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Reskilling

Adam DeRose

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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, 

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.

 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.

 has been thought of as something you do separately from 

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.”

image of a hand pushing a learning button with a stylist pen in a digital space

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

AI upskilling requires foundational technology skills, and maybe a new approach to employee learning.

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

Paige McGlauflin

That isn’t just a line delivered in a recorded acting class that became a 

. It also was more or less the warning that SHRM’s president and CEO Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. 

 at the organization’s annual conference last year. This year’s forecast is expected to be the same, he said at SHRM’s latest annual conference held in San Diego last week.

“It’s going to be another monster year,” he told the audience during his mainstage presentation on June 30, citing challenges including AI creating job displacement, 

, and DEI “becoming a four-letter word.”

Taylor outlined the three areas where HR pros can “rise literally above earthly expectations and really make a major difference in how people live, how they work, and how they thrive.”

Number one: Protecting “equal opportunity in a difficult climate.”

 Taylor stood by SHRM’s announcement in July 2024 that the organization would remove “equity” from its diversity initiative and instead call it “I&D,” a move that 

“My fellow HR colleagues, I’m not one that relishes in saying ‘I told you so,’ but we did,” Taylor said of SHRM dropping “equity” last year.

Taylor told the audience that US employment laws “focus on equality, not equity,” and that HR pros must know the difference between doing “what we want to do and what we are legally allowed.” He also said that SHRM will show how to execute on initiatives that are “legally compliant, workplace unifying, and business inclusive.”

When asked later by HR Brew how exactly employers can protect equal opportunity while publicly rolling back DEI programming, Taylor said HR pros must focus on those three factors—legally compliant, workplace unifying, and business inclusive—as guardrails for DEI initiatives.

He also noted there were “some instances” of employers not doing the work in a legally compliant manner, such as creating affinity groups that weren’t open to all employees. When asked how many HR or DEI practitioners were conducting noncompliant programs, Taylor said he didn’t know but pointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 

 to scrutinize DEI-related activities under Title VII.

When asked why SHRM is encouraging companies to shift their DEI programming when much of the law around DEI hasn’t changed, Taylor said it’s because it’s SHRM’s job as an HR organization. He cited the recent Supreme Court ruling in 

Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services

 allowing a reverse discrimination lawsuit to proceed, and striking down a rule requiring someone from a majority group to meet a different burden of proof than those from minority groups as an example. (A veteran employment attorney previously told HR Brew that the ruling 

“We saw this coming two years ago at least, and so it is our job to ensure that the HR member is, for lack of a better term, racing to where the puck is going, not waiting for it, because you lose the game at that point if you don’t see where it’s going,” he said.

Number two: Addressing “human displacement.” 

Taylor followed up on last year’s warning that advancements to technology, including AI, are creating crisis-level skills gaps and job redundancies.

“AI is ripping through the labor market, wiping out entire job categories,” Taylor told the audience. (Though he later told HR Brew that AI “hasn’t yet affected a whole bunch of people, but it will,” and HR pros must proactively address disruptions.)

And who will be responsible for reskilling workers through this mass disruption? Why HR, of course, according to Taylor. HR pros will be “the architects” of how organizations will introduce, explain, and embrace AI, he said, before plugging SHRM’s 

 project, launched last year. However, he also said HR pros can’t stop at reskilling alone, and that in order to make lifelong learning come to fruition, the profession must partner with educators, policymakers, and employers.

“If we don’t help people shift, we’re not just losing jobs, but losing livelihoods, and that’s a failure as a society we can’t afford,” he said.

Number three: Preserving workplaces as “civil sanctuaries.” 

The third and final focus for HR pros that Taylor highlighted, and that he called “bigger” than both DEI and labor displacement, ties into SHRM’s 

“Workplaces are turning into battlegrounds for ideological fights that started somewhere else, literally somewhere else, but ended up at the water cooler, on the Slack thread and Zoom calls,” Taylor said.

