Across industries, HR, Talent, and Learning leaders are being asked a hard question:
“Why should we invest in skills—right now?”
At our November Skills Roundtable, leaders from manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, retail, and tech shared how they’re making the case for skills with executives, managers, and employees—and what’s actually working.
This article distills the key themes, real-world practices, and metrics they’re using to move skills from idea to funded priority.
Why Skills Are Back on the Strategic Agenda
Skills aren’t new. What’s changed is the context:
- AI and automation:
Organizations that can’t redesign work around AI tools risk being undercut by competitors who deliver similar outcomes with less time and cost. - Talent shortages and retirements:
Some employers are facing up to 40% of their workforce retiring in the next five years. Hiring alone won’t close the gap. - Evolving workforce expectations:
Employees, especially millennials and Gen Z, expect learning, growth, and a sense of meaning in their work—not just a paycheck. - Constant disruption:
Economic shocks, new regulations, geopolitical events, and shifting customer demands all increase the premium on workforce agility.
A skills-powered organization does three things well:
- Maintains good, current skills data: what people can do now and their potential to grow.
- Manages the workforce in an agile way: quickly matching skills to priority work.
- Enables continuous feedback and learning: treating skills as a living system, not a one-time inventory.
Theme 1: “What is a Skill?”—The Definition Problem
The top concern participants highlighted was:
“People are unsure what ‘skills’ actually are and what value they bring.”
Executives and long-tenured leaders often say, “We’ve always learned on the job. Why change what’s worked for 50 years?” Some HR teams hear, “Isn’t this just competencies 2.0? We tried that already.”
We also see a split in how different groups think about skills:
- Frontline operations think in very granular, task-level skills (e.g., making a specific product the “right way,” operating a particular machine).
- Corporate functions think in broader, more abstract capabilities (e.g., stakeholder management, data literacy).
This creates fragmentation and skepticism.
What’s working:
- Translating skills into local language and value. One leader from an artisanal restaurant chain described skills as the way to preserve the original concept and quality as they scale from 10 to hundreds of locations.
- Being explicit that skills don’t replace jobs or org structures; they give you a more precise and flexible way to talk about capability, development, and deployment.
Theme 2: Skills as a Career Currency
“Clear career paths” emerged as one of the strongest “What’s in it for me?” messages for employees.
Leaders highlighted that skills data:
- Helps employees understand transferable skills across functions and job families.
- Surfaces non-obvious moves—for example, someone in IT who is an 80% skills match for a marketing role.
- Makes internal opportunities more visible, which is both a retention and recruitment lever.
One participant from Liberty Mutual shared how their internal career hub lets employees:
- See the skills required for success in their current role
- Explore roles they may already be a strong match for
- Build a plan to close specific gaps
For candidates, being able to say, “We’ve built career pathing and upskilling into how we operate” is a differentiator.
Theme 3: Skills as Operational Risk Management
Skills aren’t just about “development.” They’re increasingly about operational continuity and risk.
Leaders shared examples such as:
- Manufacturing: When someone calls in sick on the shop floor, supervisors need to know who is proficient and certified to safely run a specific machine—today, not in theory.
- Healthcare and maintenance of high-value equipment: Assigning work to someone without the right skills or certifications can mean downtime, warranty issues, or compliance risk.
- Retirement cliffs: With a large portion of the workforce retiring soon, some organizations are using skills data to drive cross-training and talent pipeline planning.
In these contexts, skills are less a “modern HR project” and more a core operations and risk mitigation tool.
Theme 4: Skills as a Competitive Edge in an AI World
One story from advertising made the AI impact very tangible:
If a copywriter bills four hours to write a brochure, but a competitor uses AI plus editing and bills two hours for a comparable result, the competitor has a built-in pricing advantage.
The point wasn’t just about speed. It was:
- Without skills in using and integrating AI tools, you can’t compete on price, speed, or sometimes even quality.
- The organizations that learn how to reconfigure work around AI will rewrite the cost and value equations in their markets.
Skills in this context mean:
- Skills to use new tools
- Skills to redesign workflows
- Skills to analyze where AI adds value and where humans must remain central
Ignoring this is, in itself, a competitive risk.
