Mapping Tomorrows Compass to LinkedIn's Skills on the Rise

LinkedIn's 2025 Skills on the Rise report is one of the more useful artefacts the platform has produced in years. It is built on actual hiring and member-activity data from a network of more than a billion professionals, segmented by geography and function, and the headline finding is the kind that tends to settle arguments rather than start them. From 2015 to 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change. The skills doing the heaviest lifting in the new mix are not technical certifications. They are behavioural patterns. That finding is also where the Tomorrows Compass framework already sits, which makes the LinkedIn data useful as a cross-check rather than a competing taxonomy.

What LinkedIn's data is actually saying

When the popular framing of the future of work converges on AI literacy, automation, and platform fluency, it is easy to assume that LinkedIn's data must reinforce that story. Read closely, the data tells a more nuanced one. Across the country and function lists in the 2025 report, the categories that show up most consistently are adaptability, strategic thinking, communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, customer engagement, creative thinking, and leadership presence. AI literacy appears too, but its position in the rankings is interesting: it sits alongside (not above) the behavioural categories. The gap between technical literacy and behavioural fluency is narrower than the discourse suggests, and in most segments the behavioural skills outrank the technical ones.

That matters because it changes what an organisation or an individual should actually invest in. If the future of work were primarily a technical-skill problem, the right response would be more certifications and tool training. The data argues for a different priority: deliberate development of the behavioural patterns that determine how technical skills get applied, how teams collaborate, and how individuals adapt as their roles evolve. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report points in the same direction when it lists resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership, and active listening at the top of employer priorities through 2030. Two independent datasets, the same conclusion.

The behavioural lens is precisely what the 12 future-ready skills framework is built around. The mapping below shows how each of LinkedIn's most prominent rising-skill categories aligns with one or more of the durable behavioural capabilities Tomorrows Compass measures. The point is not that the two taxonomies are interchangeable. The point is that they are pointing at the same underlying terrain from different angles.

How the 12 TC skills map onto LinkedIn's rising categories

AI literacy and continuous learning

LinkedIn's data: AI literacy appears in the fastest-growing list across every major geography. Continuous learning sits alongside it as a top-fifteen rising skill in most segments.

The behavioural pattern underneath both is Adaptive Digital Learning: the ability to pick up unfamiliar tools, internalise their underlying logic, and integrate them into existing workflows without losing time to friction. Inquiring Mind is the curiosity that drives someone to explore what a new tool actually changes, rather than treating it as a rebadged version of the previous one. AI literacy is not really a technical skill once you look closely. It is behavioural agility applied to a fast-moving technology.

Adaptability and managing change

LinkedIn's data: Adaptability ranks in the top tier of soft skills across almost every country and function category in the 2025 report. Roughly a quarter of professionals plan to deliberately learn new skills this year, signalling that the demand for agility is felt on the supply side too.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Embracing Uncertainty (acting with conviction when the path forward is incomplete), Change Agility (turning transitions into momentum rather than friction), and Inquiring Mind (engaging with the new rather than defending the familiar). Adaptability is not a single trait. It is a small ensemble of behavioural patterns that reinforce each other.

Conflict resolution and collaboration

LinkedIn's data: Conflict mitigation, negotiation, and cross-functional collaboration sit in the top fifteen across the US, UK, and India lists. Roughly half of hiring managers now report using skills data to evaluate fit for collaborative roles, not just for solo contribution.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Paradoxical Thinking (holding competing truths without collapsing them prematurely), Relational Influence (moving people without authority), Digital Teamwork (sustaining real connection across hybrid and asynchronous settings), and Cross-Cultural Collaboration (operating fluently across difference). Collaboration is not a single behaviour either. It is a coordinated set of patterns that show up reliably in people who navigate team environments well.

Customer engagement and support

LinkedIn's data: Customer-focused categories appear on nearly every regional and functional list. Organisations that invest deliberately in customer-facing capability typically see measurable lifts in retention and lifetime value.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Cross-Cultural Collaboration (genuine attentiveness across difference), Relational Influence (the trust that lets a customer be candid about what they actually need), and Design Thinking (the structured creativity that produces solutions built around the customer rather than around the supplier's existing capability). Customer engagement, properly examined, is the outcome of behavioural intelligence rather than a script.

