Do you hear that sound? Throughout nearly every business, human resource and talent acquisition leaders can hear the quiet rumble of a crisis resulting in the lack of skilled employees and recruits. It’s getting louder and most C-suite executives are only just beginning to respond to these ominous signs.

Look at some headlines:

• Recently, Slack, the workplace chat platform owned by Salesforce, placed its employees on a one-week hiatus to earn “Ranger Status” via its Trailhead online learning platform
• A recent Enterprise Strategy Report found that 71% cybersecurity executives admit that they’ve been impacted by the cybersecurity skills shortage, which has increased workload for cybersecurity teams (61%), left job openings unfilled (49%), and caused high burnout among staff (43%) 
• Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company postponed the opening of its Arizona chip factory to 2025 due to a shortage of technical workers

We are in the midst of a critical skills crisis. According to news reports, HR and TA experts believe that by 2030, demand for skilled professionals will far outstrip supply, and will result in a financial impact of $8.452 trillion in unrealized revenue. This crisis has spread to many fields that were once seen as desirable and lucrative by candidates and were once easy to find capable workers: IT, cybersecurity, finance and environmental science among others. But there is hope, say TA and HR leaders. The good news is that there are solutions to this crisis if companies address this challenge head on by evaluating how and where they find talented people. In short, they must invest in their future with the skills they need to be producers and leaders inside their companies. 

This is where reskilling, upskilling and new skills can become the differentiator between failure and success. 

According to HR technology analyst Josh Bersin, one answer to the ever-expanding skills crisis is to lean in “fast and hard” to reskilling the existing workforce. But this is easier said than done, he adds.

“Reskilling is an intentional shift in how your company thinks about employee learning and development as well as retention, and it requires coordination at all levels of your organization,” says the founder of HR technology market research firm The Josh Bersin Company. “But if you get it right, you will reap the benefits from increased productivity—aka profitability—as well as developing higher rates of employee retention and a deeper commitment towards your brand.”

TA leaders have heard this message loud and clear and are responding to the changing nature of employee and candidate skills. Not long ago, a candidate’s resume lead with their job experience and education on top of the paper or electronic resume with a small list of skills at the bottom of the document.

“Now, skills have switched places in importance and priority with education and experience thanks to the increased demands of modern work,” says Lisa Forrest, Managing Director of Client Services for AMS. 

“The skills that I had at the bottom of my CV were relevant when I started my job and were probably relevant 10 years into my job, but those skills might no longer be relevant two years from now,” she says. 

The increased and insatiable demand for new skills has spurred employers to hire candidates for the skills that they currently possess, but HR and TA leaders must also be aware of the skills they will need for the same role in the years to come. If that were not challenging enough, employers must screen for candidate’s willingness to learn new skills as well.

“It’s not just the skills that the candidate has today. It’s their ability that I see in them to acquire additional skills as they work,” says Forrest. “I may not care if they worked on a legal, sales or an operations team I want to know if they can learn new ones along the way.”

Unfortunately, Forrest says this is where leaders get “stuck.” Hiring managers may know the hard skills that a role requires—knowledge and experience with risk and compliance in financial services, for example—but they may not know the soft skills that are also necessary for filling a new role.

“When you ask a company to work out what skills they need, they typically are asking for soft skills. They might be negotiation skills, a level of moral conduct and code of behavior. It could be the need for people to pay a high attention to detail or adherence to a framework of rules,” says Forrest. “Hiring managers and recruiters often find it difficult to pinpoint what they’re asking for.”

Fortunately, there is no shortage of TA solution providers—many of which are AMS partners— whose tools can assess and infer current and emerging skills. According to Bersin, vendors like Eightfold, Gloat, Phenom, Beamery, and others use advanced AI to identify candidate skills from their job experiences and other relationships. 

“The big challenges companies have is deciding what skills to associate with a given job, and then building a taxonomy. Most companies have over-engineered themselves to death and unfortunately, some tools are not really that useful yet,” says Bersin. “SAP is actually there but in general most companies are relying upon a new generation of talent intelligence tools to do this.”

When asked to name the hot skills for the future, Forrest calls this “the golden question.” Ironically, the quest for many of these hot skills in the coming two to four years are not entirely brand new. Just ask Bernard Marr. The futurist, strategic advisor and business author believes that the hot skills for 2024 will be found in Generative AI and machine learning, sustainability, project management and communications, healthcare, data, interpersonal networking, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. Although these topics have been around for years—the concepts of cloud computing have been around since the 1960s—the skills required to master these constantly developing fields continue to grow at a rapid pace.

This is why employers must focus on skills and reskilling candidates and current employees like never before.