Vision Creation
Co-creating visions through ground-breaking education research projects
In order for change to become progress, we need a sense of direction. To know the right direction, a vision of the future is essential. Global Education Futures has taken the role of creating visions of the future of education since 2008. Through research projects, in cooperation with several partners.

GEF welcomes cooperation with partner organizations across the globe for the creation of visionary educational futures from various perspectives. Are you interested in cooperation as well? Let us know!
Research Publications
To build an understanding of what the next five decades may hold in store for workers, BCG engaged with more than 150 futurists through panel discussions and opinion surveys. Contrary to popular fears that the future will offer fewer work opportunities for people, most experts anticipate that rewarding work options will be plentiful. Individuals, organizations, and communities that build new skills will flourish. Economic sectors such as regenerative industries and areas that require strong creativity will offer new paths to sustainability and personal satisfaction.

Public sector organizations and their private sector partners are ideally positioned to maximize the effectiveness of human contributions to prosperity over the next 50 years. Understanding the factors that will affect the 21st-century economy and crafting future-oriented policies will ensure that populations have what they need for shared purpose and success.
The Peaceful Futures project was initiated by Global Education Futures together with VZOR Lab, School of International Futures (SOIF), and Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP).

It explores principles and methods for the establishment of a global peace-based civilization. The project intentionally brought together a set of intergenerational perspectives of: foresight practitioners with lived experience of conflict, those with direct experience of peacebuilding – both at community and diplomacy levels, and foresight practitioners with experience of driving system transformation.

The findings of this first stage of the Peaceful Futures project were organized into the Peaceful Futures White Paper and Roadmap

Project page at NGFP website
In order to transform education in a useful direction, it is essential to know the skills that learners should have in the future. In the Future Skills research project, these skills have been identified and described.

This research project was initiated by WorldSkills Russia and executed by Global Education Futures, with major support from WorldSkills International. A core idea of the research was to assess the influence that the COVID-19 crisis on the skills of the future. This research was conducted with GEF's rapid foresight methodology. Over 700 experts from 45 countries have explored implications for 7 industries and their Vocational Education & Training needs.
Learning has traditionally been done in schools and other educational institutions. This has clearly proved its value, but that is not where the development of learning stops. An emerging practice for the future of education is that learning takes place in learning ecosystems. Traditional educational institutions can play an essential role in such learning ecosystems, but there is more than school. In this publication, Global Education Futures, in cooperation with SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management, shows several relevant case studies that reflect emerging approaches to the co-development of learning ecosystems from around the world, inspired and influenced by the fields of biology, ecology, social movements, technology, cosmology, design, innovation, systems leadership and more.
In our global context of increasing social, ecological, and economic complexity our educational systems must evolve to meet the demands of the future. It is necessary to re-imagine the purpose and the design of education systems. We need a paradigm shift in how we learn together so we can collaboratively co-create a future that works for all of humanity and our biosphere. This research report identifies focal points of systemic transformation that may bring education of the future into reality and lays out the framework for education as a vehicle for the intentional evolution of humankind. It summarizes three years of the learning journey of Global Education Futures and its partner organisations, with insights from several hundreds of educational leaders across the globe.

We believe that mankind should take a serious approach towards the formation of a desired image of the future. One should not treat the future as a simple continuation of the present, as if tomorrow does not differ from the previous day. At the time of writing this report, education and skill development have been quite conservative areas - sometimes training programmes remain unchanged for decades. This report from 2017 has catalysed more conscious joint efforts of many actors.
This research report from early 2018 presents the findings from a conference of education leaders from more than 12 countries and 5 international education agencies. It deals with the rise of the 'Complex Person' and the emerging and future competencies required of all our young people to thrive in a constantly changing global society. The report is a "whitepaper" for the transition towards a new curriculum, new assessment and tracking, new learning environments and processes, and new ways of organizing educational systems. It also shows how this transition can be supported by governments, private investors, employers, parent communities and other stakeholders.
This report from 2014 describes education in an era of radical transformation. Education, for a long time, could stay unsusceptible to changes experienced by society. But the coming decades will see an era of the most radical changes in education since the appearance of national education systems. Education-related industries such as digital technologies, medicine, and finance—and not the education system itself—will be the chief source of these changes. This publication is an attempt to systematically describe these industries' impact on the various stages of education, primarily in developed countries. The goal is not to predict how events will unfold, but rather to encourage joint action to change things.
This is a report from 2015, based on research executed by GEF, when it used the name Refuture me. It showed an overview of jobs in the future, to give an idea of where we're heading. The research was conducted in cooperation with SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management and the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.

Since 2015, the Atlas has further developed, and with the new team, it passed into a new edition. See the Atlas 3.0.
Maps of Education and Skills Futures
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Three Horizons of Skills
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