Your degree expires; your judgment does not

In your parents' living room, there is a framed degree. Perhaps yours, perhaps your sister's. It has been there for years, with its crest, its simulated Latin, and its illegible signature, and no one has ever taken it down because taking it down would mean admitting something uncomfortable: that almost nothing of what it certifies is still worth what it was worth the day it was hung.

This is not a provocation. It is a measurement — or almost.

In 2019, IBM's Institute for Business Value published a report on the skills gap that contained a phrase destined to escape its context: professional skills have an estimated half-life today of five years, and even less for technical ones. The image came from physics. Just as an isotope loses half its mass within a fixed timeframe, a skill loses half its market value while you are still paying off the master's degree that taught it. The phrase became highly successful. It was cited in Forbes, in consulting reports, in every human resources congress of the last decade — almost always without mentioning where it came from, like those folk songs that everyone sings and no one knows who composed.

It is worth reading the fine print, because that is where the honest part of the story lies. IBM did not measure decaying skills in a laboratory. It asked thousands of executives how long they believed their workforces' capabilities lasted, and aggregated perceptions. The "five years" is a collective judgment of those who hire, not a universal constant. That does not invalidate it — the judgment of the employer is precisely what decides your salary — but it shifts its category: we are not dealing with a law of nature, but with the market's state of mind. And states of mind, it is worth remembering, also fluctuate. Furthermore, there is a detail that the quote never carries with it: the footnote to that sentence, within the report itself, does not refer to a study, but to an opinion piece published two years prior.

In fact, they fluctuate in plain sight. Every two years, the World Economic Forum asks employers around the world what share of their workers' skills they expect to see change in the next five years. We already shared that figure here when we spoke about employability: 39% between now and 2030. What we had not shared was its trajectory. In 2023, the estimate was 44%; in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, it reached 57%. In the first edition of the report, in 2016, it was 35%. The future, measured by those who claim to know it, has just been revised five points downward. Anyone who sells you the idea that everything is accelerating constantly and without brake is not showing you the complete series.

And there is something else in that report, almost hidden, that should make anyone who has ever stepped into a library smile. When the WEF lists the most stable skills — those that will change the least between now and 2030 —, reliability, attention to detail, and three old acquaintances appear: reading, writing, and mathematics. The oldest capabilities in the catalog turn out to have the longest lifespan. In the map of disruption, the closest thing to a shelter is a desk with books.

Here it is worth saying something clearly, because this argument is easily misunderstood: none of this is against the university degree. Specialization is not the problem; it is the greatest machine of depth that the university has built, and whoever operates on your heart had better be a magnificent specialist. The problem is more subtle. Within that transcript hanging in the living room, two things of a different nature coexist: a technical layer — the software you learned, the regulations you memorized, the state of the art of your field in the year of your graduation — and something that formed underneath while you pursued all of that: the ability to distinguish an argument from an occurrence, to connect what happens in your field with what happens outside of it, to make decisions with incomplete information. The first layer is what IBM measures in years. The second does not appear on the transcript, and it is the only part that appreciates over time, because each year of experience adds material upon which to judge.

We call that second layer judgment, and it has a curious economic property: it is more valuable the cheaper execution becomes. The printing press made access to knowledge cheaper, and the world then rewarded those who knew how to read it. The industrial revolution made strength cheaper and rewarded the specialist. Artificial intelligence is making execution itself cheaper — writing, programming, analyzing, summarizing — and is beginning to reward those who know what to commission, what to discard, and what to sign. Doing is no longer difficult. What is scarce is judgment. We spoke at length about that story in the first piece of this series, the return of the polymaths, and of its occupational consequences in the piece on employability; we will not repeat it here.

What is indeed new is that Europe has already put a number on all of this. The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan sets a target that by 2030, at least 60% of adults should participate in training each year. The actual figure, according to the 2024 European labor force survey, is 28.5%. One can read this gap as a failure of employment policies. We read it as the largest vacancy in the educational system: tens of millions of European adults who at some point in this decade are going to look for where to relearn — and who still do not know whom to call.

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The question is whom they are going to call. And there, the university has a dormant advantage that no course platform will ever be able to copy: it was already these people's home. It has their names, their decisive years, their friendships, their professors. Universities are only half-aware of this: that is why alumni networks exist, those huge lists of former students that almost no institution knows what to use for beyond asking for donations and organizing an annual dinner. Ultimately, they are the empirical proof of something that university marketing does not yet dare to say: that the bond did not expire when the syllabus expired. The technical layer of the degree expired. The sense of belonging is still there, waiting for substance.

Imagine the university not as a four-year event with a graduation ceremony, but as a lifelong subscription to a community that thinks. The degree would be the receipt for the first phase, not the exit certificate. Former students would return not for another diploma — for another technical layer that will in turn expire —, but for what does not expire: shared readings, conversation with people outside of their field, professors turned into peers, questions of the kind that do not expire. The institution that achieves this will not have to chase its alumni: they will be the ones who do not leave.

At Nomba Talent, we work exactly in that seam. The itinerary we propose to universities — twelve humanities stages, a reading plan, mentors from the faculty itself, a community that remains active when the course ends — is not just another technical layer: it is the common ground that turns an alumni list into a table you want to return to. We do not promise that judgment will trade higher than the degree; IBM, the WEF, and the European agenda are already saying that with their numbers and corrections. What we offer is more modest and older: a place to keep cultivating it, with others, for a lifetime. What is scarce, after all, cannot be bought ready-made. It is cultivated in company.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the half-life of skills? The estimate (IBM, 2019) that half the value of a professional skill is lost in about five years, and even less for technical ones. It is an aggregated executive perception, not a physical measurement.

What is lifelong learning? Sustained education throughout adult life; the EU has set a target for 60% of adults to receive training every year by 2030.

Is a university degree useful then? Yes: it provides depth and method. What expires is its technical layer; what does not expire is the judgment that was formed while pursuing it.

What skills will be most stable until 2030? According to the WEF: reading, writing, and mathematics, reliability, attention to detail, and quality control.

Are skill changes increasing without brake? Not exactly: the WEF estimate fell from 44% (2023) to 39% (2025).

What can a university do for its alumni? Keep the community alive: common substance, mentors, readings, gatherings — a bond that alumni networks prove possible.

Is lifelong learning the same as reskilling? Reskilling retrains for a specific role; lifelong learning is broader: it includes cultivating the judgment that makes any future reskilling possible.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.