This Deloitte report explores the notion that fostering human capabilities first might be more important than reskilling in the future of work.
Deloitte defines skills as the tactical knowledge or expertise needed to achieve work outcomes within a specific context. Skills are specific to a particular function, tool, or outcome, and they are applied by an individual to accomplish a given task.
Most companies’ relentless focus on skills is not surprising, given the general sense that businesses need new skills and that things are changing so fast that people can’t keep up. Their concern stems from the conviction that skills—and having workers with specific skills—are core to business success. But while they’re not wrong, skills aren’t all that are core to success these days. The marketplace and technological environment are changing in ways that make focusing on skills to the exclusion of all else a losing approach.
The reason skills have been so valuable and necessary is because, through much of the 20th century, businesses depended almost wholly on skills to get work done. The reason they could afford to depend so entirely on skills was because they operated in a specific type of environment: a stable, predictable one in which companies could use standardized, repeatable processes and techniques to produce standardized products and services on a controlled, predictable schedule and budget.
In this broad, stable context, executing repeatable activities in standard environments was the most efficient and effective way to serve ever-larger markets by meeting the greatest common denominator of need. With relatively few different types of products being offered, a given skill could be widely applied; too, the skills needed were predictable and did not evolve very fast. Thus, it made sense to invest in training large groups of workers in these widely applicable skills. In addition, well-honed skills helped companies operating at scale to do things more predictably, more quickly, with less waste, and at a lower cost.
That’s the world we were in—but the world is changing. The connected world has made scale less important than relevance, and the strategy of optimizing for scale can no longer deliver the results we need.