Cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling needed amid ongoing AI transformation

AI skills aren’t the only urgently needed skills to ready the workforce for the AI transformation. Skilling across workplace technology—not just AI—will be critical to successful AI-enablement projects, new research from Coursera and AWS finds.

The survey of technology leaders across top global firms finds that 88% agree planned AI investments will not succeed without increasing investments in skills development.

“Despite all this technological transformation and automation and speed that you know these leaders…still believe that humans are irreplaceable,” said Coursera’s CPO Marcelo Modica.

But the findings are a bit more complex. While AI upskilling is obviously important to success, technology leaders say cloud, data, and cybersecurity upskilling are also essentially needed, especially in the next three years, or AI initiatives spearheaded by organizations may underdeliver or even fail, according to the report.

A workforce with strong cloud skills remains a top priority because cloud infrastructure plays a fundamental role in every digital initiative inside the organization, including AI projects. Data skills are needed as data quality and good governance are required to successfully deploy AI solutions, and cybersecurity responsibilities will grow with expanded cloud and AI infrastructure.

“Those technical skills in themselves are changing very rapidly,” Modica told HR Brew.

So what’s HR to do? Modica told HR Brew that readying the workforce for this AI transformation calls for a new strategy for employee learning.

Learning in the AI-enabled future will require more “practical skill development, working on real projects, practicing skill assessments,” he said, and importantly “risk-free experimentation.” A culture of experimentation, innovation, and failure, “the louder the better,” will best prepare employees for participating in the future of work.

In the past, learning has been thought of as something you do separately from working. Employees stop working to participate in a training program, but according to Modica, this new culture always requires learning.

“Now more than ever, these things have to be very tightly webbed together on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “From an HR perspective, this idea of continuous learning is going to be really important…As these new technologies roll out, constantly thinking about that training in a day-to-day workflow as opposed to separate.”