Taylor highlighted the threat that incivility has on productivity, citing 

 claiming that when someone is subjected to an uncivil act at work, it takes more than a half hour to regain their composure and refocus on work. But, he said HR pros can help embody civility in the workplace, which can spread into the world more broadly.

“Goodness and compassion happen at work every day, in the open and in the shadows, and if we can model civility at work, it’ll spread beyond work into our communities,” Taylor explained.

When asked how SHRM is measuring the success of its civility campaign, Taylor said he was not deep enough in the campaign to answer.

“My instinct is...the more you raise the awareness of it [incivility], the more likely it is that people will report it,” he told HR Brew.

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Managment (SHRM)

SHRM leader shares his top three challenges for HR pros

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. said HR pros have a “monster year” ahead of them but can stay ahead by addressing the problems he identified.

The top three issues HR pros must tackle, according to SHRM’s CEO

New skills research from HR advisory firm the Josh Bersin Company reveals that skills velocity, how fast employees acquire new skills, affects business performance more than skill depth.

The report examined top-performing companies across six industries over four years and showcases how top-performing companies are outpacing their peers, especially as it relates to AI transformation.

“Technical skills are changing quickly, but then also human skills and interpersonal skills, all of those skills are actually changing pretty rapidly,” said Kathi Enderes, global HR industry analyst and SVP of research at the Josh Bersin Company.

The new report focuses on the importance of skills velocity and its connection with success.

“It’s not so much the depth of skills, that’s certainly important, but it is what we call skills velocity: how adaptable they are, how quickly you can recalibrate into new skills, into different skills,” Enderes said.

The report highlights “pacesetter” companies that learn, adapt, and adopt new technologies, practices, and models faster than their peers.

These “pacesetters” are performing well financially, their customer satisfaction is recognized, they’re known as leaders in innovation and market share by others in the industry, and they have a strong employer brand and talent strategy, according to Enderes.

The findings revealed six key components to a skills strategy shared across “pacesetter” companies regardless of industry. These companies believe in:

AI for growth, not just efficiency: AI’s true value isn’t just cost-cutting, but it can also help boost customer and innovation outcomes.

Continuous innovation as standard: Skills must constantly evolve to reflect the ongoing need for innovation in every role in the organization.

Work redesign for productivity: Redesigned workflows with better alignment to skills and skill needs is shaking up traditional hierarchies.

Talent density over quantity: Teams with “complementary, evolving skills” help employees move from entry-level roles to more skilled ones.

Change management to agility: Forward looking orgs change fast and leverage skills velocity to be more agile in the market.

AI-powered systemic HR: Companies must deploy AI-powered HR systems that bring agility to talent, skilling and recruiting strategies.

 AI technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that even 

 don’t know exactly what’s coming or what’s even possible.

Concerns or skills needed to best leverage generative AI were quickly supplanted by those relating to agentic technology. Earlier this year, 

 moves to ship AI agent subscriptions for knowledge worker agents, coding agents, and PhD-level research agents, at a fraction of the cost to employ a human, unleashing a whole new 

AI execs have invested resources into developing (currently) theoretical Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) technology. Social media giant Meta, for instance, invested billions in a 

 staffed by top talent from AI companies from Silicon Valley.

“Skills velocity is getting more important, because the speed of change is increasing more than ever,” Enders said. “We all know that the AI that we have today is the worst AI that we’ll ever have because it’s gonna get better and better and faster and faster. We don’t even know what’s coming.”

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

Top companies prioritize skill velocity over depth as AI technology evolves rapidly and changes workplaces along the way

“We all know that the AI that we have today is the worst AI that we’ll ever have.”

Growing up the sandbox was full of treasure: weird shaped rocks, pillbugs, coins, tiny plastic toys left and forgotten by a previous visitor. It’s a place of wonder for children, provided the neighborhood alley cat doesn’t also bury treasure there.

