SINGAPORE – In a world and economy increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, meta-skills – or higher-order abilities that help individuals learn, adapt and navigate complex environments – are the key to maximising one’s potential in the workplace.
Examples of meta-skills include creativity, resilience and complex problem-solving skills.
While AI tools can help to retrieve information, how one uses that information and applies creativity and critical thinking will be key.
“The skill is really going to be in combining our domain expertise – such as our work experience, what we learnt in school or things we are passionate about – and the ability to use AI to build creative solutions,” said Dr Ayesha Khanna, co-founder of artificial intelligence solutions firm and incubator ADDO Ai.
The idea of meta-skills first gained mainstream attention when US author and design thinker Marty Neumeier published a book – Metaskills: Five Talents For The Robotic Age – in 2012 about such higher-order abilities.
The term gained prominence again around September 2025 when Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis argued then that the most crucial ability for the next generation will be learning how to learn.
Dr Khanna, who served as a member of the Ministry of Education’s steering committee in 2014 which developed SkillsFuture, said that Singapore had the foresight to invest in skills upgrading and lifelong learning.
“In an era in which we’re entering with AI, it’s increasingly not just about academic qualifications that end at a certain point in your career, but skills that you need to constantly upgrade as you adapt to changing market conditions. That can be quite exciting,” said Dr Khanna.
Q: AI commentators have said the most critical meta-skill for the future, amid rapid AI advancements, is “learning how to learn”. What does that look like for students?
A: My generation was very much about memorisation and exam drills, and there were problems with that.
One problem was that the learning model was of content ingestion and then regurgitating content. That was a big problem because we are unable to transfer what we have learnt into a way of thinking.
So if I learnt physics and I already know the answers, then I have not learnt how a physicist thinks.
A physicist thinks by having an ambiguous problem and trying to solve it, tinkering and experimenting, and failing and getting up again.
