Heading for 2025: Organisational skills, resilience, and impact

Heading for 2025: Organisational skills, resilience, and impact

With constant change, it can be difficult to predict what lies ahead. Yet in this very statement lies a clue about where we perhaps should be looking – at our readiness for change and our ability to adapt, respond, and be better equipped to use the evidence at our disposal to make future predictions.

As people professionals, we are often blindsided by trends related to AI, technology, and shiny new solutions. Where I think and believe need to be headed is towards a more evidence-led approach. Not anticipating solutions but asking the questions we need to critically answer using data. How prepared are we to meet evolving workforce demands? Are our learning interventions developing the skills we need now and in the future? How can we skill people rapidly in times of change or crisis? Is our investment in skills development paying off?

These are not new or random questions but ones that I see as deeply relevant to the year ahead, based on what I have observed across three key areas. 

1. Skills: Growing gaps and growing demands

The rising focus on the concept of the skills-based organisation corresponds with an increasingly complex skills landscape driven by various socioeconomic factors, where we see a combination of skills shortages, skills gaps, and skills mismatches - the OECD Skills for Jobs database indicates that 26% of the UK workforce is underqualified for their occupation, compared to an OECD average of 18%. According to the latest Skills England report, across the UK, almost 1 in 10 or over 2.5 million roles are in critical demand, and over a third of UK vacancies in 2022 were due to skills-shortages. Developing a cohesive skills system for the UK is a critical agenda for education, public, and private sector organisations and the Skills England report is the first to set out the key skills challenges that limit growth and opportunity, and assesses skills needs in the economy.

There is some excellent thinking which provides guidance and frameworks for building a skills-based organisation, such as this article, and it’s a topic we have been exploring in our recent podcast series. However, turning theory into practice may be harder than it seems, and adopting a skills-based approach will require systemic organisational change and deeply joined up thinking across recruitment, HR and learning processes.

2. Organisational resilience

Resilience here is not about mental health or the individual ability to withstand hardship, but the organisational ability to adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of adversity. For HR and L&D, this means developing strategies that not only address immediate challenges but also prepare for future uncertainties – with skills featuring as a key component of this.

The increasing focus on resilience corresponds directly with the wider national agenda for resilience and preparedness, which is not just about the military or emergency services, but about all of us being prepared and resilient – a whole societal approach. Various models of organisational resilience exist, which acknowledge the role of people, leadership, and learning as part of a wider ecosystem of resilience factors.

I predict that we will continue to see this idea of workforce resilience emerge, with organisations increasingly looking to employ such models to measure their levels of maturity when it comes to resilience.

3. Impact

Foundational to both driving forward the idea of the resilient organisation and the skills-based organisation is the ability to use data effectively. Yet evaluation and impact feel like the perennial challenge for L&D and HR. Part of this challenge lies in accessing and integrating disjointed data sets, but as mentioned, if a skills-based organisation requires more joined up thinking across employee domains to achieve success, organisations need to be open about joining up data across those domains to capture relevant and useful insights.

Organisations also need to adopt more robust approaches to linking learning to business outcomes, rooted in behavioural science and research disciplines. Diversity and inclusion is a prime area where, for far too long, we have been trying to address complex, systemic social issues with, at times, little rigour and risking doing more harm than good. This is now being called out in publications such as the Inclusion at Work Panel report, which, based on its findings, proposes a key principle that “The impact evidence on D&I is mixed and often inconclusive. Initiatives grounded in robust evidence should take primacy and employers should be open to learning and change”.

Ultimately, while it’s a challenging time for people professionals, continuously stretched to do more with less, it’s also an exciting one I feel. A time to be curious about how we can do better and to upskill ourselves in ways that meet the demands of society and workforces in a shifting landscape. I believe that a continued focus on getting specific about what we mean by skills, resilience and impact, and adopting evidence-led approaches to tackle these opportunities, will be critical to that agenda.

If you are interested in hearing more about research involving class and evolving DEI efforts or any other L&D issues please visit https://www.capita.com/expertise/learning-and-development or contact us at Learning@Capita.com

Author:

Steph Bright, Senior Consultant, Capita

Steph has a multi-disciplinary people and learning background having worked across various customer-facing roles across learning production, customer success, service design and consulting for the past ten years, as well as an internal role as Head of Engagement and Inclusion for Capita. She has an MSc in Organisational Psychology and is a researcher at heart with a passion for understanding behaviour at work, with specific interest in the areas of DE&I, mostly focusing on gender and social mobility, as well as occupational health and wellbeing.