Today’s Workplace Changes Outpace Current Skill-Building Strategies, Report Finds

Work is moving faster than the skills needed to do it, and employees don’t have the time to sufficiently upskill, according to the Speed-to-Skill Report from learning management system company TalentLMS.

The report surveyed 1,500 U.S. workers—including managers and employees—to explore what helps teams build and apply skills faster.

Seven in 10 respondents said employees need faster ways to practice skills as job demands change, and 47 percent said some of their job skills have become outdated in the past five years.

But which skills need updating? Thirty-eight percent of managers said it’s difficult to predict which skills their team will need in the next 12 months.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant driver behind that uncertainty. More than one third of managers said they struggle to keep up with how quickly AI is changing their team’s skill needs. Currently, 82 percent of enterprise leaders said their organizations provide some sort of AI training, but 59 percent report an AI skills gap—it’s a constantly moving target, the TalentLMS report said.

Speed Matters

Work is changing swiftly, and both employees and managers want faster ways to practice new skills—especially before putting them into practice. Many organizations have robust training programs and content, but “the path from learning to real-world use is often unclear, delayed, or inconsistent,” the report said. “And that delay comes at a cost. As skill needs continue to shift, the value of newly learned skills starts to decay before they’re fully applied.”

Only 16 percent of respondents said skill-building happens quickly at their organization when new needs arise. For all other respondents, skill-building gets slowed down by other work priorities, slow training roll-out, and unclear prioritization.

Work priorities push learning aside for 44 percent of respondents—consistently across both managers and employees. “This suggests a shared reality across the organization: When work piles up, learning is the first thing to drop,” the report said.

Learning isn’t built into daily work, though, so employees have fewer opportunities to practice new skills in practical environments. Learning sits outside of daily workflows, making it easier to cut or push aside.

More than half of respondents said they learn new skills by figuring them out on their own, rather than traditional training or outside guidance. Additionally, 42 percent said they ask someone who already has the skill to help them learn it.

Just a third of employees use their company’s learning platform to search for courses or resources—those formal training channels provide consistency and a foundation for skill development, but they are slower to adapt to changing conditions.

“The challenge with predicting future skills is that the pace of change has outgrown the traditional planning cycle,” said David Kelly, a learning and development executive and advisor, in the report. “Managers are being asked to prepare their teams for work that may shift dramatically before the next development plan is even finalized. That doesn’t mean skill-building should become reactive. It means organizations need to build more adaptive learning systems that align with where skills conversations are ongoing, are more connected to the flow of work, and are informed by what the business and its people are actually trying to accomplish.”