Sandboxes are small plots dedicated to play, creation, and sometimes destruction, especially in service of building something greater. It’s an apt analogy for a space created for employees to play with AI at work.

Rather than rely solely on IT departments or outside consultants to implement AI tools across the organization, some companies are creating internal ‘sandboxes’ of sorts that provide employees with the space to experiment, tinker, and even build their own applications, and are finding it’s a great way to center an AI strategy.

Thinking about AI from the ground up rather than top down helps with adoption inside the organization. It can ease anxieties about AI’s place at work and how humans fit into the new paradigm. It also can further innovation from inside the company, with the aid of the people who actually do the work: your employees.

“Organizations, if they want their company to survive through this transformation and thrive…they need to be providing employees the opportunity to use these tools and understand how they can evolve, how it will evolve business models,” said Mary Alice Vuicic, CPO at Thomson Reuters.

 Vuicic and her colleague from the technology team recognized the transformation potential early after the launch of ChatGPT, and set out to articulate a strategy focusing not only on the global news and professional services firm’s approach to adopting the technology but also its talent strategy amid this AI transformation.

At Thomson Reuters, the people strategy centered around “Four Ts” to prepare its workforce for AI: tone from the top, training, tools, and time.

“You have to get hands-on experience to understand,” she said of “tools” and “time.” “We’ve seen a huge shift when that happens.”

. The secure internal “sandbox” offers the entire Thomson Reuters workforce, all 27,000 employees, access to leading large language models to explore AI in the workplace and gain hands-on experience interacting with the tech to foster a culture of experimentation, as well as trial and error.

“Everybody can use it, and it is secure,” Vuicic said. “We encourage people to go in [and] start their work in that sandbox.”

More than half of Thomson Reuters employees are now using Open Arena regularly, and the company is starting to track usage and report its findings back to employees and their managers to foster transparency about AI use at the company.

Open Arena also helped facilitate the company’s AI champions program. Some 400 Thomson Reuters employees are AI super-users and are helping to coach peers and design use cases on how to better use it at work, she said.

“Innovation and problem solving can come from anywhere in the organization,” Vuicic said. “That’s very different from how a traditional organization structure works.”

 Other global companies are also seeing that employee involvement is critical to scaling AI. At collaboration and team-based project management software company Atlassian, non-technical employees aren’t just end-users, they’re also AI builders.

Atlassian uses its customer-facing generative AI tool, Rovo, internally. Atlassian’s strategy includes engaging teams across the company to build tools tailored specifically to their workflows.

CPO Avani Prabhakar told HR Brew that this results in both faster adoption and deeper ownership over how AI shapes work for Atlassian employees, pointing to widely used agents built out by her HR team.

“We have Rovo agent, that’s the tool that you get,” Prabhakar said. “Our team has been able to build an onboarding agent on top of it. That agent is called Nora…It is built by [the] HR team, so I don’t have to worry about adoption.”

Because HR leaders involved in onboarding at Atlassian helped ideate how AI could improve or impact the experience for new hires, Nora acts more like an “onboarding buddy” for new hires, answering “dumb” questions like those a new hire may be too embarrassed to ask a supervisor or colleague and to walk employees through their early days. This tool, built by actual HR professionals, is used by 70% of new hires, according to Prabhakar.

“The good thing with non-tech users like HR is like, ‘Oh, I can create my own agent, it’s not being done by the IT team and then given to me to work with,’” she said. “ It’s just a very different notion.”

Atlassian’s most popular AI agent lives inside its performance management system, APEX, Prabhakar adds. It can assist in drafting talking points, and also help employees create written content or feedback. The tool also helps managers consolidate information from 360-degree feedback, peer feedback, and other places into a coherent assessment.

“Because you are letting employees tinker with the technology, then there is more buy-in, but also it eradicates all the fear that sits around it,” Prabhakar said.

Vuicic and Prabhakar agree that letting workers explore the tools for themselves—and not simply participate in training—creates a shift in mindset and eases adoption and fear. Adopting the new technology becomes less about enforcement and box checking and more about learning, engagement, and career transformation.

