Preparing Your Workforce for Tomorrow
Organisations overall are going through changing environments in the 21st century. The increase in technology is changing how we do things, what gets done, how we make decisions and what skills we essentially need in the workforce.
Organisations need to make fundamental changes to the way they do things instead of just relying on previous competencies to meet future requirements. As a result of all of this, the growing skills gap in employment has become a major concern during this decade. With the introduction and use of artificial intelligence and automation, jobs in all types of industries and organisations must re-evaluate how they’re developing employee skills.
Creating continuous learning solutions, rather than creating one-time training options for skill building, will allow employees to be highly productive and capable of adapting to future requirements.
Skill Gap is Real
The skills gap is growing rapidly, according to a recent report of the World Economic Forum, with almost 39% of workers’ core skills expected to change or be displaced by 2030. Due to the introduction of automated processes or AI technologies. This is not a forewarning; it is happening right now in many industries, including finance, health, logistics, and creative industries.
What makes this change unique from past technological changes is its enormous scope and depth of impact on employee skill development. AI is replacing tasks accomplished through assembly lines, writing copy for advertisements, reading legal contracts, and helping with the diagnosis of patients, among other activities.
Therefore, when developing employee skill development, it is not enough to just develop their technical skills. Employees need to develop critical thinking, adaptability, ethical reasoning and human-centered communication as part of their employee development process.
Continuous Learning Is Now Non-Negotiable
The old way of training employees once and expecting to keep that knowledge forever is gone. Companies that do understand this reality are now changing the way they think about employee skill development. They now create a continuous learning ecosystem with tools such as micro-learning, peer-to-peer mentoring, AI-driven personal development plans, and on-the-job stretching.
AI has also become one of the most important ways to support employee skill development. Platforms such as Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and custom corporate applications utilize machine learning to find employee skill gaps in real time. They will then provide employees with relevant content before their performance drops below standard. This gives employees a continuous feedback loop that feels less like training from a corporation and more like support from a great mentor.
How Leaders Turn Skill Development into Culture
Telling Employees to “upskill or risk being left behind” is unfair and incorrect. Studies show that when workers feel psychologically safe, leaders demonstrate curiosity, and organizations actively eliminate barriers to learning time, employee skill development accelerates much more quickly, and skills are retained for a longer period.
Microsoft and Unilever have both made substantial progress towards this goal. For example, Microsoft has begun to publicly state that it has implemented substantial internal mobility programs.
Eventually, this will give every employee a large amount of time dedicated to learning with no interruptions. Managers would be held accountable for their team’s ability to develop into higher-level positions by providing feedback regarding each employee’s skill development plan during performance reviews.
When leaders treat employee skill development as “shared ownership” versus “individual failure,” the outcomes are life-changing for both employees and organizations.
Tools of the Trade
Companies are increasingly using integrated AI-driven learning platforms that include skill-building as part of their day-to-day operations. Example: Coursera for Business, LinkedIn Learning for personalised learning based on job functions, and Microsoft Viva Learning will remove barriers by providing access to learning within existing work processes and consolidating resources.
In addition, there are other technologies that can help speed up the onboarding process for employees and create greater productivity for developers, including AI-powered solutions like Docebo and GitHub Copilot, while enterprise assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude will reduce time spent doing repetitive tasks related to knowledge work.
There is a consistent pattern among all of these tools: personalization of learning experiences coupled with integration into work processes drives results. But delivering results is dependent upon having a strong organizational learning culture in place to support the use of these technologies.
The Bottom Line
Overall, the organisations that will be most successful in this decade are not necessarily those that possess the most highly developed AI tools but rather those with employees who can effectively use this technology alongside traditional methods.
Through questioning the results, exercising their own judgment and adding unique value by applying human capabilities to each decision made. This type of ability does not happen by chance. It is developed intentionally and continuously through employee skill development at all levels of the organisation. To sum it all up, the advent of Artificial Intelligence provides an opportunity for human beings to be taken more seriously than they ever have been before.
