Five years ago the World Economic Forum predicted that 65% of children entering primary schools today would end up working in new job types and functions that had yet to be created.

Meanwhile, the business imperative has never been clearer: technological changes, in combination with the challenges of the pandemic, have exposed a critical need to focus and invest in reskilling and upskilling to ensure your organisation has the capabilities required for the future.

The recent speed of change in skills has been driven by four key forces:

• increasing job automation
• decreasing talent availability
• decreasing mobility of skilled labour
• ageing talent

Organisations need to start preparing for their skills landscape today to avoid losing out in the future. For this to happen effectively, a positive attitude towards evolution should be filtered top down to your workforce, encouraging them to take ownership of their professional development and the skills required for the future. This cultural shift will build strong foundations for ongoing skills acquisition and learning maturity.

This cultural shift will help to attract, retain, and grow the key talents, as well as speed up time to competencies. Upskilling and reskilling your organisation’s workforce will become the key concern for organisation leaders. As the PWC CEO survey of 2020 stated, "Businesses cannot hire their way over this skills gap at a price they can pay, so the imperative is clear."

For such an upskilling strategy to work, it needs an enterprise-wide, unified approach. The goals are more than an HR or L&D objective - it should be an ongoing whole-business strategy.

The starting point for these changes is to understand your organisation’s digital learning maturity level. Digital learning maturity is the ability to align to constantly changing business priorities; to actively explore the context of the people in the workplace; to shift L&D mindset to becoming business enablers; and to constantly reflect and improve based on evidence and outcomes.

The CrossKnowledge diagnostic tool can survey your skills landscape in a matter of minutes. After completing the short assessment, which involves answering a few short questions that get straight to the heart of your learning ecosystem, you will receive a tailored report and action plans to help identify areas of opportunity.