Ten years ago skills acquisition felt like an afterthought among HR professionals, but I now find myself defining “upskilling,” “reskilling,” and “cross-skilling” regularly in my conversations about workforce and talent management.

While professional development and learning have always been essential, most HR professionals say that there has been a greater push for it since the Covid-19 pandemic. In a historically tight labor market, skilled candidates have been hard to find and existing employees are demanding rigorous professional development.

There is also the notion that even if you’ve been in the same role for decades, that job is probably morphing into something new. Recent data from LinkedIn Corp. showed  that the skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this percentage is expected to double.

Given that we can’t train everyone for everything, where should HR put its focus? 

In general, employers who help their workers achieve career durability–the ability to maintain gainful employment through any industry or market disruption–are more likely to both attract and retain the best talent. The approach consists of five pillars: Hard skills, soft skills, applied technology skills, institutional knowledge and a growth mindset.

Many experts say that the most critical areas to upskill are soft skills and applied technology skills.

Teri Hart, author of the book “Hardwired to Learn,” oversees learning for Zurich North America, a division of the global insurance company with more than 9,000 employees. Ms. Hart echoed the importance of soft skills and also called out learning agility and critical thinking as upskilling priorities for her organization. “At Zurich NA, we focus on building skills that increase our capacity to learn, think, deliberate, and decide,” she said.

Applied technology skills encompass the ability to understand and work with technologies to do your job more efficiently. They are an especially important area of focus since, according to Ms. Hart, we are at a tipping point where automated machine partners like chatbots are performing more than half of workplace tasks.

“Real productivity gains come from humans and machines working together, and that means that humans need to train the bots, analyze data better, and overall, step up their game,” she said. “While we don’t need to learn every technology, we all need to improve our ability to learn technology.”

Most workers outside IT haven’t been formally trained in these, but Covid-19 accelerated the world’s digital transformation and widened an already sizable mismatch between supply and demand for digital skills, according to Mr. Shapero.

Upskilling for soft skills like distributed collaboration and applied technology skills can be achieved via in person courses, on-demand virtual training, mentoring, or on the job, experiential activities. At Zurich NA, Ms. Hart is placing increasing emphasis on embedding the practice of learning into the flow of work

Most important for HR professionals to keep in mind: Upskilling initiatives should never stand alone. By tying your strategy to your overall business objectives, you will get to the heart of what’s necessary–and what isn’t–for your organization.

Salesforce Inc.’s 2022 Global Digital Skills Index showed that a majority of workers surveyed feel they lack the digital skills to remain gainfully employed in the near future. The study looked at areas such as access to learning resources, skill levels, and training participation and surveyed more than 23,000 workers in 19 countries in November and December.

Globally, the participants scored an average of 33 out of a possible 100 Digital Readiness points, with U.S. participants scoring an average of 36 points. Just over half of respondents said they want to learn skills to help them grow in their current career, as opposed to reskilling for a new or different career path.

🎥 WATCH: Jonas Prising, chief executive of ManpowerGroup, discusses talent shortages, wage inflation and how the pandemic has changed the expectations of employers and employees.

Young professionals coming out of college this spring are in high demand. Employers plan to hire at least 30% more new graduates this year than they did last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Students across majors—considering jobs in finance, marketing and the supply chain—attended the event. Dubbed “Academy Night,” the Baylor event is one of several that the company is hosting at Texas universities as an official re-entry to in-person recruiting, said Bill Ennis, Academy’s senior vice president and chief human-resources officer.

One-on-one time: Arrive Logistics, an Austin, Texas-based freight-transportation company, sent the company’s two co-founders to the Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for a lecture in an executive speaker series, and the next day one held coffee chats with juniors and seniors, said Nicole Furnia, director of university relations for Arrive Logistics. The company hires students for several roles, including in business development.

“Gone are the days of the regular info sessions,” said Ms. Furnia. Many students haven’t experienced a recruiting cycle on campus and are learning how to network and interview in person, she added.

Hybrid recruiting: Many employers and colleges say virtual information sessions and early conversations will continue in parallel with in-person recruiting, especially for companies with limited travel budgets or those seeking to attract a wider pool of applicants.

More than 40% of 114 companies said coffee chats, information sessions and career fairs would take place equally virtually and in person in the future, according to a survey from research company Veris Insights.

What Upskilling Means for the Future of Work (BBC)

The Coming Revolution in Human Empowerment (Forbes)

Tech Talent Tectonics: 10 Realities for Finding, Keeping, and Developing Talent (McKinsey)

5 Social-Emotional Skills Kids Need to Lead Healthy Digital Lives (Education Week)

Check out a conversation from the WSJ Jobs Summit with Joanna Estanislao–who went from working in hospitality to a full-time role with Okta’s sales team–and Bridgette Gray, Chief Customer Officer at Opportunity@Work, which helps companies make pathways from blue collar to new collar.

Alexandra Levit is a business and workplace author and speaker. She is the weekly columnist anchoring The Workplace Report. Yogita Patel curated and edited this newsletter.

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