- CEO of the $26 billion bank Standard Chartered, Bill Winters, admits that his MBA was “a waste of time,” and that the skills he learned at college have “degraded, degraded, degraded” over the last 40 years. The executive says that soft skills like communication, curiosity, and empathy are more important as AI takes over grunt technical work. A LinkedIn careers exec agrees that human touch is the new in-demand talent capability.
Attending college has long been seen as a rite of passage for success, but now student-loan-ridden Gen Z is calling their worth into question. They’re not alone. The CEO of $26 billion bank Standard Chartered has just admitted that his time at Wharton Business School wasn’t necessary.
“I studied international relations and history. I got an MBA later, but that was a waste of time,” Bill Winters told Bloomberg in a recent interview.
“I learned how to think at university, and for the 40 years since I left university, those skills have been degraded, degraded, degraded.”
The banking chief executive may hold degrees from Colgate University and the University of Pennsylvania, but getting an Ivy League degree doesn’t equate to being a valuable worker. Winters says that AI has had a major impact on the relevance of skills; now that chatbots can compile documents, create meeting slideshows, and even write code, many hard capabilities like software engineering skills once seen as a career gold mine are now being rendered redundant.
Instead, human soft skills like curiosity, communication, and critical thinking are incredibly important in leadership and work, according to the 63-year-old CEO. And those are skills that don’t require a college degree to pick up.
Winters’ advice for young people: Think with empathy
In discussing the skills of tomorrow and what advice he has for young people, the Standard Chartered CEO says that soft skills are making a “comeback” thanks to AI—which can already rival professionals with PhDs.
“The technical skills are being provided by the machine, or by very competent people in other parts of the world who have really nailed the technical skills at a relatively low cost,” Winters said.
One key soft skill that’s missing, Winters suggests, is real human connection—and AI is actually making communication worse, not better. It’s become so bad that managers are complaining that Gen Z candidates can’t hold a conversation without a chatbot, and begging them not to use them in job applications.
“I really think in the age of AI, that it’s critical that you know how to think and communicate,” Winters continued. “Not communicate better than ChatGPT, but actually, I’m going to go back to curiosity and empathy.”
While the banking CEO admits that some degree of hard skills are still needed, they’ll only continue to wane in importance as AI takes over more workplace functions. As technology takes over all the heavy lifting, people will have to increasingly engage their human expertise on the job.
“Of course, technical skills are required at some level, but less and less as the machines take out,” Winters said.
Fortune reached out to Standard Chartered for comment.
Soft skills being sought after as AI takes over
While some CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman still advise young people to learn up on AI tools, there’s growing urgency for soft skills across industries.
The number one in-demand skill that companies wanted out of employees last year was good communication, according to a LinkedIn study. And the employment platform’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, echoed that AI has renewed a need for communication, empathy, and critical listening. Plus, it’s not just Gen Z grads who will need to practice talking in the mirror to get the job. Emotional intelligence has even become more important when assessing for management hires too.
This perhaps explains why staffers across the board want training with these skills; employees ranked teamwork (65%), communication (61%), and leadership (56%) as the most valuable when it comes to training workplace skills, according to a 2024 study from Deloitte. Technical skills like coding or data analysis were ranked lower, at 54%.
