Join Us in Accelerating the Skills First Movement
The Center for a Skills First Future helps employers put skills at the center of hiring and advancement—unlocking talent, fueling growth, and creating opportunity. We provide the tools, guidance, and shared language to make skills-first practices the standard.
Skills Action Planner
Skills Action Planner
Evaluate your organization’s progress in adopting a skills-first approach. Our interactive tool helps you identify strengths, gaps, and actionable steps to implement a skills-based approach effectively.
Resource Library
Resource Library
Access research, tools, and employer examples to implement and sustain skills-first talent strategies across the employee lifecycle.
Skills First Credential
Skills First Credential
Demonstrate expertise in skills-based workforce strategies. Equip yourself with the tools to drive impact across hiring, development, and retention.
Vendor Database
Vendor Database
Find vetted solutions and community support for skills-first implementations—from sourcing and assessment to upskilling and mobility.
Hear from Taylor Dunne, San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation
Taylor Dunne of the San Diego Regional EDC shares how skills-first hiring gains real traction—by starting from within. In this spotlight, she emphasizes the power of aligning HR and technical teams, identifying internal champions, and rethinking how organizations recognize and value skills beyond traditional proxies.
Hear From Rose Sikder, OKTA
Rose Sikder, of OKTA explains how a skills-first approach unlocks potential in today’s workforce. In this inspiring message, she shares how leading with skills—not assumptions—helps businesses find untapped talent, support upward mobility, and future-proof their teams.
Hear from Steven Flenory, WB Games
Steven Flenory of WB Games shares why skills-first hiring isn’t just the future—it’s the now. In this short spotlight, he highlights how prioritizing skills over outdated proxies helps employers tap into overlooked talent, improve retention, and build stronger teams.
Hear from Josh Tarr of Workday
Josh Tarr of Workday shares how their internal gig program sparked a skills-first transformation. By focusing on real skills over résumés, Workday saw faster hiring, better candidate experiences, and stronger acceptance rates. His advice? Start small, use your data, and make skills a company-wide priority—not just an HR project.
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19x
Removing degree requirements unlocks 19x more candidates (JFF, 2023)
30%
Skills-first hiring reduces cost-per-hire by 30% (SHRM, 2023)
42%
Companies adopting skills- first decrease turnover by 42% (McKinsey, 2023)
Featured Resource
Overview
Created in 2021, AI 2027 is a research-based scenario and forecasting initiative developed by the AI Futures Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit research organization focused on understanding the likely trajectories and societal implications of advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Released in 2025, AI 2027 presents a detailed, time-sequenced scenario that explores how increasingly capable AI systems could evolve through 2027, including pathways that may lead toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The project is designed as a foresight tool to support strategic planning, public discourse, and policy discussions about the opportunities and risks associated with rapid AI advancement.
Rather than offering a single prediction, AI 2027 provides structured narrative scenarios grounded in trend analysis, expert elicitation, and forecasting methods. The initiative seeks to make complex AI futures more tangible for policymakers, researchers, educators, and the broader public by illustrating plausible development pathways, governance challenges, economic impacts, and social consequences.
The AI 2027 initiative aims to:
- Explore plausible near-term futures for advanced AI development using structured forecasting and scenario planning methods.
- Illuminate potential societal, economic, and governance implications of rapid AI capability growth.
- Encourage informed dialogue about AI oversight, transparency, and public-interest governance.
- Provide an accessible reference point for organizations engaging in strategic planning around AI-related disruption.
Key Features include:
- Scenario-Based Forecasting
- AI 2027 presents a detailed, chronological scenario describing potential milestones in AI capability development, deployment, and institutional response between 2025 and 2027.
- Scenario integrates technical AI research trends, compute infrastructure projections, investment patterns, and governance dynamics.
- Dual-Pathway Futures
- Project explores alternative outcome pathways, including futures characterized by accelerated AI integration and others shaped by policy interventions, coordination efforts, or risk-mitigation strategies.
- Public-Interest Orientation
- Initiative emphasizes transparency and broad accessibility.
- Materials are published openly online.
- Materials are intended to support public-interest research, policy engagement, and educational use.
The AI 2027 effort is led by a small core team of researchers and forecasters with expertise in artificial intelligence governance, technical AI capability forecasting, scenario design, risk analysis, and public-interest technology policy. Team members bring prior experience from front-line AI research organizations, AI policy institutes, forecasting research programs, and technology ethics initiatives. The group combines quantitative forecasting methods, scenario planning techniques, and cross-disciplinary analysis to construct detailed, time-sequenced projections of AI development and societal impact. External collaborators contribute specialized knowledge in AI infrastructure trends, economic modeling, and narrative scenario construction, strengthening both the technical grounding and accessibility of the work.
Examples of work:
- AI 2027. Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean. April 3, 2025.
- Compute Forecast. Romeo Dean. April 3, 2025.
- Timelines Forecast. Nikola Jurkovic, Eli Lifland. April 3, 2025.
- Takeoff Forecast. Daniel Kokotajlo, Eli Lifland. April 3, 2025.
- AI Goals Forecast. Daniel Kokotajlo. April 3, 2025.
- Security Forecast. Romeo Dean. April 3, 2025.
- 4 Ways to Advance Transparency in Frontier AI Development. Dean Ball & Daniel Kokotajlo. Time, October 15, 2024.
- Tabletop Exercise, facilitated for 200+ people, including experts and policymakers.
Partners / Funders
- Sponsoring Organization
- AI 2027 is produced by the AI Futures Project, a U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization. The organization’s work is supported primarily through philanthropic donations and research grants, rather than corporate or government sponsorship.
- Collaborating Organizations
- Technical infrastructure and design support for the AI 2027 web platform has been provided through collaboration with external nonprofit technology and research partners. Independent forecasting collaborators contributed to probability estimates and trend analysis components within the scenario.
- Funding Model
- Publicly available information indicates that the AI Futures Project relies on individual donors and charitable giving platforms to support its research activities.
Relevance to the Learn & Work Ecosystem
AI 2027 provides a structured exploration of how rapid advances in AI may reshape workforce demand, automation patterns, skill requirements, organizational structures, and institutional governance. As such, it offers a foresight resource for educators, workforce planners, credential designers, employers, and policymakers preparing for AI-driven disruption across learning and labor systems.
Resources
AI Futures Project. (n.d.). About the AI Futures Project. AI Futures Project. https://ai-futures.org/about
AI Futures Project. (n.d.). AI Futures Project. https://ai-futures.org/
AI 2027. (n.d.). AI 2027: Forecasting the trajectory of advanced artificial intelligence. https://ai-2027.com/
Founding Investors
Founding Partners
