---
id: "quote-half-life"
type: "quote"
source_timestamps: ["¶3"]
tags: ["skill-decay", "urgency"]
related: ["concept-half-life-of-skills"]
speaker: "Jorge Tamayo, Leila Doumi, Sagar Goel, Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic, Raffaella Sadun"
speakers: ["Jorge Tamayo", "Leila Doumi", "Sagar Goel", "Orsolya Kovács-Ondrejkovic", "Raffaella Sadun"]
sources: ["reskilling"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-reskilling"
originDay: 10
articleStem: "hbr-edu-34-reskilling-in-age-of-ai"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2023/09/reskilling-in-the-age-of-ai"
sourceTitle: "Reskilling in the Age of AI"
---
# The half-life of skills is shrinking

> "The average half-life of skills is now less than five years, and in some tech fields it's as low as two and a half years."

— The co-authors ([[entity-jorge-tamayo]], [[entity-leila-doumi]], [[entity-sagar-goel]], [[entity-orsolya-kov-cs-ondrejkovic]], [[entity-raffaella-sadun]])

This is the source's headline framing of urgency and the verbatim basis for [[concept-half-life-of-skills]]. See that note for enrichment caveats (the figures are widely repeated estimates, not a standardized global metric).