Digital Upskilling Statistics 2026: Skills Gaps and AI Training Data

59 of every 100 people in the global workforce are projected to require reskilling or upskilling by 2030. Of those, 11 are unlikely to receive it, per the World Economic Forum. That is over 120 million workers at medium-term risk of redundancy. Digital upskilling statistics already show the gap: 92% of all jobs posted in 2021 required digital skills in the US, and 60% of EU citizens aged 16-74 had at least basic digital skills in 2025, short of an 80% target for 2030.

The sections below track that gap from several directions. They cover employer projections, US job postings and EU skill levels, then the hardest skills to hire and who actually gets training. Every figure keeps its producer, period and population, so you can see exactly what each number measures.

Key Takeaways

• 18.6% of the workers projected to need reskilling or upskilling by 2030 are unlikely to receive it, in the World Economic Forum’s projection.
• 92% of all jobs posted in 2021 required digital skills, with 47% requiring at least one definitely digital skill in the US, per the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
• 31% of employed workers ages 16-64 had no digital skills or very limited skills in the US before the pandemic, based on National Skills Coalition data.
• In 2025, 74.6% of young people aged 16-24 in the EU had at least basic digital skills, according to Eurostat.
• 72% of employers report hiring difficulty in ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey, down modestly from 74% last year, and AI skills have surpassed all others to become the most difficult for employers to find globally.
• In PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey, just 51% of non-managers feel they have the resources needed for learning and development, compared to 72% of senior executives.

Editor’s Choice

• Jobs created by 2030: 170 million new roles set to be created and 92 million displaced, a net increase of 78 million jobs, per the World Economic Forum’s formal-jobs dataset.
• EU countries past the target: In 2025, 4 countries already surpassed the EU target of 80%, according to Eurostat.
• Employers surveyed: ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Talent Shortage Survey of 39,000 employers across 41 countries.
• Workers surveyed: PwC surveyed 49,843 workers across 48 countries and regions in 2025.
• GenAI learning pace: With 14 enrollments per minute, GenAI remains the most in-demand skill in Coursera’s history, per its Job Skills Report 2026.
• Enterprise GenAI learners: For enterprise learners, women represented 36% of GenAI enrollments on Coursera in 2024 and 42% in 2025.

Digital Upskilling Statistics: Global Reskilling Demand by 2030

About This Data

• Compiled from 20 source pages: 14 from statistics offices, governments and company newsrooms, 5 from research, advocacy and industry organizations, and 1 secondary summary (McKinsey citing a Northern Virginia Technology Council survey).
• Publication dates run from a 2020 National Skills Coalition post on pre-pandemic data to an August 2026 announcement from India’s Prime Minister’s Office.
• Each figure keeps its producer’s period and population, so US job postings, EU citizens, OECD adults and online learners are never merged into one number.
• We review the page on a rolling basis and update figures when sources publish new editions.
• Projected job creation and displacement add up to a structural labor market churn of 22% of the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the dataset by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report.
• The report draws on data from over 1,000 companies.
• Nearly 40% of skills required on the job are set to change.
• The skills gap is cited by 63% of employers as a main barrier to future-proofing their operations.
• The 11 workers per 100 who are unlikely to receive training equal 18.6% of the 59 who need it.
• Technology skills in AI, big data and networks and cybersecurity are expected to see the fastest growth in demand.

Source: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025

The displacement half of this projection is where our AI job loss data picks up; the retraining half is what the sections below measure.

By the numbers: The World Economic Forum expects 170 million new roles and 92 million displaced by 2030, with nearly 40% of skills required on the job set to change; both job figures are projections, and together they amount to a churn of 22% of the 1.2 billion formal jobs in the World Economic Forum’s dataset. In a global workforce of 100 people, 59 are projected to require reskilling or upskilling and 11 are unlikely to receive it.

Basic Digital Skills by EU Country

• The EU share sits 20 percentage points below the 2030 target set by the European Union.
• To achieve a level of at least basic overall digital skills, individuals must have performed at least one activity related to each skill area.
• In 2025, the share varied between 82% for people with high formal education and 38% for those with no or low formal education.
• Only 33% of people aged 65-74 possessed at least basic digital skills, compared with around 75% of those in the 16-24 and 25-34 age groups.
• More young women than men in the EU had at least basic digital skills in 2025, though this balances out in the age group 35-44 and reverses for older age groups, with higher shares among men.
• People in the Netherlands are about 2.6 times as likely as people in Romania to have at least basic digital skills.