“They get past anxiety or fear about, ‘What is this technology’ and, ‘What’s it going to do to my job,’” Vuicic said. “But then it becomes a delight, because it’s so accessible,” adding that she imagines a future wherein the remaining work—what’s not modified or impacted by AI—actually becomes more human.

And that unexpected employee delight is a business advantage too, Vuicic said, adding that top talent expects access to AI now.

“They want to be future-proofed, and so they will leave and go to companies, or they won’t join companies that don’t give them that access,” she said.

two suit and tie types on their laptops in the sand

AI strategy can be built on sand, and in this case, it’s a good thing

Some companies are letting their employees play in the AI sandbox and it’s helping generate use-cases and alleviate AI anxiety.

HR pros seem to have hard feelings about “soft skills.”

Soft skills are generally understood to encompass non-technical, interpersonal job skills, including communication, critical thinking, and collaboration competencies. HR leaders say these capabilities are more important than ever as technological changes like AI or remote work reshape how jobs are performed.

But it’s hard to miss that HR leaders seldom 

 say the words “soft skills.” In fact, some want the people profession to stop using the term altogether.

The term “soft skills” first appeared in military training documents (created by the now-defunct United States Continental Army Command) in the early 1970s, initially describing any skills not involving using machinery or weapons. It emerged in the corporate lexicon in subsequent decades. Today, these skills are generally understood to encompass non-technical, interpersonal job skills, including communication, critical thinking, and collaboration competencies.

In recent years, interest in the term has skyrocketed, driven in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, when the corporate world quickly adopted remote work and suddenly the only human-to-human interactions were happening over Zoom. Leaders worried that workers, Gen Zers in particular, 

weren’t developing interpersonal competencies

 because they were missing out on social learning that occurs naturally in-person.

“There is that need for these skills, especially with the new generation that’s coming into the workforce,” said Carina Cortez, chief people officer at the talent experience platform Cornerstone.

“The Gen Z group did enter with video as their main interaction point. And there is something to be gained by entering into an office environment that’s very different than entering through a Zoom environment,” she told HR Brew.

With AI now poised to take over many of workers’ day-to-day tasks in certain jobs, leaders realize that 

these interpersonal skills are even more important

 because technology can’t replace them.

“The pace of change is so fast that we need to bring people along. And as we think about the role that AI is playing, it’s even more critical to engage, lead, help support, the people that are around us,” Sara Morales, SVP, people partner sales & marketing, country, and employee relations at Cisco, told HR Brew. “And there’s data that shows that employees who believe their managers care about them, have higher engagement and performance. We need them to help balance out everything we’re seeing from a technology and AI standpoint.”

That said, HR leaders interviewed by HR Brew say they dislike the term “soft skills.” And, as these competencies attract a greater focus amid several shifts in the nature of work, they think it’s time to retire the term.

“I’ve been doing talent management for 30 years, and I’'ve probably slipped once or twice, but I’ve never intentionally used the word soft skills in my career,” Chris Ernst, Workday’s chief learning officer, told HR Brew. “It’s time to put the soft skills, hard skills, completely to rest, I feel, because fundamentally the term soft skills unintentionally diminishes the perceived value of the essential skills that are needed, especially in the AI era.”

One large reason given for the pushback against the term is that “soft” often has a “negative perception,” as Morales said, in the business world. Just consider “soft market,” “softening demand,” or “soft management,” as a few examples.

“It mistakenly gives the appearance of diminished value in comparison to ‘hard skills,’ those skills commonly viewed as more technical and quantifiable,” Patricia Bravo, a leadership development consultant and former HR manager, said. “Soft skills have a perception problem. Their return on investment can be equitable, yet more hidden. Because their return is less visible, they are more easily discounted.”

Not all HR leaders dislike the term. While Ty Beasley, chief talent officer at audit, tax, and consulting firm RSM US, prefers to say “durable skills,” he doesn’t have a problem with “soft skills.”

