From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Learning and Development

Mikaela Cohen

hr-brew.com

Move over, Boomers and Gen Xers. Millennials and Gen Zers are ready to take over.

Nearly 80% of the global workforce will be made up of millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha by 2034, according to 

. And this year, millennials surpassed Gen X as the largest share of managers for the first time in the US, Glassdoor 

“Every time there’s a new generation that enters the workforce, there’s always this shift of style,” said Matt Poepsel, VP and godfather of talent optimization at talent software company the Predictive Index. “Even when Boomers entered…They were saying, ‘What do we do about this manager who’s showing up with bell-bottom jeans and mutton chops?’”

Now that millennials have transitioned into leadership and managerial roles, and Gen Zers are right on their heels, people leaders will need to adjust strategies to cater to their differences and preferences.

 Every generation faces similar challenges entering the workplace and advancing their careers, Poepsel told HR Brew, but they also have distinct characteristics and experiences.

“About every 15 years, you have this interesting dynamic where people have a similar set of lived experiences. They’re contemporaries, but they’re also a reaction against what came before,” he said, later adding, “When Gen Z showed up, they said, ‘We want to be heard’...and ‘We want you to change some things around here.’’”

Gen Z leaders will likely be more accountable and authentic than those from generations prior, Olivia Meyer, a member of the Gen Z networking group The Z Suite, told HR Brew. “We are a generation that, I think, is known for holding each other accountable,” she said. “We call out things that we don’t like, or different campaigns or different companies where we can clearly tell that they’re not being authentic.”

Poepsel agrees with Meyer. Gen Zers want the workplace to be real, authentic, and honest, he said, because they don’t want to pretend there aren’t issues. “They’re talking to each other about their diagnoses, and their dosages, and everything else, and they come to work, and we’re supposed to pretend like we don’t have any mental health issues at all?” Poepsel said.

Gen Z and millennials will lead differently, and it’s evident in their approach to work, said Tara Salinas, a professor of business ethics at the University of San Diego. Millennials, for instance, are known for their openness to new ideas, according to Salinas, while Gen Zers are more tech-savvy and adaptable.

But Salinas warned that Gen Z leaders, specifically, may need more learning and development (L&D) at work to unlock their potential.

Gen Z’s interpersonal skills have been stunted due to the pandemic and social media, Salinas said, so she said HR teams need to develop training programs for “seemingly basic” workplace conduct, like how to connect with coworkers and have thoughtful conversations.

“Instead of having them floundering and frustrated, from an organizational perspective, if you give them the tools, they’re in a better position, and your organization is in a better position,” she said.

Poepsel recalled a similar experience, when a Gen Z employee told him, “I don’t get email.”

“I thought it was entertaining at first, but then she said, ‘It really stresses me out.’ I thought, ‘Oh no, I don’t want you to be stressed out about email, something as silly as email’...That was a real opportunity to check my preconceived notions about, ‘Of course, everyone understands email or likes email.’ No, that’s not true,” Poepsel said.

HR teams can help Gen Z workers in situations like this by offering email etiquette training, Poepsel said. They can also train older generations to communicate via platforms that come more naturally to Gen Z, like Slack. But this isn’t the only L&D strategy that could use a revamp, he added.

“Is it mobile friendly? Is it unpolished? Because if not, it’s not trustworthy in Gen Z,” he said. “And how often do we see other Gen Z people in our training videos?”

If organizations don’t help younger workers, then “what are our organizations going to look like in 10 years?” Salinas said. She recommended HR pros help millennials avoid falling into the old-school mindset of, “I had to figure it out, so you have to figure it out.”

“It’s not a useful attitude for developing an organizational culture that is supportive and that makes employees want to stick around,” Salinas said. “There’s always a risk when you say, ‘Oh, Gen Z is this. Millennials are that.’ Obviously there always could be outliers, but I think HR needs to take the line that this is what is good for the organization.”

Cutout of a man working on his laptop contained in a shape collaged next to a close up of stars on a desk name plate.

