There’s never been a scarier – or better – time to be in HR
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend time recently with some brilliant business and HR leaders at Learning Technologies Exhibition & Conference, with the Talent and Leadership Club and in private with our partners at KPMG UK.
HR, Talent and L&D leaders are opening up about their biggest challenges and their hopes and ideas for what’s next. And for all the uncertainty, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: there has never been a more exciting time to be helping organisations transform and people succeed at work.
Yes, the challenges are real. Expectations are rising. The pace of technological change can feel relentless. But there’s also confidence.
Why? Because AI technology provides one of the most valuable problems people professionals have ever had to solve. And we’ve never had better tools, data or insight to help us do it. We can see more, understand more, and act more intelligently than ever. The fog hasn’t lifted entirely, but the headlights are getting brighter – annoyingly bright LED-headlamp bright!
This article is about a few of the key themes that surfaced in these meetings and how they relate to my good friend, skills transformation.
Skills: The Transformation Engine
As I’ve said before, a perspective on skills is critical to driving transformation. Whether you’re enabling AI adoption, unlocking productivity or supporting business agility, it all starts with people, what they need to do and what they’re capable of.
But skills are still too often seen as ‘plumbing’, abstract frameworks or outdated lists that live somewhere between HR and IT. The truth is, this is essential insight and infrastructure. You wouldn’t try to sell a house without plumbing. The same goes here. When done well, a ‘system of skills’ gives people direction and growth, aligned to both their careers and the organisation’s strategy. And it isn’t just about the business; visibility of current and future skill needs is incredibly powerful for engagement and retention.
Forward-thinking leaders are treating skills as a living, breathing system that helps them:
✅ Prioritise what will make the biggest difference
✅ Understand where capability is growing or fading
✅ Plan how automation and AI can reshape work
✅ Anticipate risks and opportunities
✅ Connect people to meaningful, value-driving work
This isn’t a one-off project. It’s a mindset shift, powered by a new dataset. It’s about embedding skills, work and job insights into decisions. It's not a 'vague platitude' (thanks Matty Hogarth!) but rather a 'proper transformation' (parapharing Aleksandra Hertelendi!)
Making sense of multiple dimensions
Skills data is powerful, but it’s also broad. The use cases are both strategic and tactical, long-term and immediate. It’s no wonder it can feel overwhelming.
Add to this the pace of technological change, and many of the assumptions we used to rely on are no longer valid. What got us here won’t get us where we’re going.
HR now must operate across several dimensions, often in tension:
Strategic vs tactical: HR leaders have an opportunity to be closer to business strategy and transformation than ever before; requiring higher-order, strategic thinking. At the same time, how we execute HR is changing faster than ever which also requires attention.
High confidence vs low: There’s a frankly terrifying level of uncertainty about many things. This means we need comfort with ambiguity and mechanisms to know what is ‘solid’ vs ‘making a bet’. Sometimes we’ll need the detail and often that won’t be possible. We need to use whatever data and insight we can to take ‘risk’ based decisions.
Now vs tomorrow: So much of HR’s work right now must balance what is good for today, vs what’s needed for tomorrow. Working it out tomorrow is too late; we must always have one eye on the future. I’ve heard practitioners use language like ‘anticipate’ and ‘sense-making’ which seem bang on to me.
It’s challenging, but this complexity is also an opportunity to build new capabilities, to think differently and to drive transformation more effectively than ever.
Thinking Today-Forward and Future-Back
No single person can hold all these perspectives at once. But a strong, well-constructed HR function can.
Sometimes you need to work today-forward: improving what already exists like job architectures, JDs, reward structures. This ‘meets people where they are’ and ‘gets some runs on the board’, creating momentum and building confidence. For example, overlaying skills on today’s job architecture in a few weeks will give you a rapid baseline of what’s needed right now. You can then decide how to prioritise from there on, linking it to a ‘currency’ people are familiar with using to make decisions: jobs.
But other times you need to think future-back: starting from first-principles and reimagining work, jobs and skills. Not constrained by what exists, but guided by what could exist. To borrow from ‘strategic reframing’ language, what does the preferred future look like? How might we get there? We’ve seen this applied in modern org design; defining the future capabilities required to deliver business outcomes, then working back to the jobs and skills to enable that.
By holding space for both approaches, HR can guide themselves and their organisations through change with clarity and intent.
Learning and Curiosity Over Content
Another consideration is that inherent in this AI-driven transformation is that while the tech changes the nature of work, its value depends on how people use it. This is where I think learning must evolve.
As one person in a workshop this week put it fabulously: It’s no longer just about content, it’s about context. Helping people understand why something matters, how to apply it and where it leads. Tomorrow’s most impactful learning functions aren’t content libraries – they’re engines of clarity, capability and skill development. They enable people to navigate change, connect the dots and keep pace with what work demands. They anticipate the future, facilitating the businesses they support to do the same.
One global banking client of Simply’s is doing just this, using market-driven skills insight to pick apart what one of their critical capabilities ‘relationship management’ really means across their different business units and roles. This is informing how they build and buy this capability going forward, with some unexpected opportunities arising in hiring, mobility and development. They’ve tried to unpick this before, but without the balance of today-forward and future-back and the data to underpin both starting points, it’s been too tough a nut to crack.
Focus Where It Matters
Transformation doesn’t require all the answers. It requires better questions and the confidence to act on the data we do have and what we do know.
We can’t fix everything at once. The world will keep shifting. So smart teams stay focused. They’re clear on what matters most now – for both today and tomorrow – and they align effort accordingly.
This clarity makes it easier to align tactical actions to strategic aims, and to help others do the same. None of this sticks without leadership commitment, so HR’s role is more about shifting mindsets than it is about rolling out systems.
Ready to Seize the Opportunity?
Yes, there’s fear. But there’s also purpose and optimism.
Regulator collaborator Eoghan Thompson managed to fit one of my sci-fi heroes William Gibson into a pres this week: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed" - what he meant was that we've got the tools and data to hand, and we can learn from others on the journey, living in the future already.
We’re working with progressive business leaders – who just happen to sit in HR! – to build confidence in their teams, use data smartly and unlock the decisions that power transformation, skills-powered or otherwise.
They’re prioritising critical talent moves and sharing ideas generously as part of our ‘Skills Enthusiast’ community. They’re not waiting for permission to lead.
And that’s why I think there has never been a more important, and more exciting, time to be in this profession.
Click to read about global fintech Finastra's skills journey.
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