Predicting the skills needed for tomorrow will be one of the major trends for HR in 2023, writes Dominic Holmes.
As organisations in the UK and beyond begin to face up to emerging talent shortages, skills have become the new currency for employees and employers.
While technology has been revolutionary in many areas of business and has the potential to dramatically increase productivity, only 30% of CEOs believe their workforce has the right skills to fully benefit from it. This is despite 90% expecting digital transformation to disrupt their organisation.
According to the World Economic Forum, the top two skills most needed by 2025 are analytical thinking and innovation, and active learning strategies. Yet these, and other skills that are highly desired by employers, are in short supply. This means that employers are completing over a scarce resource.
Furthermore, the World Skills Clock has estimated that 67% of young people globally are without the digital skills they need, and PwC has found that 77% of adults need to learn new skills now or completely retrain to improve their future employability.
Action is needed to ensure employees’ skills remain relevant and valuable as organisations look to reap the rewards from advancements in technology. However, Cornerstone has found a significant difference in employer and employee attitudes to their organisation’s skills development strategy; just 55% of employees had confidence in their skills development plans, compared with 86% of employers. In high-performing organisations – which score highly in terms of diversity and inclusion, employee development, customer satisfaction and other measures – this confidence gap reduces significantly.
We also found that 96% of high-performing organisations enable their employees to acquire skills that interest them, and 80% of employees in these businesses see assignments that ‘stretch’ them as key to their career development.
Predicting the skills needed for tomorrow will be one of the major trends for HR in 2023. This could require investment in artificial intelligence to analyse the data HR teams hold about the skills their employees possess, and the gaps that are likely to emerge.
Establishing where these gaps are and addressing them in company learning programmes will be essential for organisations looking to stay ahead of the curve.
It is also a continuous process; organisations need to carry on identifying and developing skills strategies to keep pace with developments in technology and changes in their industry.
To find out more about the 2023 HCM trends, read Cornerstone’s EMEA People & Workplace Trends Report for 2023.
