UAE: Skills Should Be Priority As Shelf Life Of Jobs Increasingly Reduce, Say Experts

A top HR leader said that jobs are increasingly getting a shorter shelf life and that people should turn their focus to skills instead . Mustafa Jaffar, Global Head of Talent for Careers and Sustainability at Standard Chartered, said that people should be encouraged to move away from having specific career paths (i.e, jobs), and instead think of skills that can adapt over time.

“Jobs keep changing , so the way to progress from one job to another is to start focusing on skills,” he explained to Khaleej Times after the panel session.“Jobs are getting an increasingly shorter shelf life; the job changes and a new job comes in,” he said, quoting a statistic by the World Economic Forum that nearly half of workers today will need to be re-skilled.

Jaffar also mentioned adjacencies, which means applying the same skill in multiple roles . He said that people can become“very powerful” that way because they can utilise their skills and use them in different jobs, adding,“skills set us free, and jobs hold us in”.

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The HR leader was speaking in a panel session to celebrate the launch of MISSION+ GCC, a Singapore-based product delivery firm, on Tuesday. Along with Jaffar, other HR leaders on the panel included the founder of People Analytics Connect, Karen Bouez, Chief People and Culture Officer of The Giving Movement, Sabahatt Habib, and Piotr Kurzepa, Head of the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship's Middle East office.

The skills Jaffar mentioned included empathy, curiosity, courage, resilience, adaptability, and decision-making.

The HR leader pointed out that while technical knowledge will remain important, it is human-centred skills that will determine long-term success.

Among the most critical are empathy, curiosity and courage, which help leaders connect, innovate and guide teams through uncertainty. Resilience and adaptability are equally vital for protecting wellbeing in a fast-changing world while sustaining productivity.

Decision-making is also key, since AI can provide information but cannot replace ethical judgement. Together these skills create the foundation for a workforce that is flexible, future-ready and able to thrive in multiple roles across industries.

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