In brief

Like a red mushroom or a power star in your favorite retro video game, a workforce made up of employees who are eager to learn and use new skills is a powerful asset. CEOs have long worried about skills shortages as an obstacle to growth and, more recently, as a barrier to business model reinvention—given how quickly jobs and roles are changing.

Employees are keen to unlock new skills, but often feel shut out from opportunities.

The quest for skills

A game-changing skills approach

Level up your skills approach to win the battle for talent.

game on

In depth

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More issues

Employees are hungry to build and use new skills at work. Companies can seize this golden opportunity to bolster the skills within their workforce, and to more fully tap into the potential of their people. By leveling up their skills strategy—while also paying close attention to such factors as fair pay, flexibility, and inclusivity at work—organizations can supercharge the employee experience and unlock the critical capabilities needed to stay ahead. Mastering this challenge not only boosts employee morale but also equips the workforce with the game-changing skills that are essential for victory in the marketplace.

In conclusion

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September 2024

Illustrations by QuickHoney

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8 min

Dive deeper: Workers are ready for change. Are leaders ready to engage them?

The

quest

Hit pause on your workday and channel your inner Lara Croft or Super Mario for a moment. Your quest: entice an all-star candidate to work for you instead of your competitor. You’re confident you have enough gold coins and special items to win. But as you reach the final level—the offer stage—your rival turbocharges its package with something you didn’t think to match: dedicated upskilling opportunities. Your candidate, eager to unlock access to new career dimensions, accepts the offer. Game over. The business world is a long way from the video game realms of the 1990s, but the battle for talent is still on—and employees today see skill building at work as the ultimate power-up. In fact, for almost half of workers, having opportunities to learn new skills is a key consideration when they are deciding whether to stay with their employer or leave for another job, according to PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024.

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10 min

How to level up your skills game

—Richard Branson

Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

This may sound like good news for senior leaders, who need a workforce eager to learn in today’s rapidly changing business environment. But it also pressures companies to level up their skills strategy while also offering fair pay, purposeful work, flexibility, and other factors important to employees. That means ensuring companies not only provide adequate upskilling opportunities but also embrace a skills-first approach to both hiring and employee development. The stakes are high: companies risk losing top talent if employees don’t see opportunities to build and flex. Getting it right, however, can increase productivity and innovation, expand your company’s access to great talent, and boost employee engagement and satisfaction. So, how do you shift your workforce skills strategy from game over to game on? We recommend four actions:

for skills

The fact that so many employees want skills training—and would even leave their current job to find it—suggests companies have a stellar opportunity to accelerate their upskilling efforts while also offering workers something they clearly value. Yet when it comes to navigating the world of workforce skills, companies aren’t quite hitting the top scores—at least according to employees. Fewer than half (46%) of workers surveyed in PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024 said they moderately or strongly agreed that their employer provides adequate opportunities to learn new skills that would be helpful to their careers. What’s more, the survey found that upskilling opportunities are twice as likely to be steered toward employees with specialized skills. That means, workers whose roles involve non-specialist activities, which are at higher risk of being automated or shifted to artificial intelligence (AI), could be left behind if they aren’t able to upskill or reskill. Gaps in upskilling aren’t the only source of frustration for employees. Only half of workers surveyed moderately or strongly agreed that they have been offered the chance to demonstrate the full breadth of their skills at work, and more than a third said they had skills that are not clear from their qualifications, job history, or job title.

Dive deeper: How to become a skills-first organization

If the future of work revolves around skills, not jobs, then addressing gaps in upskilling solves only one piece of the puzzle. The bigger opportunity lies in shifting to a skills-first approach through the entire talent cycle. Traditional credential-based hiring often overlooks candidates who have the necessary skills but may lack formal qualifications, such as college degrees or a specific job history. This can perpetuate skills gaps within the organization and can cause companies to bring in employees whose skills don’t strongly align with the actual requirements of the job, exacerbating the problem of underutilization.

Shifting to a skills-first talent strategy benefits companies, employees, and society.

Focusing on skills can benefit wider society as well: the World Economic Forum found that more than 100 million people across 18 economies would benefit directly from a skills-first approach.