Creative thinking and problem solving

LinkedIn's data: Innovative thinking and creative problem-solving rank in the top fifteen in multiple geographies. Creative thinking is named explicitly as a must-have for sustained relevance in the AI era.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Design Thinking (structured creativity through empathy and iteration), Paradoxical Thinking (seeing options that emerge between opposing ideas rather than choosing prematurely), and Inquiring Mind (the curiosity that produces the questions worth solving). Innovation is not magic. It is a combination of nameable, learnable, observable behaviours.

Strategic thinking and decision-making

LinkedIn's data: Strategic thinking is one of the most consistent risers across geographies, functions, and seniority levels. Decision-making appears alongside it in the top tier of professional skills demanded by employers.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Contextual Intelligence (reading the situation accurately), Purposeful Focus (choosing what genuinely deserves attention), and Dynamic Resourcefulness (finding a way through with the resources actually on hand). Strategic thinking is not a credential either. It is the durable behavioural pattern that lets a professional cut through ambiguity instead of getting stuck in it.

Leadership and influence

LinkedIn's data: Leadership presence, executive presence, and people management capabilities appear consistently in the top tier of rising skills, particularly in the US and UK lists at senior levels.

The behavioural patterns underneath are Relational Influence, Change Agility, Paradoxical Thinking, and Embracing Uncertainty. Effective leadership in 2026 is structurally different from effective leadership in 2010. It rewards adaptive presence over command-and-control delivery, and the behavioural patterns reflect that shift.

Where this leaves you

The two takeaways from the LinkedIn data, once you put it next to a behavioural framework, are concrete enough to act on this quarter.

The first is that the rising-skills story is not really a technology story. It is a behavioural story dressed in technology vocabulary. The professionals who navigate the next several years well will be the ones who treat behavioural development as the core investment, with technical-tool fluency as a secondary layer that gets refreshed on a faster cadence as the tools change.

The second is that "future-ready skills" is a more nameable, measurable set than the discourse usually allows. The twelve durable behavioural capabilities the Tomorrows Compass framework measures cover the same terrain LinkedIn's data is pointing at, with the advantage that they can be benchmarked, developed deliberately, and tracked over time. We argue the broader case for that approach in Will AI Take My Job? and in Career Planning Is Broken. Here's What to Do Instead.

If you want a clearer read of where your own behavioural toolkit currently stands against the rising-skills picture, take the Tomorrows Compass assessment. It maps how you currently show up across the twelve durable capabilities, surfaces the patterns doing the heavy lifting today, and gives you a realistic next focus for the quarter. The framework itself, and how it is built, sits at how Discover works.

A practical way to act on the LinkedIn signal this quarter is to pick one rising category that genuinely matters for your role, identify the two or three Tomorrows Compass capabilities underneath it, and commit to one specific, observable practice for each over the next twelve weeks. If your role is leaning harder into AI-augmented work, that probably means deliberate development of Adaptive Digital Learning alongside Inquiring Mind. If your role is being reshaped by stakeholder complexity, it probably means Relational Influence combined with Paradoxical Thinking. The category-level insight from LinkedIn becomes useful at the moment it converts into a small, named set of practices on your own calendar. Without that conversion, the rising-skills list is just another headline.

The signal from LinkedIn, the WEF, and the broader applied-research literature is consistent. The future of work is being rewritten in behavioural terms. The most useful thing a professional or organisation can do in response is build a clear, current view of where the behavioural baseline sits, and where the next quarter of deliberate practice should land. The data is the easy part. The deliberate practice is where the real work begins.

The LinkedIn rising-skills list is most useful when treated as a starting point rather than a prescription. Categories like Adaptive Thinking or AI Literacy are not capabilities that can be developed directly; they are clusters that decompose into behavioural ingredients. Without that decomposition, the rising-skills list sits on a shelf. With it, the same list becomes a working agenda for the quarter. Specificity is the conversion step. The further the gap between the headline category and the named behavioural practice, the less likely the rising-skills signal is to translate into actual capability movement.

All methodology specifics are Tomorrows Compass's own estimates and calculations; pilot validation is in progress.