Three years ago, Cambridge academics lauded the economic benefits of language skills to society. Not only will direct translation skills be in high demand, they’ll also grease the wheels of international trade, they said.
Fast forward three years, however, and we see Oxford’s associate professor of artificial intelligence (AI) and work, Carl Frey, showing that language skills are one of the first talents to be rendered obsolete, thanks to the march of AI. More broadly, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, published at the start of 2025, suggests that 59% of people will need to reskill by 2030.
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What’s more, a Harvard study published in January found that AI-based disruption is most likely in the kind of recession that many believe will hit the UK during 2025 (the multinational financial services firm JP Morgan suggests that there is a 60% chance of a global recession in the wake of Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policies.)
“The real risk isn’t that skills are changing but that most organisations don’t know which ones to focus on,” says Nelson Sivalingam, cofounder and CEO of tech firm HowNow. It’s no surprise then, that January’s Global Labor Market Conference highlighted the risks posed by the mismatch between skills that industry needs and the skills that people currently possess.
At the conference, Stefano Scarpetta, director of employment, labour and social affairs at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), referred to the challenge as a ticking time bomb for global economies, as organisations lack the skills they need to innovate, and employees lack the skills they need to stay relevant in the changing labour market. How can HR professionals help bridge this skills gap?
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Frey believes that much of the responsibility rests on the state to help with retraining. But as experts routinely argue that AI should be developed with humans at its heart, HR surely has a key role to play in helping employees adapt their skills to working alongside new technologies.
Where to start
For learning provider Udemy, the starting point is to conduct a skills audit or a skills mapping exercise. This allows leaders of an organisation to understand both the skills the business has and the skills it needs. It is a crucial process as, often, people have many skills that either aren’t being used or fall outside of their current job description or role.
"Udemy’s Intelligent Skills Platform, for example, offers solutions to assess an organisation’s skills proficiency across the entirety of its business and/or across specific teams and the employee lifecycle," says Karen Fascenda, chief people officer for the online learning platform Udemy. "It analyses the skills needed to meet organisational goals and recommends the courses teams and individuals should take to reach these goals, thereby addressing potential skills mismatches."
It’s an approach that HowNow also strives for: the company uses artificial intelligence to identify emerging skills that are specific to roles within the organisation, and then adapts learning and development to those needs. Sivalingam believes that that this approach gives the firm the ability to adapt to any identified gaps before they become major problems.
The value of a continuous learning culture
Leaders of the car company Toyota famously aim to have zero layoffs among full-time staff. The business can do this not only because employees are skilled across multiple areas, but because the company invests heavily in reskilling, to help people adapt to the changing requirements of the company. It’s a philosophy that Fascenda thinks should be at the heart of every modern organisation.
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"HR leaders can support these objectives by creating a continuous culture of learning and development, and ensuring that, amidst the myriad of competing business priorities, time is dedicated to upskilling existing employees and built into the employee experience,” she says.
“Businesses must think of skills holistically and recognise that employees possess skills beyond those which are primarily required in their existing roles. With sufficient training, ‘secondary skills’ can be developed and augmented, and talent redeployed elsewhere in the business, mitigating the risk of technological advancements displacing top talent and not having the talent needed to compete."
Data from LinkedIn shows that skills-based recruitment is on the rise, but it’s clear that with AI and automation having such a significant impact on the existing workforce, we also need to think about skills-based talent management more broadly, so that workers aren’t cast aside by the AI tidal wave hitting the workforce, but are instead given the support and the opportunity to ride that wave instead.
