Five skills that will make you more promotable in 2025

Executive overview

70% of workplace skills will change in the next five years, meaning doubling down on current strengths is a poor strategy. Tim Duggan, author of Work Backwards, outlines five skills that are becoming critical — most shaped by AI's impact on work.

Pick one skill, not all five. One small action beats broad paralysis.

The promotable edge comes from human skills that AI cannot replicate: judgment, storytelling, collaboration, adaptability, and conflict management.

Skill 1: Judgment

• AI generates outputs; humans must decide if those outputs are accurate, appropriate, or worth using.
• Hallucinations are common — every AI-generated fact needs verification, especially in research and writing.
• No one has years of AI experience yet, so the skill gap is unusually small — catching up is still possible.
• Pre-mortems sharpen judgment: project forward to success or failure, identify conditions, then work backwards.
• Avoid "whether or not" decisions — always generate at least one alternative to force genuine comparison (from Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath).

Skill 2: Storytelling

• Job listings containing "storyteller" doubled in one year in the US, reaching ~70,000 roles.
• AI produces average, expected content — storytelling is how individuals and brands cut through.
• The test for a good story: can the listener retell it to the next person simply and clearly?
• Strip jargon, keep messages clear, aim for transferability.
• And But Therefore framework: And (set the world), But (introduce tension), Therefore (resolve with takeaway).

Skill 3: Collaborative intelligence

• Coined as "the missing middle" by Jim Wilson (Accenture) — the collaboration layer between humans and AI.
• Seeing AI as a threat limits the upside; seeing it as a partner unlocks compounding value.
• Use AI heavily for research — but verify every statistic, every claim, every cited figure.
• Know when not to use AI: uninterrupted writing or creative work benefits from staying offline.
• One practical shift: move to 50% voice input (e.g. Whisper) for emails and writing — faster and sounds more human than AI-drafted text.

Skill 4: Unlearning

• The pace of change means past knowledge and methods become liabilities if held too tightly.
• Confirmation bias makes unlearning hard — humans instinctively seek evidence that confirms existing views.
• Unlearning is an optimism practice: treat new tools and disruptions as opportunities, not threats.
• Ask consciously when encountering something new: am I resisting this only because it's unfamiliar?

Skill 5: Conflict management

• Workers spend roughly three hours per week dealing with conflict — it has real productivity costs.
• 60–90% of people are conflict avoiders; avoidance rarely resolves anything.
• As more work moves to screens and AI, human-to-human conflict skill becomes rarer and more valued.
• First step: identify your conflict style — avoider, seeker, or middle ground — before trying to change behaviour.
• The amygdala hijacks rational thinking in conflict; intellectual awareness of that response is the override mechanism.
• The most powerful word in conflict is "how" — it forces empathy and invites co-creation of a solution (e.g. "How can we resolve this together?").