Recent Developments

• August 2026. India: The Prime Minister announced that one crore youth would be trained in AI skills over the next one year, in the 80th Independence Day address.
• July 2026. Eurostat: In 2025, at EU level, the share of young women aged 16-24 (75.9%) with at least basic digital skills was higher than that of young men (73.3%).
• June 2026. European Commission: More than 60% of Europeans now have at least basic digital skills, but shortages of ICT specialists remain significant and the gender gap persists, according to the State of the Digital Decade report.
• June 2026. ICT workforce: Women remain substantially underrepresented in IT work, accounting for less than 20% of ICT experts.
• December 2025. Eurostat: In 2025, 19.95% of EU enterprises used AI technologies, in a survey that covered enterprises with at least 10 employees and self-employed persons.

Digital Skills in US Job Postings

• On February 6, 2023, National Skills Coalition (NSC) in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta released Closing the Digital Skill Divide, a real-time snapshot of demand for digital skills in the US labor market.
• Workers who qualify for jobs that require even one “definitely digital skill” can earn an average of 23% more, or more than $8,000 per year, than in a job that requires no digital skills.
• Demand for digital skills is strong across every industry and in almost every occupation, including entry-level and frontline positions.
• The digital skill divide disproportionately impacts workers of color, low-income individuals, and rural residents.
• Ninety percent of jobs in Illinois require digital skills, said Juan Salgado, Chancellor for City Colleges of Chicago.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, National Skills Coalition, 2021 job postings

Can you give me some examples of digital skills?

Salesforce or Python are “definitely digital skills,” which cannot be completed manually. Bookkeeping is a “likely digital skill,” frequently accomplished using a digital device but possible to complete manually. Counting both types, 92% of all jobs posted in 2021 required digital skills.

Digital Skills Among Young Europeans

• Only 2 EU countries had youth shares below 60%.
• In unrounded 2025 data, the youth share is about 14.2 percentage points above the share for all individuals aged 16-74, according to Eurostat’s database.
• The pattern of higher shares among young women than young men was observed in 22 EU countries.
• The largest gap in favor of young women was registered in Cyprus, with an 18.8 percentage point difference (73.9% vs 55.1%).
• Slovenia recorded an 11.6 percentage point gap (73.5% vs 61.9%) and Austria a 9.1 percentage point gap (82.7% vs 73.6%).
• In the other 5 EU countries, the share of young men with at least basic digital skills was higher.

How schools build these skills is a separate dataset, covered in our AI in education statistics.

Employer Upskilling Plans

• AI is reshaping business models, with half of employers globally planning to reorient their business to target new opportunities resulting from the technology.
• The most common workforce response to these changes is expected to be upskilling workers.
• Almost half of employers expect to transition staff from roles exposed to AI disruption into other parts of their business.
• The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) study is based on a survey of 82 top technology organizations in the Northern Virginia (NOVA) region. In that survey, 80% of respondents say upskilling is the most effective way to reduce employee skills gaps, while only 28% of organizations are planning to invest in upskilling programs over the next two to three years, as cited by McKinsey.
• Among those Northern Virginia organizations, that leaves a 52-point gap between respondents who call upskilling the most effective fix and organizations planning to invest in it.

Source: World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025; Northern Virginia Technology Council survey via McKinsey, 2024

Adult Skill Gaps: US Digital Skills and OECD Literacy and Numeracy

• Nearly one in three workers lack foundational digital skills, according to a National Skills Coalition report.
• Even before the pandemic, many workers lacked the foundational digital skills necessary to quickly adapt and upskill as their jobs evolve.
• The data refers to workers ages 16-64 who were employed at the time of the survey.
• Combined, 31% of these workers had no digital skills or very limited skills in that pre-pandemic data.
• In the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, large shares of adults aged 16-65 scored at the two lowest levels of the proficiency scales: 26% in literacy, 25% in numeracy and 29% in adaptive problem solving, on average across OECD countries and economies.
• In Chile, 44% of adults aged 16-65 scored at the two lowest levels in all three skill domains, compared to only 7% in Japan.
• On average, 55-65 year-olds display lower proficiency than younger adults in all the assessed domains.

Key finding: National Skills Coalition found that 13% of workers have no digital skills and 18% have very limited skills, while 33% have advanced skills. Those first two groups are the workers an upskilling program has to reach before an AI course can do much for them.

EU ICT Specialists and 2030 Digital Targets

• The European Commission’s yearly State of the Digital Decade report assesses how the EU is progressing on its 2030 digital transformation targets.
• The 2026 report shows that the EU has made progress in key areas, but structural gaps continue to hold back Europe’s digital transformation.
• Significant gaps remain especially in foundational technologies, computing capacity, cybersecurity, uptake of advanced digital technologies, and digital skills and scale up capacity.
• More businesses are using cloud computing, data analytics and AI, but many small and medium-sized enterprises still face barriers to adopting advanced digital solutions.

