IdeaWatch: New Research and Emerging Insights

Employees who focus on core skills perform far better.

YOUR first inclination is to hire and train with an eye toward cutting-edge skills that your company might have to deploy in the future, you’re not alone. In 2023 the World Economic Forum reported that 44% of workers’ skills would need to be updated within the next five years and that 60% of employees would require retraining before 2027. Despite those needs, the average training investment for large companies fell from $19.2 million in 2022 to $16.1 million in 2023, according to Training magazine’s 2023 industry report. Companies of all sizes offered five fewer hours of training per year per employee, on average, while the expenses for conducting training continued to climb. With less time and money available, it’s crucial that your company invest in skills that will have a lasting and meaningful impact on your organization. But where should you start?

A recent Gartner survey of 3,375 employees found that training workers in the core skills essential to their roles right now has five times more impact on their performance than teaching “emerging” skills that don’t have a clear here-and-now application. It’s important to note that core skills will be different for every role, and certain emerging skills may actually be immediately needed in some jobs. AI-prompt engineering, for example, isn’t essential at this point for employees in accounting, but it is for certain engineers working with large language models. Unfortunately for HR managers, only 25% of employees prefer to improve core skills rather than learn new ones. Companies want their employees to focus most of their training time on mastering their core skills, but 40% of employees aren’t doing this. That is a mistake.

Tony Guadagni, a director in Gartner’s HR practice and the lead author of the survey, offers four tips for building an effective training program dedicated primarily to core skills.

Determine the right skills. Focus only on your current business needs. Ask employees what skills they need to thrive in their jobs today. Speak to your recruiters and managers, too. Drawing on those conversations, create a list of 10 core skills for every role. They should be tied to business results, and they should reflect only what’s mission critical now. That’s because roles change quickly, as the survey participants Guadagni interviewed report, but the fundamental skills required to do most jobs don’t. That isn’t the case with emerging skills, however. They evolve rapidly, and some become obsolete before anyone has the chance to master them.

Tout the benefits of focusing on core skills. Managers and their employees are often resistant to developmental training, according to Guadagni. Managers worry that the time employees spend learning or brushing up on skills will eat too much into their day-to-day tasks. Employees worry that their regular work will be interrupted and that the skills they learn won’t help them do their jobs better. This is especially true when a training program focuses on core skills.

It’s crucial that your company invest in skills that will have a lasting and meaningful impact on your organization.

To win over skeptics, you should be clear about why employees must acquire or improve core skills, even those the employees think they’re already expert in. No matter which ones you refresh, you should offer specific information about how they will help employees succeed and advance.

Start small and grow. It takes an enormous amount of time just to catalog core skills. One company told Gartner that it took so long to conduct a skills audit for a single set of roles that it had to extend its timeline for the whole organization by two years.

Redesigning a training program is costly, especially in the near term, so start with a defined group of employees and then expand to other areas as you get results. That way, your HR managers can understand what works and what doesn’t before rolling a program out broadly. They’ll also be able to assess how employees are progressing and whether there will be pushback when the program moves to new departments.

Incorporate emerging skills when they become mission critical. “Over the course of five years, everyone will need to learn new skills,” says Guadagni. You should constantly identify emerging skills and assess whether they’ll become a requirement in the long run. Then you should decide whether now is the time to teach them.

How you split the training time between core and emerging skills will vary for each role. Some departments, such as IT, will need to update their skills more frequently than others. And timing is key to integrating emerging-skills training successfully. New skills will always crop up, but will employees have time to learn them, time to test them, and time to apply them in their daily functions while also maintaining or improving current levels of productivity?

“New skills will atrophy if people don’t consistently apply them in their roles,” Guadagni notes. “If you’re going to train someone on an emerging skill, you’d better be sure they’re going to use it.”

ABOUT THE RESEARCH “Modernizing Talent Management” (Gartner white paper, 2024).