How HR can adapt to the up and coming generation of leaders

People leaders should focus on change management strategies as millennials, and eventually Gen Zers, take on managerial and leadership roles.

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

With the labor market cooling, experts have said that now is the best time for employers to invest in 

. The only problem is that companies aren’t actually doing that.

. Despite a modest increase in hiring demand in the first half of this year, internal hiring and promotion rates have actually fallen.

Hiring demand was up 6% year over year in the first half of 2025, down slightly from the 7% YoY increase in the first half of 2024, according to Workday’s internal data and external surveys.

However, internal hiring fell 8% YoY, and only 30% of all hires in June were internal. Additionally, promotion rates fell in 10 of the 11 industries tracked by Workday; manufacturing was the only one to see an increase in promotions.

“It is pretty rare for 10 industries to see a promotion recession all at the same time,” said Phil Willburn, VP of people analytics, insights, and experiences at Workday. “That was very surprising to me in our latest data.”

It’s creating some frustrations. More than 57% of job seekers feel stuck in today’s labor market, according to one of the surveys conducted by Workday for the report. (High performers, who are often more likely to land opportunities even in cooling markets, aren’t feeling so stuck, though: Attrition for high-performing employees was up in every single industry, with the largest spikes being in retail and healthcare, up 64% and 28% YoY.)

AI transformation may be to blame, Willburn said. Many companies have been eager to adopt the new technology, but haven’t necessarily focused on training their workers to use it. (Just 21% of business leaders surveyed by Workday believe investing in AI tools and upskilling will be a key retention driver in the next year.) Instead, they’re focused on getting these skills from external hires, which may push high-potential employees out the door.

“You need to have a clear and strong narrative around AI, because high performers, above anything else, they need growth,” Willburn said. “They want growth, and as soon as they feel slightly stagnant, they’re the ones who always have opportunities.”

 that HR leaders need to be involved in AI strategy with their C-suite peers, according to Willburn. Without a clear roadmap and communication around AI, workers will be left in the dust, lacking critical skills and fearing displacement. (Relatedly, 44% of employee comments about strategy and AI were negative.)

“When all of these tools are being rolled out, and then the CEO is like: ‘Why aren’t we adopting when we’re spending this much money?’ This is when HR is now coming in and saying, ‘This is how you actually drive behavior change,’” Willburn said. “My hope is that this is a wake up call for many organizations, and that then HR steps in and you’re going to see this improve in the near future.”

characters running across a crevice with a hand of "skills" helping them cross

Employers aren’t focused on internal mobility, research finds

Today’s cooling labor market is the perfect opportunity for employers to upskill and promote their own employees. They aren’t doing it.

Employers are failing to prioritize internal mobility, according to Workday research

Speakers

Questions?

As skills gaps widen and AI reshapes workflows, HR leaders face growing pressure to rethink talent strategies, career pathways, and development plans. This event explores how data-driven insights and skills intelligence can help organizations close gaps, boost retention, and future-proof their workforce.

Mind the Skills Gap: Preparing Your Workforce for What’s Next

Ingrid Hu Dahl’s journey to becoming a great leader started when she noticed how different she was from her peers.

Sun Shining on Morning Snow: A Memoir of Identity, Loss, and Living Boldly

, the leadership coach and speaker shares how grappling with her identity impacted her career, and why she hopes other leaders and HR pros will approach leadership with empathy.

“This is a leadership book. It’s a book about how I came to become a leader, from the lens of identity, and choice, and choosing to learn every step of the way and to choose to connect with people despite all of the series of projections,” Dahl told HR Brew.

We chatted with Dahl about more insights from her book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I absolutely wrote this book to lay bare my authentic journey and invite people to step into my shoes as I experienced xenophobia, and how I slowed down as a child being inquisitive about being asked the question, “What are you?” every day by typically white adults. And this search for identity and trying to fit in, but not belonging anywhere. I didn’t belong with the white kids or along with the Asian kids, and it continued throughout my life, and so I got really comfortable being an outsider. But I was very bold, and there’s been also a lot of rejection and loss in my life, which a lot of people can relate to. And, so, I’ve just been seeing a lot of people say, like, “Wow, I really saw myself in her story,” and this is a cis-white Jewish man down the street who’s in his 70s.