“Maybe it’s because we’ve been saying it for so long, when I think of soft skills, I don’t look at the negative side of it,” he said.

Numerous terms have emerged as substitutes in place of “soft.” Common examples given by HR leaders interviewed by HR Brew include “core,” “durable,” “human,” or “interpersonal” skills.

But are there downsides to using a myriad of alternatives instead of "soft skills," which, despite its flaws, might be better recognized?

“While alternatives like ‘human skills’ or ‘real skills’ attempt to elevate the perception of soft skills, they can introduce ambiguity or perpetuate the same undervaluation issue,” Jelena Djordjevic, CPO at home services company Thumbtack, told HR Brew via email.

“I think language is important, so I’m hopeful we will land on a common term,” Cortez said. But what’s most important, she noted, is building up the skill sets that these terms actually encompass.

“What’s good, I think, is that the skill sets that make up this group, whatever you choose to call it… they’re the same group of skills, and I think people are understanding that,” she said. “So just to use the terminology consistently within your own organization will be the key.”

Other leaders echoed that sentiment. Workday, for example, uses “core skills,” and further defines the term as relating to the company’s six core values, Ernst said.

“There may be some risk of having different nomenclature, but the most important thing I would advise an organization to do is to organize your skills around your business strategy and your culture, and in a way that makes sense for your organization.”

Keyboard keys spelling "soft," with a mouse cursor placing the "T" key into a trash can, while a paper in front reads "skills." (Credit: Anna Kim)

HR leaders want to ditch ‘soft skills’

The term elicits negative connotations, and HR leaders think it’s time to ditch it.

HR leaders think soft skills are more important than ever—just don’t call them ‘soft’

The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) won significant raises for its 45,000 dockworker members this month after a three-day strike that briefly threatened shipping and international trade.

That victory, however, was colored by ongoing efforts at the ports to address automation and its potential effect on long-term job security for its members, which remains very much unresolved.

“One of the things that strikes me is it doesn’t matter what the group is or what the industry is. We are seeing this pop up in just about every industry,” said Alexander Alonso, the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) chief data & insights officer.

The dockworkers strike to protect jobs in the wake of leapfrogging automation technology mirrors broader employee sentiment toward the technology as it shows up more and more at work.

Unease and fears in the workplace about automation and AI tools, like those that have become wildly available for businesses thanks to advances in generative AI, remain as more employers adopt tools that have the potential to amend employee workflows.

“Most HR professionals report out that about one in five of their workers have a healthy mistrust of automation and or some form of automation like artificial intelligence,” Alonso said.

However, HR professionals have the potential to help facilitate this transition to an AI-enabled future of work. One way to address job security concerns among employees is education, both education on AI and how to use it at work, as well as reskilling efforts for those displaced by the technology, he said. Some 72% of global CEOs 

 by KPMG between July 15 and August 29 expect generative AI will not affect the number of jobs at their organizations, noting that upskilling will be needed. Meanwhile, 27% believe it will result in job creation.

HR professionals are shifting from a “full-blown transformation” mindset toward AI integration to thinking about how this is an educational opportunity, he said, “Really the skilling stage and the commitment that exists right now in any one organization is to understand: How do I build the kind of workforce planning mix that allows me to skill people, and at the same time integrate these kinds of tools?”

HR leaders can lean into this AI momentum by focusing on skills and looking at talent differently.

“If anything, AI might actually be the best friend of a skilling movement in most organizations,” he said. “It’s going to propel me to want to engage in skills-based hiring [and] skills-based talent development more so than if I was doing HR business as usual.”

Dockworkers strike depicted American employees’ healthy mistrust of automation and AI

This is a moment for HR to step up and help ease the transition for employees.

