And the Systems We Keep Avoiding
The release of the OECD Skills Outlook 2025 lands with the familiar thud of recognition. The diagnosis is sharp, data-rich, and globally consistent: skills systems are out of sync with how people actually live and work. Automation is accelerating, traditional career ladders are eroding, and the burden of adaptation is being quietly transferred onto individuals — especially those already carrying the most invisible labour. The report is not short on warnings. What it is short on, deliberately, is implementation.
The dominant narrative embedded in the global skills conversation remains stubbornly narrow. Governments talk about “reskilling pipelines,” “future-ready workers,” and “agility,” as if skills float freely, detached from bodies, households, health, or time. The assumption is that if people just acquire the right micro-credential at the right moment, productivity will follow. But the OECD’s own data quietly undermines this fantasy: participation drops where care responsibilities rise; mid-career exits spike where work becomes fragmented; and the groups most asked to “adapt” are those least supported by existing systems. This is not a motivation problem. It is a structural one.
The Creative Women’s Association (CWA) enters this picture from a different angle — not as a commentator on skills, but as an organisation building the missing infrastructure the report keeps circling around. Where the OECD names fragmentation, CWA has mapped it. Where the report notes unpaid labour as a contextual factor, CWA has operationalised it through the Domestic & Care Load (DCL) Index — a measurable determinant linking care, mental load, physiological stress, and economic precarity to workforce participation. This is not advocacy theatre. It is systems design, grounded in workforce economics, health data, and governance logic.
The CWA lens reframes the skills problem entirely. Skills do not fail because people lack talent or willingness. They fail because the systems surrounding them are not designed to hold real lives. Women — who make up the majority of the creative and cultural workforce — are not “leaking” from the economy due to preference or confidence gaps. They are exiting because there is no recognised workforce architecture that accommodates hybrid careers, micro-enterprise, care intensity, or mid-life transitions. The OECD Skills Outlook describes the symptoms. CWA is building the mechanism that resolves them.
This is where the work moves from talk to creation. CWA is establishing a standards-based authority for Cultural Contributions & Provenance — defining certification pathways, verified practice, and workforce recognition for creative labour that currently operates outside formal economic visibility. It is not a grants program. It is not another pilot. It is workforce infrastructure: certification, data, inspection, and integration with health, education, and procurement systems. In practical terms, this means skills can finally be counted, valued, and sustained — rather than repeatedly “retrained” and discarded.
The reframe is uncomfortable but necessary. The global skills crisis is not a future problem; it is a present design failure. Asking individuals to endlessly adapt without addressing unpaid labour, health load, and economic instability is not resilience-building — it is cost-shifting. CWA’s approach aligns with the OECD’s own evidence while extending it into action: if skills are to be portable, they must be formally recognised; if participation is to be sustained, care must be accounted for; if productivity is the goal, then workforce stability is the prerequisite.
There is a quiet clarity that emerges when reports like the OECD Skills Outlook are read alongside real implementation work. The gap is no longer intellectual. It is operational. CWA exists precisely in that gap — translating analysis into systems, and rhetoric into structure. While global institutions map the terrain, someone still has to build the road. That is the work now underway.
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