Future skills emerging

Employers face a growing workforce risk as employees struggle to understand which skills they need and how to develop them quickly enough to keep pace with changing work, according to WTW’s latest EX Intelligent report.

The proportion of employees who say their manager helps develop their abilities has shifted from 84 percent to 78 percent over the past four years, highlighting the need to give managers more support for development conversations. At the same time, only about 30 percent of organizations have established processes for identifying, assessing and tracking workforce skills.

This mismatch risks creating “capability anxiety”: uncertainty among employees about whether their skills will remain relevant, what capabilities will matter most and where they should focus their development.

Employees understand that work is changing. Forty five percent say AI is already important to their daily job and another 22 percent say it will fundamentally change their work in the future. The pressure point is not change itself, but rather the uncertainty of whether they can keep up, what skills matter most and where to focus next.

“Employees recognize that work is evolving, but many lack clarity on what skills matter most and how to prepare for what comes next,” said Jill Havely, Global Employee Experience Leader at WTW. “Without that visibility, uncertainty can become a barrier to confidence and growth.”

Havely continued, “To address this, employers need to make development more tangible by equipping managers to have meaningful career conversations, creating clearer visibility into skills and career opportunities, and linking learning directly to the work employees do every day.”

For organizations, skills uncertainty can create a blind spot. If employees cannot connect their current role with future opportunities, confidence may erode, adaptability may slow and investment in new technology may fail to translate into stronger performance.

WTW recommends that employers:

• identify the skills required to deliver current and future business priorities;
• give employees clearer visibility of career pathways, learning opportunities and internal roles;
• equip managers to discuss changing skill requirements and guide development; and
• use employee listening and workforce data to identify where uncertainty or capability gaps may be affecting confidence and performance.

“Workforce transformation is more likely to succeed when employees can see a clear path to growth and organizations have the infrastructure to support it,” Havely concluded. “By making skills, career pathways and development opportunities more visible and actionable, employers can reduce capability anxiety and build a workforce better equipped to adapt, grow and perform.”

Source: WTW.

From WCI's HR Answers Now ©2026 CCH Incorporated and its affiliates. All rights reserved.