The issue of skills needed for the 21^st century has been the subject of educational policymaking and research for over a decade; the skill sets have been defined in various educational initiatives in the USA, Australia, the European Union, and the OECD. Many organizations and researchers have produced frameworks of the skills that children and students need in their life and work in the 21^st century (Ananiadou & Claro, 2009; Binkley et al., 2012; Gordon et al., 2009; P21Skills, 2013). These definitions have much in common and all include elements of collaboration, communication, ICT literacy, and social/cultural skills, along with skills such as civic participation, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving (see also Voogt & Pareja Roblin, 2010). There seems to be a recognition that the development of the school system necessitates better embedding of 21^st century skills, as well as new assessment tools and teaching and learning methods, in order to equip citizens to function in the knowledge society (see Krokfors, Kangas, Vitikka, & Mylläri, 2010).

At the same time, some argue that the Finnish school system is at a crossroads, where we have to decide whether a school can operate separately from other sectors of life and society or whether it has to keep pace with and be part of social development (e.g., Pohjola, 2011; Välijärvi, 2011). Moreover, recent research evaluating the implementation of the Finnish National Core Curriculum for elementary education has shown that, even though 21^st century skills are well recognized and referred to at curricular level, they do not yet play a clear role in everyday school practices and are mostly neglected in regular teaching and learning (e.g., Kartovaara, 2009; Niemi, 2010). Overall, economic and societal changes closely related to recent developments in technology and consequently in the characteristics of jobs and the home environment seem to be regarded as the most important drivers of demand for 21^st century skills (Voogt & Pareja Roblin, 2010). Although the 21^st century skills – often labelled as “soft” or “generic” skills – have been widely recognized in curriculum standards, the main emphasis in standards and assessment is still on the “hard” skills that are found in language and mathematics learning as well as “hard” factual knowledge (Scardamalia, Bransford, Kozma, & Quellmalz, 2012, 250). The consensus among researchers in the learning sciences is that these two are not in conflict. Thinking skills and working skills are actually learned best together in their natural context (e.g., Rotherham & Willingham, 2009; Silva, 2009).

This paper presents results from a Finnish study, in which school pupils were asked to anticipate the skills they would need in the future. Accordingly, they were asked to value and rank the 21^st century skills listed in existing frameworks and pick out those they regarded as the most important they had learned. The aim is to take account of students’ own opinions about the importance of the skills they need for the future, how they appreciate and value 21^st century skills, and what they describe as being the most important skills and competences they have learned so far. The study focuses on the following research questions.

1. What kinds of skills do students anticipate they will need in the year 2020?
2. How do students rank and value the importance of 21^st century skills?
3. What skills and things in general do the students describe as being the most important they have learned so far?
4. What kind of gender differences are there?

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