How Leaders Are Measuring ROI on Skills
Executives rarely fund skills work on belief alone. Leaders shared several ways they’re making the impact measurable:
1. Hard cost savings
- A healthcare example: when hospitals defaulted to calling the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for maintenance, it cost 7–10 times more than sending internal technicians.
- Once they built a skills and certification database, they could confidently assign internal staff—unlocking significant, visible savings.
2. Engagement and behavior change
One organization is:
- Comparing engagement scores between employees who’ve gone through a skills program and a control group.
- Targeting managers whose teams have not entered development goals, putting those managers through training, and then measuring whether goal-setting behavior changes.
This connects skills initiatives with tangible shifts in engagement and leadership behavior.
3. Skill growth as a KPI
Especially in early pilots, some leaders focus on:
- Establishing a baseline for key skills
- Running an intervention (training, hiring, cross-training)
- Measuring skill growth over time
While skill growth doesn’t always translate directly into dollars, it is a concrete signal to functional leaders who know they are short in a particular capability area.
What’s Blocking Skills Adoption?
The Mural exercise looked at three personas—employees, managers, and leaders—and three messaging lenses:
- “What’s against my interest?” (WAMIs/resistance)
- “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM/benefits)
- “Burning platform” (cost of inaction)
Common barriers included:
Employees
- “Just another flavor of the month.”
- Fear that skills data will be used to replace, not develop them.
- Distrust about how assessments are done and where the data will go.
- Lack of guidance on how to build the skills that matter.
Managers
- Perception that skills work is too complex and adds to an already overloaded plate.
- Skepticism after previous efforts (competencies, frameworks) that didn’t stick.
- Pressure to deliver short-term results eclipsing longer-term capability building.
Leaders
- Time and attention: upskilling and workforce redesign can feel like a big lift without immediate payoff.
- Uncertainty about what counts as a “skill” and how to judge proficiency.
- Over-reliance on outsourcing by default when internal skills and certifications aren’t visible.
One research-backed insight that came up: fear of loss is roughly twice as motivating as promise of gain. Effective messaging for any persona needs both:
- “Here’s how you benefit if we do this”
- “Here’s what we risk if we don’t.”
Practical Advice Leaders Shared
A few patterns from the discussion that you can adapt:
- Anchor skills work in concrete business problems.
Start with a specific use case:
- A plant with staffing gaps
- An area with high onboarding time
- Roles tied to quality, safety, or compliance
- Career paths with high turnover
Rather than starting with a massive taxonomy, start with a real problem executives want solved.
- Translate into local value for each audience.
- Executives: competitiveness, risk, cost, and strategic options
- Managers: better staffing decisions, lower turnover, more capable teams
- Employees: fair opportunities, targeted development, clearer career paths
- Use both benefits and burning platforms
Combine inspiration and pragmatism:
- The promise of career mobility
- The risk of losing out to competitors using AI
- The cost of unnecessary OEM service calls
- Measure something early, even if it’s imperfect.
Use early pilots to show:- Skill growth
- Internal fill rates
- Reduced outsourcing or OEM spend
- Engagement lift in pilot groups
- Start simple, start soon.
As we tell clients: simplicity is your friend. Over-engineering architecture and governance can stall momentum. A small, real result builds the credibility you need to expand.
Turn Insight into Action: The Skills Readiness Snapshot
Many organizations are somewhere between “we know skills matter” and “we don’t know what to do next.”
That’s why we offer a Skills Readiness Snapshot—the same starting point we use with Fortune 500 organizations before larger strategy engagements.
In a focused 45-minute working session, we will:
- Benchmark your current state across six critical capabilities:
Culture, Partnerships & Governance, Data, Architecture, Analytics, and Technology - Identify practical 6–12 month and 12–24 month milestones for each capability
- Co-create a concise, leader-ready briefing that you can use to:
- Align HR, Talent, and business stakeholders
- Secure executive buy-in
- Prioritize where to start without getting lost in complexity
There’s no cost and no obligation. It’s designed to help you cut through analysis paralysis, get a clear view of where you stand today, and choose a realistic path forward.
If you’d like to explore whether a Skills Readiness Snapshot is right for your organization, you can book a time that works for you.