures variation in investment priorities across sectors and regions, demonstrating that different industries and geographies pursue distinct approaches to workforce capability development based on their specific sectoral and local labour market conditions.

The World Economic Forum's Global Skills Taxonomy provides a standardised classification framework enabling consistent measurement of skills demand and supply across diverse economic sectors, industries and geographies. This taxonomy-based approach facilitates comparable assessment of skills requirements across organisational types and regions, supporting evidence-based policy development and strategic workforce planning. The standardised framework enables stakeholders to identify skills that are increasing or decreasing in importance across different labour markets and sectors.

## Why it matters
**DMOs & destinations** — Understanding future skills demand helps DMOs and tourism boards identify workforce gaps and design targeted training programmes. This intelligence supports destination competitiveness by ensuring tourism and hospitality workforce readiness for emerging technology, service standards and customer expectations. Skills outlook data enables strategic workforce investment aligned with visitor economy growth.

**Hotels & hospitality** — Hotels and hospitality groups use skills outlook data to align talent acquisition and development strategies with market evolution. Knowing which capabilities will increase in importance enables prioritised investment in employee reskilling and upskilling, reducing recruitment costs and improving operational resilience. This intelligence supports competitive positioning through workforce capability development.

**Travel tech & distribution** — Travel-tech firms benefit from understanding how hospitality and travel sectors are prioritising reskilling in digital, data and technology capabilities. This intelligence informs product development, customer support requirements and talent acquisition strategies for technology vendors serving the travel industry. Understanding buyer-side skills priorities helps vendors align solutions with market demand.

## Methodology and limits
This chapter presents results from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Survey, which gathered data from companies on skills priorities and workforce planning for 2023–2027. The report uses the Global Skills Taxonomy to standardise classification of competencies. The publicly available source material does not specify sample size, survey methodology, response rate, confidence intervals or exact data collection period. This brief is based on the publicly available chapter summary only; the full report may contain additional methodological detail, statistical analysis and granular data not reproduced in the accessible text.

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© World Economic Forum for the original report. This brief is an original editorial summary by TourismIntel (https://tourismintel.ai). Read the original: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/in-full/4-skills-outlook