One number turns up in nearly every talk about preparing children for the economy of 2040: that 65 percent of children entering primary school today will work in job types that do not yet exist. It is usually credited to the World Economic Forum, and it has been repeated for a decade by ministers, consultants and edtech companies.
The attribution is shakier than the repetition suggests. The figure appeared in a 2016 WEF report as a widely cited popular estimate rather than as a finding the Forum had produced, and researchers who have gone looking for the underlying study have not found one. It has been challenged in print several times since, most prominently by education researchers tracing its provenance back to nothing in particular.
That matters, because the argument the number is used to support does not depend on it.
Two datasets carry the same conclusion without the sourcing problem.
The OECD reported in 2020, in Dream Jobs?, that the career aspirations of seven-year-olds are already shaped by gender stereotypes and social background, and that they change very little by the age of seventeen. Aspiration narrows early and then stays narrow.
Education and Employers, in its 2018 study Drawing the Future, asked more than 20,000 primary school children what they wanted to be. Under one percent had learned about that job from someone who visited their school. The rest were working from television, social media and family occupation.
Neither of those requires a forecast about 2040. They describe what is already true about how children acquire a sense of the working world, and both point the same direction: the inputs are thin and they arrive early.
Predicting job categories is difficult and the record is poor. Arguing that education must change because most future jobs are unknown invites the obvious retort that this has been said in every decade since the 1950s.
The stronger claim is narrower and testable. Children commit to a small set of career images before they are eight. Almost none of that comes from contact with actual work. When the formal decision point arrives at sixteen, they are choosing from that same small set under time pressure.
Elizabeth Tweedale, who founded the coding school Coco Coders in 2016 after a career spent patenting technical systems, frames the aim as capability rather than prediction. If the specific jobs cannot be named in advance, what can be taught is how to learn, model and reason about systems.
“We’re solving longer-term problems,” Tweedale said. “The ones that don’t just exist for today, but for the world these kids are actually going to inherit.”
The practical consequence of dropping the forecast is that the target moves from job training to structural literacy. A student does not need to know which roles will exist in 2040. They need to understand that most industries run on infrastructure somebody builds and maintains, and that their interest in animals, cities or music has a technical layer with jobs attached.
Coco Coders builds this into a ten-week foundation and four-week deep dive structure, taking a real technology as the anchor. An ocean conservation module examines Mr. Trash Wheel, the solar-powered device operating in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, before students design their own solution to the same problem.
Where did the 65 percent figure originate?
It circulated as a popular estimate before appearing in World Economic Forum material in 2016. Attempts to trace it to an original study have not produced one, and it has been publicly challenged by education researchers since 2017.
Is the underlying argument wrong, then?
Not necessarily. The case for early career exposure rests on the OECD’s 2020 aspiration research and the 2018 Drawing the Future survey, both of which are sourced and neither of which forecasts anything.
What can schools do without a forecast?
Introduce contact with real work early, and teach the systems underneath industries rather than lists of job titles.
Where can the Coco Coders curriculum be reviewed?
Programme information is published at cococoders.com.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.
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