As a 22-year-old man who’d just completed his college degree, Shashank Bhushan believed at the time that he understood everything he would need to thrive in his professional life. “I thought, ‘I’ve studied it all and I know it all,’” said the chief talent development architect and VP of HR at BMC Software. “I never realized that learning is a process that really never ends.”

Bhushan, who later saw the light, made his observation as part of a From Day One panel discussion, “Focusing on Skills, Rather Than Jobs, to Meet Future Workforce Needs.” When applied to talent management today, an outlook on long-term learning such as his can be a key driver of employee retention. According to a September 2022 study from LinkedIn, companies that provide professional-development opportunities and optimize internal-talent mobility retain employees for an average of 5.4 years, which is nearly double the rate of companies that struggle in this area. 

Learning, particularly in the form of upskilling or reskilling, keeps employees engaged, the study notes. But perhaps even more vitally, learning also prepares organizations for prospective shifts in production requirements and desired outcomes. “The work is just changing so rapidly,” said Carly Ackerman, director of customer experience for VIP accounts and partnerships at Eightfold, an AI-driven workforce growth platform. “It’s becoming increasingly important for us to be able to evaluate the likelihood of an individual with the skills of today to be able to rescale or upskill successfully and apply those skills that they have today to a new context tomorrow.”

Added Bhushan: “In today’s world, where the evolution of work is happening much more rapidly than before, the skills become obsolete that much faster. The goalposts will keep on moving as time progresses.”

But how can employers anticipate those skills and then align employees with opportunities for upskilling and reskilling? What are the best ways to anticipate future roles, so that career paths and succession plans can be put into place? The four expert panelists, in conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman, senior editor at Fast Company, outlined some strategies. A few important takeaways:

Fall Back on Your Company Mission

Keeping in mind a given organization’s primary goals can help ground its learning and development (L&D) programming. “It’s important that you look at: Why are you there? Why does your organization or company exist? What’s the mission? What is the vision?” said Carmen Canales, chief people and belonging officer for Novant Health, a North Carolina-based health care system. “For us, it’s quite simple: We are here to serve the patients–and that really gives us clarity around what are the things that are key.”

Canales said in the case of Novant Health workers, speed is oftentimes critical in making sure patients and their families have what they need. 

Ensure Workers Produce at the ‘Top of Their License’

A worker’s rate of productivity can be optimized by bringing greater efficiency to their daily responsibilities. Canales said at Novant Health they have examined duties carried out by registered nurses, for example, and figured out how some of them can be “supplemented” by other staffers. 

“Things as simple as taking out the garbage from the room takes time from the clinically talented person,” Canales observed. “It’s really using people in what we call at the ‘top of their license.’ In our brand, it’s registered nurses doing registered-nurse things, and us looking at what other roles are still fulfilling and exciting and important that don’t quite require that level of education or experience.”

Identify ‘Adjacent’ And ‘Timeless’ Skills

Having workers stay in their lanes and leverage their current skills will boost daily productivity. But in strategizing for more long-term workforce sustainability–a necessity considering  the talent shortage in many industries–a broader approach is required. 

A company’s employee management team wants to “certainly understand the most top, in-demand skills of today, but make sure you’re prepared to understand those skills’ adjacencies,” said Ackerman, “so that you can really help yourself and your people be prepared for whatever the next set of top skills might be.”

Jed Davis, VP of organizational development and learning at NCH Corp., a Texas-based global provider of industrial-maintenance solutions, observed that, in service to customers, businesses can easily get “stuck in a loop where you’re reacting instead of anticipating.” Too often, companies develop tools and training programs to fix the problems of today, but just as they’re being rolled out, they may not be as relevant anymore.

“So one of the things that we’ve been focused on is trying to really zero in on some of the timeless skills, those things that we feel like will help us regardless of the occasion over the next five to 10 years,” Davis said. “In doing so, that creates the space and also the credibility and the trust to talk about what’s on the horizon and do a better job partnering with our businesses.”

As Ackerman noted, these “adjacent skills” and “timeless skills” can vary in terms of desirability, as they’re dependent upon many factors, such as the type of industry in which a company operates. But one area that can be a focus for talent managers are the soft skills their workers and potential candidates may bring to the proverbial table. Soft skills are “extremely transferable” and “potentially predictive of success,” Dishman observed, while noting they are more difficult to teach.

“Technology skills can be learned, and [oftentimes] they die off or migrate into some other alternative skills rather quickly today,” Bhushan said. However, “if the person has the ability to adapt, there is resilience, there is the ability to persevere,” he added, that worker is probably going to prove adaptable and be someone who can remain on a team through inevitable changes in a given industry’s landscape and job expectations. 

Leverage Technology 

There is technology that can help companies identify needed skills of the future. Ackerman discussed how Eightfold has been able to harness the power of AI to do so. “It’s really incredible the amount of data that we’ve been sharing, capturing, aggregating across so many different resources,” she said. “We can scrape publicly available data and start to understand the shape of where there are some real skills penetration within different industries. Ten years ago, we certainly wouldn’t have had a study hitting your inbox on a random Tuesday telling you what the top skills are.” 

At Novant Health, Canales said they are using AI technology to “supplement people, not replace people,” as part of an effort to “get really creative” in the face of a talent shortage. One way this initiative has manifested is in the use of tablet-based, language-translation apps in lieu of real-person interpreters on the job. “We also are taking advantage of predictive tools so that we can be a little bit more precise about staffing and understanding where our peaks are likely to be,” Canales said. 

And with the normalizing of remote-work tools throughout the pandemic, Canales said the current technological landscape provides “an opportunity to even think beyond our borders, to consider international hiring, to understand what is the work involved in operating in a different footprint that you may have operated in because there’s a whole wealth of talent out there in the world beyond where you may currently be operating.”

Reexamine Job Descriptions

Repositioning hiring officers to seek out skill sets as opposed to job experience starts with a reexamination of job descriptions in help-wanted ads.  “What usually happens is, when the hiring managers are filling up these descriptions, they’re looking at the skills they already have in the [talent] groups,” said Bhushan. “So we do not have a very sound methodology of forecasting and saying, ‘What are the evolution of the skills that we are really looking for?’”

When a company loses an employee and is looking to backfill the position, Bhutan said, they should ask: “Do I really need to backfill that position with the same set of skills that we had in the past, or do we need to look in the future and say, ‘This is what I really need.’ And that’s a constant struggle.”

Reformatting job descriptions in such a way that compels candidates to apply based on their skills as opposed to past experience will prove valuable and widen the pool of options. “We’re going to see more organizations thinking more deeply about the work that needs to get done,” said Ackerman, “and the outcomes that the organization is trying to drive, because that is what’s going to help you create your roadmap for where you are today and where you need to get to from a skills perspective to drive those outcomes and to deliver that value that you want to drive.”

Make the Time for Learning

If a company is going to dedicate itself to upskilling and reskilling, it must recognize that the learning won’t manifest spontaneously. At a foundational level, it will take time and resources that, on the surface, might not seem available with employees already maxed out with responsibilities. But that shouldn’t stop the process.

“You need to revisit the current workload, you’ve got to make space,” said Canales. “This shouldn’t feel like a burdensome, extra thing [for workers].” Removing tasks from workers dedicated to learning is a must if they’re going to get the upskilling and reskilling they want and may be required.

“​​We find time to watch Netflix, right?” added Bhushan. “Why wouldn’t we find time for learning? If learning and building your skills for the future are the fuels for your own career, you find time for it.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.