80% of Workers Feel Unprepared for Future Jobs

Image Credit: Skynet

Curated by Paul Helmick

Signal: Most employees don’t feel ready for how fast job requirements are changing, creating a widening skills gap.

Audit role-critical skills, then align training, hiring, and AI-assisted workflows to close gaps within 90 days.

Paul’s Perspective:

When most of your workforce feels unprepared, performance issues show up as missed targets, slower delivery, and higher turnover risk—not just a “training problem.” It’s a capacity and competitiveness issue.

Leaders have to decide whether to treat skills as a periodic HR initiative or as an operating system: continuously measuring capability, reallocating talent, and redesigning work with automation where it makes sense. The companies that close the gap fastest will out-execute peers even without adding headcount.

Key Points in Article:

  • LinkedIn research reports roughly 80% of workers say they feel unprepared for the future of work.
  • The gap is driven by rapid changes in required skills, especially digital, data, and AI-related capabilities.
  • Employers that make skills development part of operations can reduce churn risk and speed up internal mobility.
  • A practical approach is skills-based workforce planning: define the capabilities each role needs, assess current proficiency, then target training to the highest-value gaps.

Strategic Actions:

  1. Identify the 5–10 capabilities that will matter most to your business over the next 12–24 months.
  2. Map those capabilities to priority roles and workflows.
  3. Assess current proficiency levels and locate the largest gaps.
  4. Prioritize gaps by revenue impact, customer impact, and execution risk.
  5. Create a 90-day upskilling plan combining training, coaching, and on-the-job projects.
  6. Update hiring profiles to be skills-based, not credential-based.
  7. Redesign workflows to incorporate AI and automation where it reduces low-value work.
  8. Track progress with simple metrics (time-to-proficiency, internal fills, productivity, retention).

Dive deeper > Full Story:

The Bottom Line:

  • Signal: Most employees don’t feel ready for how fast job requirements are changing, creating a widening skills gap.
  • Audit role-critical skills, then align training, hiring, and AI-assisted workflows to close gaps within 90 days.

Ready to Explore More?

If you want to turn skills gaps into a concrete 90-day plan, we can help you define role-critical capabilities, assess your team, and prioritize training and automation that improves execution. Reply back and we’ll compare notes on what’s changing in your industry.