“Skills-based” is one of the latest workplace buzzwords to take the HR world by storm.

 a skills-based talent strategy, some are further down the road, including Workday. The enterprise management software giant, which ventured into the skills territory with the 

 of its Skills Cloud for clients, shared updates from the last year of its internal skills-based transformation during its annual conference in Las Vegas.

At a session hosted by Josh Tarr, director of Workday’s skills-based organization, and Doug Chartier, principal of Workday’s people and purpose accelerator team, three successful use cases from its strategic skills initiatives were highlighted.

“Over the last year, we think we’ve been able to drive real value from some of these skills initiatives,” Chartier said.

The first use case was around Workday’s skills data. Chartier’s team reviewed the company’s existing repository of HR data, looked at skills in global markets, and used workplace skills intelligence platform TechWolf to create a skills inventory.

Chartier and Tarr’s team then distilled that data into 20 to 30 skills that it shared with 2,600 people leaders across the company, asking them to rank the skills based on importance. They then consolidated that information into digestible formats so business unit leaders could choose the 10 to 12 skills that they believed were most critical to their organizations. Their team also used AI and machine learning to clearly define each skill so that conversations with people leaders were consistent and improved, each skill highly understood.

It then shared the skills with employees, with a goal of getting 75% of its workforce to list skills on their job profiles within the Workday platform by the end of the year. However, Chartier said at the conference that the company is ahead of schedule, as 85% of its employees (15,000 workers across 300 job types) have critical skills listed on their job profiles.

The second use case focused on employee mobility. Based on employee feedback from sources including Peakon, Workday’s employee feedback software, Chartier’s team realized that there was a lack of clarity around the skills employees needed to advance.

His team took skills data and embedded it into its internal talent development platforms and quarterly performance check-ins to ensure alignment between workers, managers, and leaders on the most-needed skills.

The company saw a boost in internal mobility. At least 30% of Workday’s hires between February 2023 and January 2024 were internal candidates, 

 to its Global Trends Report. And 80% of these internal hires were more likely to be rated as a “top performer” in their first performance check-in in their new role than external hires.

And more than 4,000 employees participated in Workday’s 

, contributing to a 42% increase in mobility, Chartier said.

“Gig roles have a really great role to play for us,” Ashley Goldsmith, Workday’s chief people officer, told HR Brew. “We’ve had thousands of employees take advantage of gigs. The returns from them—they stay with us longer, they get promoted faster, their engagement is higher—just across the board, is good for us.”

Starting small with skills-based hiring. 

Third, Workday experimented with skills-based hiring in its sales organization, which hires hundreds of account executives annually. While a company can remove recruiting criteria like degree requirements, hiring managers may still use these to make hiring decisions, Tarr said.

“Hiring managers get one, maybe two shots a year to get this right, so no wonder they’re going to rely on things that are more comfortable to them, and we were seeing this too within Workday,” Tarr said. “We were hiring for way too many skills, and doing so inconsistently, and that made drawing a line of sight to quality of hire…really hard.”

Tarr’s team and the sales team refined its interview process, creating standardized interview questions based on 10 critical skills. In the last 12 months, 500 account executives were hired under this strategy. Workday’s sales organization saw a 32% reduction in time-to-hire, an 11% increase in offer acceptances, and a 51% increase in candidate net promoter scores. Based on this success, Workday is rolling out skills-based hiring across the entire company in October.

Overall, the biggest takeaway from Workday’s last year of skills-based transformation was thinking of the initiative as an enterprise-wide effort, not something just housed in HR, Goldsmith said.

She also noted the importance of thinking big, but starting small, referencing the use case with piloting skills-based hiring for Workday’s sales team. Workday settled on a pilot for a few reasons, she explained. First, because the organization hires at a high volume, making a reduced time-to-hire critical, and second, because the leader of the sales department was interested in participating, securing for HR the executive buy-in that is critical to success.

“If you really have strong alignment from the executive team, that this is something we should do as a company, then you can really gain great momentum,” Goldsmith said.

A photo of Workday's headquarters in Pleasanton, CA.