I ultimately wanted this to be a couple of different things. One was, how do we help, through my story and my lens, bring us closer to humanity?...There’s also such a huge reconciliation story between a mother/daughter anchored in sexuality. I absolutely struggled with my mother, who did not want me to be gay, and I’m absolutely a lesbian, and she struggled with that…It’s also this painful connective point around coming out, coming of age, losing my mom, because I’ve chosen myself, not what she wants, but what I who I am, and before she ultimately passes from cancer, which is a really beautiful, dramatic part of the book. She has, and we have, this beautiful, transformational experience together of forgiveness and healing, and intergenerational healing.

How did those experiences impact the work you do?

Being somebody who’s been in learning and development for about 20 years, and leadership development for the more recent five years being an executive coach, I have connected with a lot of people and have experimented with a lot of different learning solutions around behavior, and around what does good leadership, or empathetic/high emotional intelligence, high self-awareness, look like in the workplace. How do leaders actually create conditions for people to thrive?

People were like, “Why didn’t you write a leadership book, or a book around inclusive leadership, or something that reflected your expertise?”...All of the vignettes that make us who we are continue to shape how we lead, and how we choose to belong, and how we model to our teams, how to interact with one another.

What are some HR takeaways from the book?

When I work in these corporate settings and run teams, I tend to be known for my empathetic leadership and people want to follow and be in my teams…We choose to believe in one another, and I recognize and value that that is a choice every day that you’re making, and sometimes you’re going to have a day where you’re like, “I feel like shit. I don’t like the company, or I just am cranky.” And, that’s okay. But to be seen and to be able to show up full of your fallibility, or mistakes you might make, not knowing how to do something and need to ask for help—those things are important to feel safe.

For people who are curious about this particular way of leading from somebody’s perspective who grew up as, “the outsider, the other,” is a very telling example of transformational leadership from this point of view, and to lay there and understand all of these things that made me who I am, that shaped my lens. I hope it will be inspiring to people who are leading differently, and have come up, from growing up, multiracial, multicultural, bilingual…I felt like sharing that story from the beginning to present was more important than writing a straight up leadership book.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Ingrid Hu Dahl, author ‘Sun Shining on Morning Snow’

“All of the vignettes that make us who we are continue to shape how we lead, and how we choose to belong, and how we model to our teams, how to interact with one another.”

Growing up as an outsider made this leadership coach a better leader

What would the world look like if employees introduced themselves not by job titles but by their skills inventory?

While it isn’t realistic to introduce yourself in everyday conversations with, “Hi, my name is Stacey. I write code in Python. I design products. I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years,” one author suggests HR pros think of their employees as these skills instead of just, “Stacey, the director of product design.”

Craig Friedman, a talent and skills transformation leader for the Illinois-based St. Charles Consulting Group, highlights the importance of companies becoming a skills-based organization in his new book 

Enterprise Skills Unlocked: A Blueprint for Building Skills-based Talent Management

Friedman shared with HR Brew what people leaders will learn from his book.

What does a skills-based organization look like?

Skills [are] largely about data…and that’s one of the misconceptions around it…If we had skills not just tied to learning courses and on people’s profiles, but they were tied to everyone’s job descriptions, and especially tied to the work tasks, whether that’s in a workflow, or in a staffing assignment, or job posting…we can actually leverage a whole bunch of more adaptable, more efficient, more tailored talent strategies across the whole value chain.

We can create more personalized learning pathways, so we get [a] broader reach of learning, development, of leadership development, more flexible work design, more career mobility options for employees, [a] deeper reach for recruiting, more strategic workforce planning.

What’s an example of how HR can focus on skills for roles and projects?

One way that consulting companies are leveraging these concepts is through talent marketplaces. The core of a consulting business is getting people staffed on projects that are billable, and when people are not on projects, they’re essentially like inventory in a warehouse accumulating, carrying charges…So, anything you can do to get the right people staffed on the right projects more efficiently leads directly to revenue capture.

