The bottom line
The useful life of knowledge and skills is shrinking while the volume of available knowledge keeps expanding.
Why it matters
That changes the competitive advantage from possession of expertise to the ability to locate, absorb and apply new knowledge quickly. Just-in-time learning becomes an operating capability rather than an occasional training activity.
From the foresight archive
Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #5 on 2025-06-30. He revisited it one year later on 2026-08-11, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.
In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: Confirmed — and it’s getting more urgent, not less. “Knowing how to know it” just became the actual job description.
This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.