Skills gaps have employees feeling insecure—and HR can come to the rescue

Employees are feeling insecure, and L&D programs aren’t helping.

Some 41% of full-time employees—across the US, UK, Germany, and India—report feeling a lack of job security due to their skills gaps, and just 25% think their company’s L&D programs are helping them fill their gaps, according to a survey by e-learning platform Skillsoft released Thursday. After leadership skills, employees cited AI among the skills they feel are most critical in the workplace.

“Generative AI comes in, and there’s all of this initial excitement. Everybody’s dying to get their hands on it and figure out how to use it, and then I think you get to a bit of a plateau,” Ciara Harrington, Skillsoft’s chief people officer (CPO), told HR Brew. “We’ve all learned the initial stages of it, but we still don’t really know right [now] what it means for the future of work and for the future of all of our jobs.”

People leaders, she said, need to change how they’re helping employees learn new skills. She shared advice for how to get started.

Changing everyone’s job. Leaders typically think of employees in two buckets: technical and non-technical, Harrington said. But going forward, every employee, especially managers and leaders, will need to be technical, too.

“Every people leader now needs to be somewhat of a technology leader. They don’t need to be as in-depth, maybe, as the programmers, but they do still need some education and training on how technology can be used to improve and drive efficiencies for your job and for your team,” she said.

HR can help employees feel more secure in their jobs, Harrington said, by encouraging them to upskill.

“The more we can all learn about generative AI, the more tools we introduce, the more we practice and the more we upskill ourselves, the more we start to learn and understand it and figure out how we can use it as our co-pilot,” she said. “It becomes something that’s less scary and more exciting.”

What’s Skillsoft doing? Skillsoft recently integrated Microsoft Copilot into its workflow, Harrington said.The first order of business was training employees to use the generative AI tool.

“Rather than just pushing it on everyone, saying, ‘Hey, here’s this new tool. Go figure out what to do with it.’ We want to make sure our employees are empowered and they understand all the ways they can use it to help them drive their business forward,” she said.

Then, HR helped employees get comfortable using Copilot to complete their day-to-day tasks. Demonstrating how employees can use a tool to better their performance can help them feel less insecure, she said.

“Encourag[e] and promot[e] team members to come forward with exciting ways in which they use this technology to help improve their job and to create an environment of sharing ideas,” Harrington said. “[It] turns it into something more exciting and something that people look forward to learning about.”

A missing link. Before taking any of these steps, though, it’s important to first upskill the HR department. This, Harrington said, is where many companies fall short.

“In any situation where there is uncertainty, team members are going to look to their [people] leaders to help guide them and help them [answer], ‘What does this technology mean for me? How should I be using it? Am I using it in the right way? Am I getting up to speed fast?’” she said. “They need to know that their leaders have the knowledge and expertise right to guide them and make them feel comfortable.”