Relearning at 40 is not a matter of retraining

Look closely at the word. To recycle oneself. We recycle plastic, glass, cardboard: materials that have already served their purpose and that, with luck and industrial processing, can be made useful again for something else. When the discourse of lifelong learning tells you, with its slide-deck smile, that at age 40 "it is time to recycle yourself," it is saying something that no one would dare say to your face: that you have expired, and that the remaining operation consists of recovering whatever is still salvageable from you.

This notebook is written for the adult who has discovered themselves on autopilot, and few things fuel that autopilot as much as accepting without question the words others use to describe you. So today we are going to do something very simple and very uncommon: look closely at the figures that underpin the recycling discourse. A warning of what is to come: the most famous of them all does not exist.

The figure that organized a decade

You have probably heard it in some webinar, in a LinkedIn post, perhaps in a master's degree brochure: "technical skills last two and a half years." It is usually attributed to a 2019 IBM report on the skills gap. This summer, the team at this house did what almost no one does with round figures: they went and read the report. Nowhere in the entire document does two and a half appear. The figure comes from an IBM training blog post published in 2021, which presents it without citing any source whatsoever.

And what about the five years that actually are in the report? There, the fine print is even better. The footnote that supports them does not refer to a measurement, but to an opinion piece by the CEO of a freelance work platform, published on the World Economic Forum blog. An opinion (legitimate, self-serving, like all of them) from someone whose business improves the faster you believe you expire.

It is worth pausing to consider what this means. It does not mean that nothing changes, nor that technical knowledge does not age: it changes, and it ages. It means that the exact speed at which you supposedly expire has never been measured. It has been proclaimed, it has been repeated, and it has been billed. The figure that organized a decade of speeches about your training has a blog post behind it, not a laboratory.

Panic also has value

There is a second series of numbers that does have a known methodology, and precisely for that reason, it is worth reading in its entirety. Every few years, the World Economic Forum asks employers around the world what portion of their workers' core skills they expect to see change in the next five years. In 2016, they expected 35%. In 2020, with the world in lockdown, 57%. In 2023, 44%. In the latest edition, from 2025, 39%.

Read it again. If that 57% had been a measurement of reality, more than half of your profession would have expired between 2020 and 2025, and that is not what you have experienced. What the series measures is something else: the mood of those who hire, which rises with scares and falls when the scare passes. The future, as told by those who claim to know it, has corrected itself five points downward in two years. Whoever shows you only the latest number is selling you urgency. Whoever shows you the complete series is treating you like an adult.

The most stable is the oldest

In that same 2025 report, there is a list that almost never makes the headlines: the skills that employers expect to remain most stable until 2030. There are five: sensory perception capabilities; reading, writing, and mathematics; reliability and attention to detail; quality control; and global citizenship. Look at the second one (the report itself anticipates a small net decline there, but it remains among the most stable). Right in the middle of the disruption map, the most durable item in the catalog turns out to be what a school from a century ago would have recognized without blinking.

This has a direct consequence for you, who are thinking about learning again. The discourse of recycling always pushes you toward the most perishable layer (the tool of the moment, the certification of the quarter), precisely the one that, according to its own figures, evaporates first. Meanwhile, what the market itself declares stable is reading well, writing well, thinking with numbers: the equipment of someone who reads slowly and judges. A curious way of telling you, inadvertently, where the value lies.

Learning is what people do

In the masterclasses of El Viaje, Javier G. Recuenco, with whom we have already conversed at length in this notebook, insists on an attitude he calls perpetual learning, and on a preference: "generalism over specialism; more and more you are going to have to mix things from a lot of different places." Recall that Asimov already warned that some people think education is something that ends at a certain point, and it is not so. And he repeats the old slogan attributed to Gandhi: learn as if you were to live forever.

The nuance matters, because Recuenco is not talking about employability: he is talking about vocation. The generalist he defends (that historically undervalued figure, capable of having serious knowledge of seemingly unconnected subjects) does not accumulate courses to remain useful to their employer. They broaden their judgment because their personal vocation, not their fear, steers the ship. Therein lies the entire difference between the two concepts. To recycle oneself is to replace the expired technical layer to fit back into a process designed by others. To educate oneself is to take charge of one's own understanding: to expand it, to order it, to refine it. The former is done to a material. The latter is done by a person.

And there is a paradox worth savoring: the adult who at 45 enrolls in an ancient history course, resumes the mathematics they abandoned, or spends a year reading the Greeks slowly is not doing anything "impractical." They are training exactly the area of the map that employers themselves declare most stable. It turns out that what was apparently useless was the last thing to expire.

You are not alone in this

Europe has put a number to the issue, and that number includes you. The action plan of the European Pillar of Social Rights sets a target that by 2030, at least 60% of adults should participate in training every year. The reality, according to the 2024 European labor force survey (Eurostat, adults aged 25 to 64 who trained in the previous twelve months), is that around 28% do. In Spain, 29.7%: slightly above the European average, and still halfway to the target.

You can read that gap as yet another unfulfilled European goal. We prefer to read it this way: tens of millions of adults are going to learn something new in the coming years, and you, who are already considering it, are not the odd one out in class: you are the vanguard. It is only wise not to mistake the motive. Public policy wants you to train for productivity; that is its job. You can want something bigger. And as to whether the vehicle should be a master's degree (with its prices and its fine print) we have already written at length in this notebook.

The difference between a material and a person

We are not going to close by promising you anything, because this notebook is not in that business. No one can guarantee you that studying at 40 will raise your salary, and the figures that claimed to measure your expiration have just been exposed for what they are. What we can leave you with is the distinction, because the words you call yourself by end up governing what you do. A material is recycled when it ceases to be useful. A person learns while they are alive, not because they expire, but because they grow, and because there is an age, roughly yours, when one no longer studies to pass or to fit in, but to finally understand the world in which they have been living for forty years.

That is, perhaps, the secret advantage of learning again at 40: for the first time there are no grades, there is no graduation picture, and there is no one to impress. There is only you, the subject, and the desire. Let no one dare call that recycling.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.