If they’re using a talent marketplace where they’re posting open staffing assignments, the machine learning in the talent marketplaces can scan across all of the employee profiles, find people who are the best matches. And, even if they’re not a 100% match, say you’ve got someone whose skills profile is a 90% match, the system can automatically tee up the project onboarding for that 10%. No extra effort on anyone’s part. No one has to create a project onboarding plan.

How can HR help their organization adopt a skills-first mindset?

You can make a lot of progress building in the long term a skills-based organization or skills-based enterprise one meaningful project at a time, and one of the best ways that I’ve seen companies do it is by finding a business issue that is tied to skills.

I had a client that worked in the mining industry. The market was changing in such a way that they needed to dramatically expand their copper mining business, and in order to expand their copper mining business, it so turns out that most of the copper that they’re mining today is near the surface of the earth. If they want to dramatically increase it, they need to dig deeper into the earth to get some more copper.

But underground mining is a completely different set of engineering practices than surface mining, so they have to develop a whole lot of new underground mining skills in order to expand their business. With the help of a skills-based organization, they can much more effectively find the talent that they need, define the skills that they need through a variety of different strategies. 

They might do skills-based recruiting to get it from the marketplace…They might move people around internally, the build, buy, repatch, borrow strategy to try to meet that capability need and get to market quickly.

What role does AI play in skills-based organizations?

For most of the last 40 years, our HR systems have been all based at the employee level. We hire employees. We give them a job title. We give them a salary and benefits, and an email address and a phone number. Slot them into a job. Everything that HR does is focused at the headcount level.

Skills-based [strategies] takes that down a level of detail, and in taking it down a level of detail, it’s both more granular, but it’s also more informative. Because skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish. So, it moves the whole exercise of talent management from being a headcount management exercise to being a capability development exercise.

An interview with Craig Friedman, author of ‘Enterprise Skills Unlocked’

“Skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish.”

HR should stop thinking of employees in headcount—consider them as a collection of skills

Is getting promoted always the best thing to happen? There’s little doubt that many employees wouldn’t turn down a pay bump, but one author suggests that promotions aren’t always positive.

More companies are reconsidering promotion structures to include both non-management and management role tracks, 

, so employees can advance their careers without necessarily jumping into people management.

But even when employees decide to take on a people management role, some of those “superpower skills” that got them promoted might work against them, according to Sabina Nawaz, executive coach, speaker, and author of 

You’re The Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)

Nawaz shared with HR Brew how people pros can help employees be aware of some adverse effects of stepping into leadership.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

This book, for HR professionals, is a two-fold resource. One is for themselves, and the other is for the clients that they support. There are three key things in the book that reshape our thinking about power, pressure, and leadership, and particularly leading in these times. The first one is that getting promoted is often the riskiest time in your career.

The second is that it is not power, but pressure that corrupts us. Under pressure, we act out, we get shorter, we get snippier, and then power comes in, and isolates us from the impact of those actions under pressure. So, we are often the last ones to find out that we’re actually doing damage and becoming innocent saboteurs for our teams, as well as our business results, because nobody wants to tell someone in a position of power what they don’t want to hear.

To the first point, what do you mean by promotions are risky?

When we get promoted, of course, it’s obviously an occasion for great celebration. At the same time, we haven’t changed, but our position has changed. We’re in a new level, and we have new rules. If people are not aware of that, it comes [back] to bite them.

Let’s say somebody is really attentive to details. It’s a superpower of theirs. That is what got them noticed and promoted up the ranks. Now, suddenly, as a manager, they’re going to be viewed as a micromanager because while we haven’t changed, the necks that are craning up to look at us, their view of us becomes less charitable, and also, sometimes people feel a sense of threat when somebody is in a position of power because they have so much control over our lives.

What does a good or effective manager look like from your perspective?

I don’t know that there is such a thing as a purely good manager or bad manager. They both reside under us, and it goes back to one of the earlier points I mentioned around pressure, that pressure actually changes how we act. 

