Mike Clementi |
Last month in Park City, Utah, Guild convened a group of over 20 senior HR executives from healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, tech, and government to talk about what’s ahead for our nation’s workforce. As an official Education, Skilling, and Career Mobility Provider of Team USA, Guild hosted the roundtable discussion against the backdrop of the Winter Olympic Games Milano Cortina 2026 Homebase Celebration, to tackle three key questions:
How do we build resilience into the core of our workforce?
What does AI disruption truly mean for talent development?
Why are entry-level roles disappearing — and how should we respond?
It was no small undertaking. The questions on the table could have filled days, not hours. And yet, for all the diverse viewpoints in the room, there was early alignment around one reality — and it’s what propelled the rest of the conversation: AI is changing work faster than our organizations and institutions are designed to support. In some functions, day-to-day responsibilities are already starting to look vastly different than they did just a few years ago.
The mood in the room, however, was constructive. The 20 senior leaders gathered in Park City agreed that while the pace of change is accelerating, the capacity to adapt can be built. Here’s how.
1. Hire for adaptability.
Early on in our session, one central question reverberated through the room: Are we chasing skill sets or building the right mindsets to survive and thrive in the AI era?
Most everyone agreed that technical capabilities — particularly AI-related skillsets — are evolving too quickly to treat as static targets in talent acquisition. And that organizations hiring too narrowly for these AI tools may be making a strategic misstep.
Instead, participants stressed the importance of “durable” traits, such as:
Learning agility;
Coachability;
Dependability;
Logical thinking;
Resilience; and
A bias toward progress over perfection (what one participant described as “steady piloting”).
These attributes are becoming more operationally and strategically important in an era of AI “workslop”: AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks real substance. Recent research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and collaboration issues. In this environment, the most impactful workers are also the most discerning — people who know what to delegate to AI and what to keep human.
So, what are the implications for hiring and development?
Most in the room agreed that traditional signals — degrees, certifications, narrowly defined technical skills — are becoming less predictive of long-term performance. Several participants described shifting toward experiential interviews that test one’s adaptability and initiative in real time. Others are rethinking onboarding and early-career development to focus on developing resilience through stretch assignments and coaching.
The takeaway: The organizations best positioned to succeed in the next 18 to 36 months will be those that eschew perfect skills-forecasting (which we know is not possible) in favor of institutionalizing adaptability. That means embedding learning agility, judgment, and resilience into the fabric of how we hire, develop, and lead.
2. Rethink early-career and frontline pathways.
If adaptability is our new primary goal, access is one of the biggest challenges we need to solve.
As we know, the traditional proving grounds for talent — think entry-level roles, rotational programs, junior-analyst tracks — are narrowing or disappearing altogether. AI is absorbing routine tasks that once trained new hires; rotational programs are becoming more selective; and youth unemployment remains stubbornly high in both the U.S. and the U.K. This has led to, as several participants called out, the “shrinking frontline worker” and a simultaneous erosion of early-career on-ramps into the workforce.
So, how should companies respond? Participants highlighted two actions:
First, early-career investment should shift from broad exposure to targeted capability building. Aligning internships and rotational programs with critical functions will strengthen the leadership bench in areas of highest strategic value while ensuring frontline roles remain viable pathways rather than dead ends.
Second, employers should start recruiting people earlier in their lives and careers. Healthcare systems and manufacturers are already offering immersive “world-of-work” programs in middle and high school. These initiatives expose students to real work earlier, demystify pathways to growth, and stoke career aspirations, particularly for roles that have historically been filled through frontline experience.
The takeaway: In an AI-accelerated labor market, waiting until candidates are “job-ready” is no longer viable. Whether preparing frontline employees for advancement or designing early-career pipelines, we must shape exposure, aspiration, and access long before the application stage.
3. Work together to solve problems.
The most forward-looking moment of the day’s conversation came when the group started talking about working collectively. One participant posed an interesting question: What if six companies formed a consortium and guaranteed employability across them?
The question radically shifted the group’s thinking. We discussed the possibility of “cross-company” rotations, credentials that can be shared between organizations, and employer-led coalitions that work with universities to modernize their curricula. We also delved into regulatory barriers in healthcare and the need for collective pressure to unlock faster career pathways.
But a harder truth surfaced beneath it all: Our public workforce systems are not moving at the pace of AI-driven change. Across the country, employers are creating high-quality jobs in sectors such as advanced manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, and technology. Yet the systems designed to help workers prepare for these roles are struggling to keep pace. States are stretched thin; employers lack a trusted way to verify skills and track learning outcomes; and workers face a maze of potential career pathways with no sense of which programs lead to real opportunities.
One way companies can help the situation is by aligning around common standards, portable credentials, and outcomes. This will create momentum that no one organization can generate on its own. As one participant put it, “Think bigger than your organization.”
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, employers remain among the most trusted institutions. That trust brings both responsibility and opportunity, particularly at a moment when workers are looking for clearer pathways and greater stability.
The takeaway: The organizations that think beyond their own walls will help shape the infrastructure that determines whether talent can adapt at scale.
Where this leads
Though the roundtable did not yield a single prescription, it clarified what’s at stake for all of us. Workforce strategy now turns on three shifts: building adaptability rather than chasing skills, investing in early pathways rather than reacting late, and coordinating across institutions rather than acting alone. The next five years will move faster than the last five. Organizations that prepare their people — and align with partners to do so at scale — will shape the change rather than catch up to it.
