In this series of articles, I take a look at the HR and workforce trends that are building momentum to help businesses understand what the workforce of the future will look like and how they can prepare for these workforce evolutions. In this article we take how external pressures are putting more focus on workplace skills.
We are ever seeing the pace of life speeding up with rapid evolvements in technology, business and the economy and AI. In 2022 IBM’s research showed that where previously learnt skills had a ‘shelf-life’ of 15 years, this has shrunk to just 5 years. For technical skills this has shockingly shrunk even faster, from previously having a shelf-life of 5 years to nowadays only 2.5 years. This is known as the ‘half-lifing of skills’. Essentially this means that learnt skills are becoming outdated quicker and retraining or re-education is needed more frequently to keep knowledge current. It also means that if those capable in certain skills do not re-educate themselves or participate in continuing their professional development (CPD) that they become out of practice and ‘unskilled’ in their areas of expertise sooner.
This would suggest that the value of skills in the workplace is increasing and even possibly in the future, could become more important and valuable than other aspects such as experience, formal qualifications or seniority. This could lead to workplace changes including:
- Recruitment becoming more and more skills focused
- Formal education becoming less important (e.g. degree)
- CPD, work based learning and short courses becoming more important
- Lower entry requirements for roles
- More demand for training on the job
- Reward becoming more skills focused rather than performance based
Looking even further into the future, it’s clear that artificial intelligence will become a more significant part of the work place. We are already seeing developments (e.g. ChatGPT, the Office for Article Intelligence) which will only continue and this will begin to impact the workplace and the labour market. AI will pick up repetitive, mundane and analysis based tasks through job automation replacing roles in industries where these have traditionally been picked up by people. This will mean that employees in the future workplace will increasingly need to have a more advanced skills set for tasks that can’t yet be picked up by AI. This might include knowledge roles, cognitive based tasks, problem solving skills, interpersonal skills, innovation, design and creativity.
Though some of this is very future focused, it is worth employers considering the following preparations:
- Carrying out skills mapping within the company to accurately record the workforce capabilities and skills, in particularly to understand:
- Available skills
- Relevant skills
- Skills gaps
- Business critical skills
- Working out CPD requirements and / or time to train for relevant business critical roles / skills and feeding this into retention and succession planning
- Considering retention and attraction planning for required talent with key skills to support the organisations future development
- Using skills mapping to match employees into relevant roles or to create development plans for their progression
- Considering how AI currently does, and how it may in the future may affect your business and industry – particularly from a skills perspective
* https://www.ibm.com/blogs/ibm-training/skills-transformation-2021-workplace/
In our other articles in this series, we have looked at the following trends:
- Becoming more Family and Female friendly
- Creating a Flexible and Fluid workforce
- Attracting the worker of tomorrow with ‘career experiences’
If you would like any advice on skills mapping, succession and retention planning, or HR trends, then please contact Kimberley Wallace, Senior HR Consultant on kim@nockoldshr.co.uk or 0345 646 0406.