Bijal Shah |
Even by the standard set by 2025, 2026 is likely to bring many more disruptions with significant implications for the future of work.
Executives will continue to face a volatile business environment, including severe talent shortages, rapid advancements in AI, and a policy environment that is shifting quickly, with real consequences for how employers attract and develop talent. This is all happening while stakeholders push leaders to cut expenditures while pursuing faster growth.
Leaders must understand how these forces will shape their organizations, as well as what actions they need to take to remain competitive, attract and retain top talent, and achieve desired business outcomes.
When I stepped back to look at the data from 2025 — and reflected on the hundreds of conversations I have had this year with industry experts, our executive team, employer partners, learning providers, and learners — these are the three upcoming shifts that I believe will most directly shape the year ahead.
1. Workforce strategy will move to the center of business performance.
The idea that our higher-education ecosystem and labor market will solve the talent crisis in due time is no longer credible. As more organizations recognize this, we will see talent development move closer to the core of business and organizational strategy. Not as a perk or a pilot, but as a direct lever for resilience, productivity, and growth.
In 2026, the leaders who treat talent development as a business imperative — and who invest in building and moving talent from within — will be the ones who stay competitive . Those who wait for external systems to solve their talent challenges will find themselves outpaced by organizations designing their own solutions.
2. The real impact of AI will be felt in the rising complexity of work.
When it comes to AI in 2026, leaders will see the biggest shift not in the displacement of jobs alone but in the transformation of the jobs that remain. For years, we have evaluated the impact of AI by looking at tasks in isolation. But the roles most essential to our economy — in healthcare, logistics, safety, and field operations — will be defined by context, not tasks. They will require timing, discretion, judgment, and the ability to read situations in real time.
As more and more routine work becomes automated, the remaining work will become more complex, and we will see our economy increasingly depend on people navigating unstructured, nuanced problems under pressure. In 2026, the leaders who get ahead will be the ones who stop equating job titles with job complexity — and start designing talent systems that recognize the human capabilities these roles truly demand.
3. Public–private workforce collaboration will move from concept to operation.
In 2026, the impact of workforce-development efforts will hinge less on policy ambition and more on operational alignment. It will not be the strength of policy goals that determines success, but the ability of public and private sectors to co-design systems that actually deliver.
Policy matters. Funding matters. But neither will drive outcomes on its own. What changes trajectories is alignment across government leaders setting priorities, employers defining demand, and partners capable of translating both into results.
Turning trends into action
Trends lists like this are designed to spark curiosity and sharpen our thinking, but the pace of change can make it hard for leaders to move from awareness to meaningful action. The real work is in determining where to focus.
A helpful starting point is for executive teams to ask, together:
Which of these trends are most likely to have an outsized impact on our organization?
Which will meaningfully affect our most critical talent segments over the next two years?
Which pose a real risk to our strategic goals if we do not address them?
From there, the question becomes one of opportunity: Which trends give you a chance to differentiate — with your talent, your customers, or both? Identifying where you have a comparative advantage is what turns trends into investments that pay off in ways that matter.
