In 2022, Raven published a reflection on where digital learning for green aerospace skills was heading, framed around the idea of “Web 3.0” – a coming stack of spatial (AR/VR), physical (IoT, robotics), cognitive (AI, quantum computing) and distributed (blockchain) technologies. Four years on, it’s worth being honest about which parts of that forecast held up, because the answer isn’t “all of it.”

What “Web 3.0” actually meant in 2022 didn’t win

At the time, “Web 3.0” was widely used as shorthand for a blockchain- and metaverse-centred vision of the internet’s future – decentralised ownership, immersive virtual worlds, tokenised digital assets. That specific framing has largely faded from mainstream technology and education discourse since 2022, alongside the broader cooling of crypto and metaverse enthusiasm that followed. Blockchain-based credentialing and metaverse classrooms remain niche experiments in professional training rather than the mainstream delivery model the original article anticipated.

What actually reshaped training was generative AI

The 2022 article’s “cognitive tier” – AI, machine learning, and the promise of a platform that could act as “the professional’s workplace companion” – turned out to be the part that mattered most, just not in the form anyone quite predicted. The rise of large language models and generative AI from late 2022 onward changed how digital training content gets built, personalised and assessed far more than distributed ledgers or virtual worlds did. Adaptive, AI-assisted learning tools are now common in professional and vocational training generally; the specific mechanism was the surprise, not the direction.

AR and VR hardware did keep improving – new headsets reached the market through 2023-2025 – but their footprint in day-to-day aerospace professional training remains limited to specific use cases like simulator-adjacent scenario training, rather than the broad shift to “metaverse classrooms” the article envisioned.

What held up: the underlying premise

The article’s actual thesis – that green skills (per Cedefop’s definition: the knowledge, abilities, values and attitudes needed to live in, develop and support a sustainable and resource-efficient society) need to be built as a cross-cutting competency rather than a bolt-on module, and that the technology used to deliver training would keep changing under it – has aged well. What’s changed is which technology stack is doing the delivering. The goal stayed constant; the “Web 3.0” label attached to a specific, and in hindsight partly wrong, guess about how we’d get there.

This article supersedes an earlier Raven piece, which remains on the site for historical reference: Future Proofing the Globe’s Mobility: A Web 3.0 Approach to Green Skills Development (2022).