The power of durable, human-centric skills in the age of AI
Your company's ability to adapt to disruption and evolving technology hinges on your entire workforce being future-ready.
And that takes the right mix of skills.
In the past few years, companies have had to address the impact of social protests, severe talent shortages, generative AI, and political instability — with more change on the horizon.
The question is: How will people leaders prepare their organizations to adapt and grow through inevitable change and disruption? Particularly when it comes to AI?
Innovative leaders are helping their organizations become future-ready by building the right skills in their workforce — at every level — today.
You can’t harness the power of AI without people.
When planning for the future of work, many business leaders think first about harnessing the potential of generative AI — but they run the risk of over-indexing on technical skills.
While organizations can and should leverage strategic education benefits to help employees build skills for AI and other evolving technology, they shouldn’t overlook the other half of the equation: durable, human-centric skills.
7 of the 10 most requested skills are durable skills, according to an analysis of 80 million job postings.
These skills are in demand, and they lay the foundation for a resilient workforce that’s ready to help your business grow and adapt when needed. Investing in durable skills enables businesses to leverage technology in the first place while building talent pipelines for high-demand roles across the organization.
Without them, you miss out on an opportunity to improve internal mobility, productivity, and organizational agility.
What are durable skills?
Durable skills are foundational professional skills that improve performance and ensure employees can meaningfully engage with their work, peers, and managers.
Think people-centric skills such as:
- Managing yourself (time management, goal-setting, creativity)
- Making decisions (problem solving, analytical thinking, creativity, logic)
- Customer service (sales, service, empathy, inquiry)
- Working with managers & leaders (upward feedback, self-advocacy, communication, receiving feedback)
- Working with a team (collaboration, conflict resolution, building trust)
These skills represent teachable, measurable mindsets that transfer across roles. They’re foundational to more specialized skill sets — whether that’s management and leadership, cybersecurity and AI prompt engineering, customer service, and beyond.
Employers are noticing a growing gap in durable skills.
Organizational leaders are starting to notice that entry level-workers aren’t always equipped with durable skills.
Research from 2021 found that leaders in IT say their entry-level candidates have fewer durable skills than are required for the job.
Meanwhile, 40% of employers in a 2023 survey said that recent college graduates are unprepared for the workforce, thanks largely to gaps in durable skills such as communication.
Why durable skills matter to building an agile workforce
Durable skills are a superpower in the age of AI — for employees and employers alike. A Deloitte Australia report found that investing in employees’ soft skills could increase an individual firm’s revenue by $90,000 AUD.
It makes sense — as employees and employers look to keep pace with new ideas and technologies, durable skills help individuals communicate, problem solve, and serve customers — ultimately driving more productivity.
After all, your big digital transformation initiatives are led by people. Maybe that’s through using ChatGPT to drive demand, or combining personal connections and experience with data to uncover customer insights. The technology shouldn’t replace people — the tools are only as good as the critical thinking and problem-solving skills of those using them.
That means that when durable skills are present throughout the workforce, they allow for more flexibility and pivots as strategic business priorities evolve.
And when they’re in short supply, business viability and growth is at risk.
Durable skills examples: These skills are needed for all high-demand roles.
This framework underlines the ultimate goal of investing in durable skills: internal mobility.
Durable skills are foundational to skills and jobs across industries. Roles that are in-demand all involve communication, problem solving, teamwork, and so on.
Take these job descriptions across industries. Despite being very different, at their core, they require the same kinds of human-centric skills.
Nurse practitioners tend to sick patients and work with other care providers. Data scientists need technical skills, but they also need to understand business priorities and communicate with different stakeholders. Financial managers need to be able to project manage and work with customers.
What’s been missing — durable skills training designed for the front line
Durable skills aren’t a new concept when it comes to skilling strategy.
And in fact, most knowledge workers gain durable skills through the natural course of life, including higher education and professional experiences. They grow up in families and communities that introduce them to the norms of working life. They are able to access and follow an education pathway that ends in a degree or higher. They have a sense of occupational identity.
Employers have then offered additional training and coursework on leadership, people or project management, or customer service to employees who are already starting with a baseline of knowledge. These types of courses are valuable for many workers and can build important skills. They belong in any strategic education benefits catalog.
But traditional training for durable skills isn’t optimized or accessible for the frontline workforce or entry level workers. It generally falls in two categories:
- Degree programs, which take years to complete and aren’t financially accessible to many individuals
- Micro-training, which teaches employees about the skill but not how to do the skill
The opportunity for organizations to build durable skills where it counts — and gain a competitive advantage — lies in combining the strengths of the existing options into a new offering: short-form, credentialed learning that focuses on frontline workers, helping them master the skill through practice, feedback, and application.
The biggest opportunity to build durable skills is to offer short-form, credentialed learning designed for frontline workers, helping them master the skill through practice, feedback, and application.
Durable skills are critical — but often overlooked — stepping stones to management and leadership.
In terms of skilling opportunities, frontline workers may have access to training such as high school completion or language learning.
But the move into management and greater opportunities takes more than a people management course.
Short-form, credentialed, practical learning on durable skills enable frontline workers in particular to more successfully mobilize their careers, helping them stand out and prove their potential as future people managers.
With durable skills, employees are set up to succeed in additional learning programs that can help them move into frontline management and beyond.
How Guild built and optimized durable skills training for the frontline workforce
Leveraging insights from our employer partners, Guild noticed this gap in durable skills training, so we turned to our innovative network of learning partners to create it.
Through our deep relationships with these learning partners, we built new-to-market programs designed for the frontline employee and aligned to employer needs.
Programs leverage best-in-class learning design principles for non-degreed learners, and prioritize skills in: decision-making, working with managers, teamwork, personal development, and customer service.
We focused on optimized format and delivery, including:
- Short-form: 6 months or less in duration
- Foundational: Fit for frontline employees without prior college experience
- Flexible delivery: Accessibility any time, any place, any device (including mobile)
- Skill mastery through application: Live practice and feedback
- Differentiated elements: Human / tech enabled support
Soon we had three new programs that took different approaches to learning while offering consistent, complementary, high quality programming.
Learn more about the offering by reading our product overview.
