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.
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Faster than a speeding bullet. AI technology is evolving at such a rapid pace that even execs at top AI companies 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, OpenAI announced 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 set of concerns and issues.
AI execs have invested resources into developing (currently) theoretical Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) technology. Social media giant Meta, for instance, invested billions in a “super intelligence” unit, 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.”
