Worries about AI taking our jobs might make for sensational headlines, but they don’t paint an accurate picture.
Yes, generative AI will save millions of hours of repetitive work. But the United States will also face a substantial worker shortage by 2028, according to ServiceNow's Impact AI: 2024 Workforce Skills Forecast.
Organizations can navigate these systemic shifts by fully understanding the skills each employee possesses and creating a four-dimensional workforce. This step-by-step process developed by Heather Jerrehian, vice president of product management for employee workflows at ServiceNow, culminates in companies using AI to map the skills its workforce has today to the roles they will need in the future.
The business case for seeing the workforce in 4-D is strong. By having visibility into the skills of in-house talent, companies can tap into internal capacity and develop targeted upskilling programs to deliver against strategic initiatives more quickly.
“The pace of change is accelerating, and the cost of falling behind is getting more acute,” says Jerrehian. “It's imperative to get started now.”
Explore all four dimensions below and learn how they can help you really get to know your people.
Start With Job Titles
For decades, job titles have been a key ingredient in boosting professional identities while reflecting employee performance. Titles have also had a place in enabling career mobility.
“Everybody’s ego is embedded in how well they’re doing at their job and whether they’re progressing and being recognized for it. Job titles are a means to do that,” says Gretchen Jacobi, head of enterprise at General Assembly, which runs programs that train tech talent.
But Jacobi and other experts say titles are an insufficient proxy for the very real skills you need at a job. At best, they’re an incomplete one.
The argument against leaning solely on titles is that a single, static designation cannot capture work’s complexity. This is especially true today in light of AI’s ability to reshape work and the fundamental nature of our roles.
To support projected economic growth, the U.S. will need an additional
workers by 2028.
Source: Impact AI: 2024 Workforce Skills Forecast, ServiceNow
Business titles have played a really outsized role in talent sourcing and development for a long time. Employers have built these proprietary infrastructures that might give an illusion of a career path but aren’t actually tied to anything more than tenure, say, as you move from role to role.”
Melissa Matlins
Global Head, Workforce Solutions, Pearson
Professional, scientific and technical services will experience the greatest growth in headcount with an additional
people required in the U.S. by 2028.
Source: Impact AI: 2024 Workforce Skills Forecast, ServiceNow
You really need visibility into your talent to enable business agility and get to the four-dimensional workforce. As employers, you can incentivize your workforce to bring their rich work history with them, skills from a prior company or even hobbies with skills that might be useful for the organization.”
Heather Jerrehian
Vice President, Product Management, Employee Workflows, ServiceNow
Using an AI-enabled technology platform, you begin to understand the relationship of titles and skills, mapping them to identify the 12 to 15 core skills required to excel at every role in the enterprise.
And as AI automates repetitive tasks, human skills like critical thinking, creativity and complex problem-solving will become more valuable to organizations, says Jerrehian.
“People bring so much more to their jobs than what’s on their job description. Their outside interests and life experience add to the valuable human skills needed in today's workforce.” Put another way by Jerrehian, “Human skills are the new power skills.”
Skills paint a complete picture of a person’s abilities, even if they’re only marginally related to current or past roles.
“They’re the real transcript of an employee’s expertise, not the job title you see on a resume,” says Melissa Matlins, global head of workforce solutions at Pearson, a provider of educational resources.
Jacobi likens the wealth of human resources to an oil field that companies have been perched atop for some time and haven’t fully tapped.
Match Titles
With Skills