Source: European Commission, State of the Digital Decade 2026; Eurostat, 2025 data

Hardest Skills to Find in 2026

• Employers in Germany (83%), France (74%), and the U.K. (73%) face significant shortages, while the U.S. (69%) tracks slightly below the global average and China (48%) stands out as the least constrained major market.
• Traditional IT & Data skills fell to seventh place in the global ranking of hard-to-find skills.
• While the Information industry faces the highest shortage (75%), critical service sectors like Hospitality (74%) and Public Sector, Health & Social Services (74%) report nearly identical levels.

Pay at the specialized end of AI work is tracked in our prompt engineering salaries data.

Which digital skill is in high demand?

AI Model & Application Development and AI Literacy now lead the global ranking of hard-to-find skills in ManpowerGroup’s survey. The World Economic Forum points the same way: Technology skills in AI, big data and cybersecurity are expected to see rapid growth in demand, but human skills, such as creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, will remain critical.

Human Skills Employers Still Need

• Even with employers chasing AI capabilities, core human skills remain in-demand: Communication, Collaboration & Teamwork are the most sought-after attributes, followed by Professionalism & Work Ethic and Adaptability & Willingness to Learn.
• Human skills such as analytical thinking, cognitive skills, resilience, leadership and collaboration will remain critical core skills.
• A combination of both skillsets will increasingly be required by many growing jobs.

Adaptability and willingness to learn makes the top three, so a trait that upskilling depends on is also one employers say they are looking for.

Upskilling Access and GenAI Use at Work

• Only 14% of respondents are using GenAI daily, and only half (54%) say they have used AI for their role in the past 12 months.
• Daily use rose only slightly from the 12% who reported it in 2024.
• An even smaller proportion (6%) say they are using agentic AI daily.
• Just 51% of non-managers feel they have access to the learning and development opportunities they need, compared to 66% of managers and 72% of senior executives.
• Daily GenAI users are far more optimistic about the future of their roles over the next 12 months (69%) relative to infrequent (51%) and non-users (44%).
• PwC surveyed workers from 7 July through 18 August 2025, with figures weighted proportionally to each country’s working population’s gender and age distribution.

Which AI apps those daily users open is tracked in our workplace AI tool adoption figures.

Why it matters: Compared to infrequent users of GenAI at work, daily users are much more likely to have seen tangible benefits in the last year to productivity (92% v 58%), job security (58% v 36%), and salary (52% v 32%). The group reporting the biggest gains is small, and fewer non-managers feel they have the learning resources they need.

National AI Skilling Targets

• Every adult in the UK is eligible to take free, newly benchmarked courses to gain practical AI skills for work.
• The UK package includes £27 million funding to connect people to tech jobs in local communities, and create new professional practice courses and graduate traineeships.
• The UK is setting ambitious targets in order to make Britain the fastest adopting AI country in the G7.
• Referring to the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence, India’s Prime Minister said the initiative would help equip India’s youth with the capability to lead in AI.

Source: GOV.UK, 28 January 2026; Prime Minister’s Office of India; European Commission, State of the Digital Decade 2026

GenAI Learning and the Gender Gap

• Learners recognize the need to layer role-specific AI knowledge on top of technical foundations, according to Coursera’s Job Skills Report 2026.
• Learners prioritize skills in foundational technologies like SQL, JSON, and Web Applications while layering on new AI competencies in domains like Unsupervised Learning and Multimodal Prompts, per the same Coursera report.
• Critical Thinking enrollments grew 185% year over year for GenAI learners, 168% for Data, 101% for Software & Product and 91% for IT, in Coursera’s Job Skills Report 2026.
• The Data cohort shows over 100% year-over-year growth in Data Quality (+108%) and Data Cleansing (+103%), per the same Coursera report.
• Although women remain underrepresented in GenAI learning globally, the gender gap is clearly narrowing.

Course enrollments are one slice of the wider digital learning market, and our ChatGPT usage figures show the consumer side of the same GenAI demand.

What Is Digital Upskilling?

Digital upskilling is training that raises a worker’s digital skills for the job they hold or the one they want next. It runs from basic tasks like managing online accounts up to working with AI assistants. In Eurostat’s measure of basic skills, activities include managing access to personal data, fact checking, or changing software settings.

The World Economic Forum counts reskilling and upskilling together in its workforce projection. In its survey, the most common workforce response to AI reshaping business models is expected to be upskilling workers.

Conclusion

59 of every 100 workers are projected to require reskilling or upskilling by the end of the decade, and 11 of them are unlikely to receive it. That leaves over 120 million workers at medium-term risk of redundancy. Access is uneven inside companies, where just 51% of non-managers feel they have the resources needed for learning and development.

Non-managers, older adults and workers in the EU’s lowest-scoring countries have the most ground to make up. Watch the next State of the Digital Decade report for EU progress toward its basic-skills target, and ManpowerGroup’s next shortage survey for whether AI skills stay the hardest to find. Which skills is your employer paying to train? Tell us in the comments.