The Great Reskilling: How market trends, demographic shifts and AI will impact your talent strategy

Work as we know it has been upended over the past three years. We saw the Great Resignation as employees reevaluated their work/life balance. While some say this pandemic-era trend is coming to an end, others forecast that 70% of U.S. workers are planning to leave their jobs in 2023. Productivity is also falling at its fastest rate in nearly five decades as the “return to office” battle between employees and employers reaches a fever pitch.

It’s time for HR and organizational leaders to face a hard truth: Work is never going back to the way it was. Trying to push pre-pandemic norms and policies is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It’s just not going to happen. Instead, efforts should be directed toward fostering what a new normal looks like as we head into the next era of work, which I like to call the Great Reskilling.

Why Do We Need To Reskill?

Here's some context for our current situation. The pandemic gave people the opportunity to evaluate their priorities in life, so employees’ relationships with their jobs fundamentally changed. As a result, people became unmotivated and disengaged with the current structure of work. We see this trend continuing through the rise of quiet quitting and the abundance of viral content around Sunday Scaries and Bare Minimum Mondays.

People want work that gives them purpose, fulfillment and opportunities to grow. But on the other side of the equation, employers have a business to run. They need to be productive and profitable. These differing goals, however, aren't inherently at odds or achieved at the expense of the other. It's a balancing act, yes, but one that's attainable if we begin to think about work in an entirely new way.

We Need To Rethink Jobs

Organizations must first reimagine the way they approach workers and jobs. We generally think of a person’s role as a way to define their job within an organization; "Jane is a marketer, and her job is being a marketing manager." But the most forward-thinking companies have begun the shift away from this rigid way of thinking through a skills-based lens. Jane's no longer just a marketer. She's a person who can plan a budget, write content, use Salesforce and Google Ads, etc.

Early adoption of this way of looking at people for hiring, career pathing, advancement and more has proven astounding results. Skills-based hiring creates a more resilient workforce and can be an effective strategy for employers to prevent attrition. This strategy is five times more predictive of job performance than hiring for education and more than two times more predictive than hiring for work experience.

But this is only half of the story. A skill by itself doesn’t mean much. So we've still been trying to match skills to jobs, which are often nothing more than static and rather superficial job descriptions. How many of your current job descriptions detail the work that the person is supposed to do in a way that isn’t outdated the moment you post it?

We must think about jobs in the same way we've evolved our thinking about skills. If you can have visibility to the tasks, education, experience and other requirements of each job, then you have the actionable counterpart to skills.

That's the key to rebuilding work in a way that simultaneously matches your business's most critical needs to the best resources and gives your people the opportunity to do meaningful, purpose-driven work that aligns with their passions and preferences. Employees won't be constrained by a certain role or pigeonholed into a specific career path, and your company will have the agility to address rapidly changing business requirements in response to the market, artificial intelligence or anything else. It’s a win-win.

Investing In The Great Reskilling

Enter the Great Reskilling. What I’m discussing here isn’t just a theoretical philosophy; the market is demanding this shift. We see it as the shelf life of skills gets shorter every year. The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs report predicts that nearly 70 million new jobs will be created globally, while 83 million will be eliminated by 2027. Right now, 87% of executives are already experiencing skills gaps in their businesses or expect to face them within a few years. We can also expect a talent shortage for the next couple of decades as Baby Boomers exit the workforce.

No organization is immune to these changes, but to minimize the impact, they can invest in learning and development programs that reskill and upskill their employees. By unbundling jobs into sets of skills, organizations can gain greater transparency into the competencies that exist across their workforce. With the help of technologies like AI, they can then reengage employees by matching their existing skills with open opportunities or giving them an opportunity to upskill in desired areas.

This is also just good business. Reskilling and upskilling can save organizations an average of $136,000 per employee, compared to the costs of layoffs. It’s incredibly more efficient to source skills from within your existing talent than to search externally or to let go of someone who may have the exact skills needed to fill a different task or position that you need.

A skills-based economy is the likely contender to help organizations innovate around big workforce changes. However, the transition won’t happen overnight, as many organizations are still operating at the status quo because it’s keeping them afloat for the moment. But the time to start thinking about and implementing a new skills-based strategy is now. It may be your best bet for unlocking your organization’s potential.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

Learn more about what it takes to implement a skills-based strategy in this practical guide