The skills that actually matter now? They were never in a coding bootcamp
For about a decade, the advice handed down to school leavers was delivered with the confidence of someone who read a LinkedIn post and decided it was gospel: learn to code. Get into STEM. Know your way around a spreadsheet, a Python script, an algorithm, and preferably a few of them simultaneously. The arts? Grand as a hobby. The humanities? Best of luck with that.
Ireland has not been immune to this particular wisdom. We had a tech boom to sustain, foreign direct investment to attract, and a generation of school leavers to funnel into roles that the multinationals setting up shop in Dublin, Cork, and Galway were crying out for. It made a certain kind of sense at the time. It makes considerably less now.
A study published this month by GoTu, a large US recruitment agency, examined over 20 professional skills to find out which ones employers are actually prioritising in 2026, and which will matter most by 2030. The top skills? Resilience, flexibility and agility, all cited as must-haves by 67% of employers. Second was analytical thinking. Third was AI and Big Data. Creative thinking came fourth. Technological literacy (not programming but basic digital fluency) rounded out the top five.
This is a telling list. Look carefully and you’ll notice that the majority of the most in-demand skills by 2030 are not techy in the narrow sense: they’re human. They’re the kinds of capacities you develop by reading difficult books, arguing about ideas in a seminar room, writing essays under pressure, studying history and philosophy and literature, and by being asked to think rather than just to execute.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 comes to similar conclusions. Four out of the five fastest-growing skills it identifies for 2030 are distinctly human: creative thinking, resilience, curiosity, and leadership. McKinsey’s research, meanwhile, predicts that demand for social and emotional skills will grow by up to 26% in the US by 2030. It described these skills as ones “machines are a long way from mastering”.
Rise of the humans
We are, in other words, at a somewhat ironic juncture: the rise of AI is making human skills more valuable, not less. Skills like empathy, adaptability, the ability to sit with ambiguity and still reach a considered judgement. And the ability to lead, persuade, and understand people who don’t think the way you do. None of this comes from a bootcamp, in fact, much of it comes from the humanities.
This makes the news of Carlow College’s imminent closure all the more difficult to absorb. Founded in 1782, the college, Ireland’s second oldest third-level institution, announced last week that it won’t be taking in new students from this September and is beginning a two-year wind-down before its land and buildings transfer to South East Technological University (SETU). All its staff face phased redundancy and after current students complete their degrees the doors will close on 244 years of liberal arts education in the south east.
Carlow College offered undergrad and postgrad courses in arts and the humanities: philosophy, theology, psychology, social studies, English. The kind of education that, if the research is to be believed, is increasingly what the jobs market is quietly desperate for – even if it’s not explicit in a job advertisement.
Bear with me as I am a Carlovian but there is something particularly galling about the timing of all this. For years, institutions like Carlow College were implicitly if not explicitly regarded as the also-rans of the higher education system – you know, perfectly fine but not exactly future-proofed. Because the smart money was on tech. So we watched as STEM funding flowed and CAO points for engineering and computer science courses climbed.
And now, just as signs are pointing to the fact that analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, curiosity, and the ability to navigate uncertainty are among the most durable professional assets someone can have, we’re losing one of the few institutions that specialised in exactly that.
The GoTu study predicts that demand for AI and Big Data skills will grow 88% by 2030, which cannot be ignored, but it also points out that resilience and agility are projected to grow by 68%, creative thinking by the same margin, and straightforward tech literacy (no coding required) by 71%. I think it’s obvious that we’re looking at a hybrid future where the most effective workers are people who can think, adapt, communicate, and lead, and who also happen to be comfortable with digital tools. This isn’t an engineering graduate. Sure, it might well be an arts graduate who picked up a few technical skills along the way.
I’m not suggesting tech education is unimportant or that we should stop producing engineers and data scientists because they are obviously needed. But there’s a difference between valuing technical education and treating everything else as decorative.
Carlow College will be gone before anyone in a position of influence appears to have quite absorbed that lesson. It won’t be the last institution to pay the price for a government that worships blindly at the altar of US tech and pharma multinationals.
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