There were times in my career where people told me I was the best boss they’d ever had, and there were times in my career where people told me I was the worst boss they ever had. Actually, they didn’t tell me that, they told other people.

Did I have a personality transplant? No. Did I act differently? Yes. Did those actions change because of the amount of pressure I was under? Absolutely. 

I’m not saying we should use that as an excuse, but to recognize that we’re capable of both types of behaviors we just have to be mindful of how we manage pressure. Because, if you think about it, pressure is also great. Diamonds are forged under pressure. It’s like an invitation to grow. We don’t realize the brilliance, the resilience, the creativity that we have unless we’re under pressure. So it doesn’t have to define you, it can refine you.

An interview with Sabina Nawaz, author of ‘You’re The Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)’

“When we get promoted, of course, it’s obviously an occasion for great celebration. At the same time, we haven’t changed, but our position has changed. We’re in a new level, and we have new rules. If people are not aware of that, it comes [back] to bite them.”

How having promotable skills can have adverse effects on employees

Adam DeRose

In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you are.

Before Workday designed any AI learning or adoption strategy for its workforce, execs first needed to understand where employees were at both as it related to their skills and sentiments and to identify their needs amid this workplace upheaval.

“It’s not just a technological transformation, it’s very much a human one,” said Chris Ernst, chief learning officer at Workday. “Even though we’re a technology company in Silicon Valley, when we began our upskilling journey on AI, we started with research, and we’ve learned a lot.”

The firm surveyed employees to better understand the barriers to AI adoption. What Workday discovered ended up informing the cornerstones of its AI adoption initiative: Everyday AI.

According to the company, the global focus groups revealed three key data points to build its strategy around:

43% of Workday employees lacked time to explore AI tools

37% said they weren’t sure how to use them effectively

37% revealed concerns about reliability and accuracy

“Once we deeply understood our Workmates,” Ernst said, referring to Workday employees, “their needs, their concerns, their use cases, we went really big on this, and we’ve launched an enterprise upskilling initiative…The goal of this program is for all of our nearly 20,000 Workmates to build the mindsets, the skills, and the habits to use AI effectively every day.”

Changing mindsets at Workday involves giving employees more exposure to AI tools and their capabilities to really address baseline fears around how AI will impact their work.

“The mindset piece really is about that fear and that concern,” Ernst told HR Brew. “The way we’ve really been working on that..is through a lot of events around the company.”

The company launched its first ever “prompt-athon,” inspired by the popular Big Tech practice of hosting hackathons, events for developers and teams to work together or in competition to address problems or challenges with a technology or tool.

To address upskilling at Workday, the learning team created one digital academy for all things AI available to all employees. The content is organized by different personas of users, so employees can learn about AI strategies or use cases based on their specific role or project they’re assigned.

The academy serves more as a choose-your-own-adventure: Employees can identify exactly what they’d like to do with AI, and the platform surfaces relevant training based on different personas, such as “innovator,” “communicator,” and “analyst,” according to Ernst.

To foster good AI habits, Ernst asked all employees to set a personal AI goal, share that objective with their managers, and check-in quarterly on the progress.

Additionally, instead of communicating from the top down about the AI plans from senior execs, Workday opened up a company-wide town hall to spotlight the work of employees leveraging the tech in important or interesting ways that are really meaningful to Workday’s business.

“All of this is creating the conditions to want to learn,” Ernst told HR Brew. “Our highest performers are twice as engaged with these technologies. We also found that those who are most engaged with these technologies…feel that they have a 13% increase in their sense of having a career path.”

Workday employees are reporting that since the launch:

73% found that AI tools make them more productive;

50% said it provides them new insights; and

“This is the biggest enterprise learning and development initiative we’ve taken on in 20 years as a company,” Ernst said.

An AI robot robot sitting side by side with a businessman at an office desk working

How Workday narrowed its talent strategy for AI enablement and skill building to focus on three things

“The goal of this program is for all of our nearly 20,000 workmates to build the mindsets, the skills, and the habits to use AI effectively every day.”