Andrew Mina

We’re seeing a fundamental shift in employee expectations.

Employees are no longer asking, “What is my next role?” Instead, they’re asking: 

• What skills am I building?  

• Where can those skills take me?  

• Will my organization invest in my growth? 

These are important questions to consider when we talk about skills and AI.  

I believe employees now expect organizations to support their development and not only for their current role, but also for future and adjacent opportunities. The expectations are also extending further: ‘What else could be growing?’ and ‘What else could I learn?’ 

Employees are also looking for a new form of recognition. Don’t just recognize me for my years of service, the work I’ve completed, or the KPIs I’ve achieved. Recognize me for the skills I bring to the organization. This challenges us to rethink how we value and recognize skills. 

When looking for a digital platform to record your employee’s skills ensure it has the capacity for employees to include the skills they have, and they can even say to what level they believe they’ve got the competencies in those skills. And not just the employees but the managers as well. This can unlock internal opportunities and help organizations respond quickly to short-term projects and stretch assignments.  

This gives leaders greater visibility into capability across the organization and enables them to respond far more dynamically. 

This shift will also impact how rewards are viewed. Employees increasingly want recognition for the value their skills create rather than simply for tenure. This raises important questions about compensation, benefits, and bonuses, and how they can better reflect the capabilities employees bring to the organization. 

We’re beginning to see performance management evolve. Skills are increasingly being recognized as key inputs to performance. Employees bring their capabilities to work, apply them effectively, and generate results. This creates an opportunity to rethink how performance is measured and discussed. 

We need to connect people to learning and opportunities while helping them understand the value of their skills to the organization. This also facilitates peer mentoring matching, because maybe there’s someone in the organization who already has those skills who are one or ten projects ahead and already has the skills you’re looking to develop. 

Next is a space that I really love to create these recommended learning plans. We can personalize learning at an individual level. It’s not a case of, do this, do this, do this, but now the platform recommends, hey, this is your background, his is your background, this is what you’ve done, and these are your skills. Maybe you can go further, you can learn this, and you can develop that. And this also means that it adapts in real time. As you grow and develop, the platform will recommend learning pathways in real time.  

Finally, let’s talk about managers. They sit at the intersection of leadership and employees. From their vantage point they can contribute to answering: 

• What does it look like for my employees?  
• Where are they at developmentally?  
• What are they working toward? 

This creates the opportunity for more meaningful growth conversations and shifts workforce planning from static forecasting to continuous adaptation. 

My key takeaway is this:

Employees are building portfolios of skills rather than climbing ladders of roles. 

This shift is transforming talent strategy. It requires greater agility, strengthens employee engagement, and helps organizations become future-ready. 

Now, if you’ve heard me speak or read any of my writing before then you’ll know I love the idea of next steps. You’ve been so kind to read this blog so far, but hey, what could we do next with all this information?  

Where to start?

I’m not a big fan of the phrase, boil the ocean, but we don’t need to when we begin operationalizing skills across the organization. But what we want to do is find a practical starting point: Where could you introduce skills into your organization?  

It could start with job descriptions. This shift could be moving from asking for 5 years of experience and/or done that before, to saying, ‘We need somebody who can demonstrate X and Y skills.’ 

Another starting point is the intentional identification and development of skills. An excellent starting point is identifying the skills developed through learning and then designing development programs around them. 

Actions like this create confidence that you’ve thought ahead, and looking ahead is not just this month, this year, but we’ve put them on a pathway that supports their long-term development. Reinforcing that we can turn every good job into a great job.  

Further as I mentioned before, we need to be inviting employees to play their part to share their skills. Encourage them to share what they can do. Because when you hired them at some point the focus was on one job. They may have 10 other amazing skills, but they weren’t relevant to the role at the point of recruitment. Give them an opportunity to articulate them. 

Employees should also have a voice in deciding which skills they want to develop. This empowers you to be do informed workforce planning. Start with a pilot in a single department or team. Try and monitor it. See, what does success look like for your organization? But also, in this, we also must talk about the fact that this is a cultural shift.  

As a skills-based organization, you can promote continuous learning and empower adaptive approaches, drive innovation, and the truth is, incremental changes matters. (That’ll get an ‘Amen’ from James Clear) Your employees love the incremental more than what we probably realize. 

Final thoughts on this series. 

Firstly, the risk for HR leaders isn’t AI itself. The greater risk is failing to see and activate the skills already present in our organizations. 

Too often, valuable capabilities remain hidden. We fail to recognize them, validate them, and mobilize them quickly enough to meet emerging business needs. 

The second challenge is leadership. This is a both-and moment. We need to combine human wisdom—the experience we’ve gained through leading people—with AI-powered insight. Together, they enable better decisions, deeper understanding, and more effective leadership. 

As Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter argue in More Human, the future belongs to augmented leaders: leaders who combine human empathy with AI capability. When done well, technology doesn’t make leadership less human—it makes it more human. 

Looking ahead, the organizations that succeed won’t necessarily be those with the most AI. They’ll be the ones that can activate human capability at speed. 

That’s the opportunity in front of us.