Dive deeper: Transforming your workforce through upskilling: Citizen-led innovation

If you’re ready to shift to a skills-first approach to hiring and deploying talent, you may be wondering how to assess candidates. One way to evaluate them is through incorporating skills-based assessments into your hiring process, including practical tests, simulations, or work samples that allow candidates to showcase their abilities. For instance, Google is well known for its use of online assessments to measure role-specific skills, such as coding or leadership. And in IKEA Switzerland, where the company shifted to a skills-based hiring approach to help refugees find work, candidates are assessed for job suitability over a five-day trial period, a strategy that reduces reliance on language fluency and focuses on their job-relevant skills.

Upskilling all employees, not just those with specialized skills, is crucial for creating a more inclusive and adaptable workforce. Inclusive upskilling can also lead to more versatile and resilient teams and unlock new revenue opportunities for businesses. Consider the consumer markets industry, for instance. Many companies in the industry are focusing their upskilling efforts on workers with specialized skills, such as those in research and development, supply chain, or procurement. But many of those companies also have large cohorts of frontline employees who need upskilling too—and training those workers in new skills could have a bigger impact on the company’s overall performance. Imagine the benefits, for example, if retail employees were able to deploy a tech solution that suggests upselling opportunities, helping them instantly recommend an additional product based on a customer’s purchase.

Become a skills-forward organization with a multipronged approach.

level up

How to

Upskill inclusively (don’t just focus on your superstars)

Tapping the power of your workforce begins with four key actions, which can be taken in any order:

Traditional training courses and seminars have their place, but like 8-bit technology, they can feel outdated. Instead, create hands-on opportunities for employees to learn. These could take the form of stretch projects, tours or job rotations, shadowing, and other options. Job rotation programs, for example, let employees experience different roles within the organization, giving them exposure to diverse skill sets and broadening their understanding of different functions. This not only helps employees develop new skills but can also cultivate versatility and adaptability within the workforce. Offering more hands-on approaches to learning is a win for both employees and companies. Employees gain new skills and relationships, while companies become more attractive to ambitious candidates. What’s more, collaborations between experienced and new employees often generate fresh perspectives and ideas, innovative solutions, and contributions to process improvements.

Anthony Abbatiello US Workforce Transformation Leader, Principal, PwC US Email

Kathy Parker Global Workforce Strategy Leader, Partner, PwC Canada Email

Peter Brown Global Workforce Leader, Partner, PwC UK Email

Illustration of woman sitting in a chair that is rocketing into the sky

Empower to transform

Illustration of office workers using AI to pick a candidate

Skills-first hiring in the era of AI

AI Jobs Barometer

Illustration of man and woman looking down over a cliff

Uniting a divided workforce

Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024

Image of woman sitting in office on the phone

PwC’s Global Workforce ESG Preferences Study 2024

your skills game

Target skills, not formal qualifications

Forge new paths for on-the-job learning

—Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani, authors of Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future

Sometimes, simply stating the newly desired skills will surface people you did not know of who have those skills and who are energized by your vision.”

It may sound basic, but a skills database is key to unlocking the world of workforce skills, and many companies don’t have one. In a nutshell, a skills database is a system that captures and tracks the skills and expertise of individuals within your company. Need to identify skills gaps in your workforce to focus your upskilling efforts? Want to better match employees to roles, or have more agility to staff projects quickly? Need to strategically plan for future talent needs? A skills database can provide quick insights to help you pursue any of those goals. For proof of concept, look to the success of a global financial services organization that implemented an innovative in-house hub to identify the existing skills within its workforce and reference them against skills descriptions, showing which ones were needed now and in the future. The process helped the company identify the skills prevalent in certain parts of the organization and map them to a taxonomy, enabling leaders to compare the company’s skills data with that of other organizations in the same industry. This, in turn, helped leaders better understand the external supply and demand of industry skills. The company is also working with various business units to drive strategic delivery of targeted learning interventions, data-driven workforce and succession planning, responsible redeployment, targeted reward and recognition, and proactive retention tactics.

Inventory your cache of skills

A skills-first approach, however, values abilities over formal credentials. It helps organizations tap into a more diverse pool of talent, while also better enabling internal mobility so that existing employees can smoothly transition to new positions. This makes it much easier to find the perfect fit for each role—like slotting just the right piece into place.