This article was awarded the 2023 HBR Prize honoring the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. The authors share the significance of the complexity and pace of technological change. Its velocity will likely require millions of workers to be not only upskilled, but reskilled. Drawing from interviews with representatives of companies worldwide that are already actively reskilling employees, they share five paradigms required to adapt and keep pace.
The average half-life of skills is now fewer than five years, and in some tech fields, it’s as low as two and a half years. The authors assert that for millions of workers upskilling alone won’t be enough.
Source: Harvard Business Review, September-October 2023. Link.
Today’s advances in technology are changing the demand for skills at an accelerated pace. New technologies can not only handle a growing number of repetitive and manual tasks but also perform increasingly sophisticated kinds of knowledge-based work . . . long considered safe from disruption.”