Leapfrogging AI tech is shrinking the shelf life of skills and changing the way we skill employees
Amelia Kinsinger
Talent and L&D pros can focus their upskilling strategy to help employees harness a number of broad skills and a few deep ones.
By Adam DeRose
August 20, 2024
About a decade ago, understanding DVR and on-demand might’ve felt difficult. A mother (not mine!), perhaps, relied on her adult children to come over to set up recordings or teach her how to rent movies on the TV. You (not me!) spent several years teaching her to master that remote, until it finally clicked.
Then came the streaming apps. All those skills navigating an incredibly complicated remote now rendered useless. New sleeker ones from Siri and Alexa replaced the SUV-size ones, and we’re back to square one. Maybe we just read books by candlelight, Mom.
Tech changes. Skills needed to master that tech changes. Life goes on.
Right now, technological advancements—especially in AI—are changing the way talent leaders and learning and development (L&D) pros are thinking about skills in the workforce. Skills are relevant for shorter periods of time, making it advantageous for companies to focus on a new skilling strategy: the T-shape.
A skills' half-life
Technological and AI advancements have accelerated corporate America’s progress when it comes to productivity and innovation. They’ve also reduced the half-life of skills present in a workforce.
“Where 40 years ago, you can expect a skill to be [useful] more than 10 years on average in someone’s career, today, it’s about four years, and in digital areas like AI, it’s about two and a half years,” said Kian Katanforoosh, a Stanford lecturer on AI and CEO of Workera, a skills intelligence platform. “Every two and a half years you have to refresh your knowledge and skills around AI and digital technology, which has a direct implication on how you run the workforce.”
A skills’ half-life
“We ask one question to every person, regardless of whether you’re a coder or you’re a strategist or you’re a doctor or you’re working in HR. We ask one interview question to everyone. We say: What have you learned in the last six months?”
—Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture
A dwindling value for skills means an increased value in workers who are continuous learners.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said at the 2024 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos that the ability to continue learning was a key requirement for the firm’s workforce. Sweet said Accenture even requires candidates at the interviews to recall something new they’d learned.
“We ask one question to every person, regardless of whether you’re a coder or you’re a strategist or you’re a doctor or you’re working in HR. We ask one interview question to everyone. We say: What have you learned in the last six months?” she said at the meeting. “We don’t care if it’s how to bake a cake, but we have to have people who like to learn.”
According to Katanforoosh, technological advancements are putting every business “under significant pressure” to become a “skills-based organization.” Job descriptions may be less valuable than an assessment of what skills are needed to accomplish a set of business goals and outcomes.
T-shaped skills
That’s where T-shaped skills enter the picture. The shape reflects the need for employees to possess both a wide breadth of skills and deep knowledge about one or two things relevant to an employee’s immediate responsibilities or current project.
“For any given role, some skill requirements are universal. Every team member may need to be comfortable working with data, or solving problems in a structured way, for example. Beyond those basics, however, they will also want to develop a deeper understanding of topics that allow them to make a real difference in their job,” according to McKinsey.
A video editor, for example, might have deep skills in Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and new AI applications for video creation. That video editor might also possess good time management, communication skills, and the ability to take client concepts and storyboard them in great detail.
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“Everybody in the organization [needs to] have a set of durable skills that are applicable for the long term, but also a set of perishable skills that are at the cutting edge of innovation that allow them to be more innovative on their job,” Katanforoosh said.
AI literacy is now among those valuable baseline skills needed by everyone for everyday work. That, too, is different from other tech advancements in the workplace.
“AI is now becoming one of those power skills, one of those durable skills. It was not the case before,” he said. “We sometimes say AI is a horizontal skill. And the reason is that, unlike other transformational technologies—like cloud—AI touches productivity; it touches output of every function.”
“If done thoughtfully, however, a renewed focus on soft skills could result in vastly improved workplaces where human connection, strong values, rich communication, and dynamic innovation abound.”
—Peter Cardon, Professor at USC Marshall School of Business
Katanforoosh said that while cloud technology upended the workplace, it was not necessary for every employee to understand how it worked; it only required a set of specialists to set up and maintain the cloud.
Other soft skills, like cognitive thinking, interpersonal communication, organization, and creativity, are durable skills needed at work that can last.
“If done thoughtfully, however, a renewed focus on soft skills could result in vastly improved workplaces where human connection, strong values, rich communication, and dynamic innovation abound,” USC Marshall School of Business Professor Peter Cardon wrote earlier this year.
What’s HR to do?
Katanforoosh suggested that underlying talent management applications—workforce planning, ATS, LMS, performance management, even rewards and recognition—need to be calibrated to skills: What skills are needed for the business to succeed, who possess those skills inside the workforce, and what’s needed from outside the employee population?
“The first thing to fix is that skills data layer below the application,” he said. “Once we have good skills data, all these applications can work more synergistically and more effectively.”
AI, he said, will also help better identify skills needed and skills possessed by the workforce “in high granularity.” With a better understanding of skills needed within the organization, L&D pros can focus on matching the right skills to the right projects and deepen an employee’s vertical skills on a project basis.
“Measurements are getting better. We are understanding the skills of employees better,” Katanforoosh said. “There is an opportunity for people to perform better, to be on better projects, to be matched with better people, and all of that will overall benefit your organization.”