It is commonly asserted that education is crucial for meeting the challenges concerning the futures of work. But education cannot overcome deficient economic policies causing declining job quality, mass unemployment and rising under-employment. Instead of pre-occupation with so-called 21st-century skills and micro-credentials, greater recognition needs to be given to what education does best. That is, helping people master bodies of conceptual knowledge as well as relationships between bodies of knowledge, nurturing learning dispositions and equipping people with skills and capacities that support disciplined creativity and adaptive capacity. These qualities enable people to handle the challenges of climate change, changing life courses, artificial intelligence and data-ification. Education can also support new configurations of expertise made possible by new technologies. While education cannot solve most problems concerning the futures of work, there can be no solution to these problems without quality, enduring institutions supporting education and occupational coherence in the labour market. © Ellu Saar and Péter Róbert 2025.
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