Is it time to hire a chief skills officer?

People have worried about technology taking their jobs since the Luddites destroyed textile and weaving machinery during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. And to be sure, some industries will be impacted by the continued rise of automation.

IT professionals, telecommunications staff, retail and wholesale workers, and support technicians are most at risk of being automated out of a job by 2027, according to research from Pearson, which uses machine learning to help businesses prepare for the future of work. The same research shows that countries such as the United Kingdom will require tens of thousands of additional application developers to meet the demands of digital transformation.

“We all saw organizations adapt and reskill at speed during the pandemic,” says Janice Burns, chief transformation officer at Degreed, a digital learning and upskilling company. “Many companies with retail operations recognized that they needed to adjust their business model to service customers differently. In response, progressive companies quickly upskilled their front-line employees to do other roles that could be performed remotely in both their customer support areas and data analytics functions.” 

Healthcare organizations also had to adjust their operating model due to the shortage of clinical staff. As a result, they quickly upskilled and reskilled their office and administrative employees to perform clinical support roles. “By skilling these new employees, organizations were able to redeploy employees and save jobs, meet a new customer need, and adapt to new and unexpected market demands,” says Burns.

Retailers that shut down their physical storefronts used workers’ technology skills to run their businesses online, she says, and car manufacturers pivoted to make ventilators and other medical supplies. Burns believes that “if organizations could move quickly to evolve during the pandemic, they can do the same now.”

In addition to training and upskilling, businesses can develop their capacity for sophisticated skills-matching. For example, administrative support workers are especially at risk of elimination over the next five years, according to research from ServiceNow and Pearson. By identifying the types of digital skills these workers have, they can be matched with new roles. In this case, administrative support workers have transferrable skills that will make them good system administrators, according to this research.

However, skills-matching is complicated, requiring significant time and resources. “In a lot of organizations, nobody truly takes ownership of skills management,” says Burns. “The need for a single owner, or a chief skills officer, is becoming more apparent each day.”

The same automated tools that are driving the need for skills matching can also augment the process. AI and machine learning can quickly parse the types of roles likely to disappear in the near future and match employees with the training they need to advance.

Beyond automation, companies are looking for creative ways to expand the pool to include underrepresented talent. For example, talent programs like RiseUp with ServiceNow are designed to train the next generation of workers while filling the talent gap.

“The exciting part is that the demand created by emerging technologies like GenAI is creating new pathways into tech,” explains Regan Morehouse. “RiseUp with ServiceNow is all about widening access to meaningful technology careers by delivering those in-demand skills.”

These are the same principles that businesses used to survive the pandemic, says Burns. “Organizations were able to save a large portion of their employee base by reskilling,” she says. “If we can do that in the short-term during times of crisis, [who’s] to say we shouldn’t be doing it in the long run?”