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How is AI changing the way organisations design and develop the skills of their people? This question was at the heart of the round table discussion “Skills & Learning in the Era of AI-driven Transitions”, held during Septeo Future Insights HR 2025.
As Isabelle Rouhan, founder of Colibri Talent and President of the Observatory of Future Jobs, reminded us:
“Hard skills, which had a 20-year lifespan in the 1970s, now rarely last more than 12 to 18 months.”
This accelerated skills obsolescence is forcing organisations to rethink their talent development strategy in depth. In this context, HR plays a central role: anticipating shifts, supporting employees, and building organisations that can learn and evolve continuously.
In summary:
- AI accelerates skills obsolescence and requires a rethink of talent management.
- AI literacy is the first lever for anticipating these shifts rather than reacting to them.
- Curiosity, adaptability and critical thinking are becoming the key soft skills of tomorrow.
- To ensure skills resilience in the face of innovation, HR must embed continuous learning at the heart of company culture.
AI literacy: the first antidote to skills obsolescence
Obsolescence is not only caused by a lack of technical skills, but also by a lack of understanding. Building AI literacy gives teams the keys to understand the technology and creates a supportive environment for ongoing development.
How can you raise employee awareness of AI?
AI fascinates as much as it worries people. Many employees wonder: “Will my job disappear?” “Am I ready to work with these tools?”
The challenge for HR is to create a shared baseline of understanding. This can be achieved through workshops, internal webinars, or onboarding modules specifically dedicated to AI, for example.
Eneric Lopez, AI National Initiative & Social Impact Director at Microsoft, captures the spirit of this first step:
“The first thing organisations need to do today is include all employees in the AI journey, and that starts with awareness. Everyone needs to understand digital basics, data fundamentals, data science, and what responsible AI means to be able to navigate change.”
Creating an AI skills framework and mapping skills
To prevent skills obsolescence, you first need to understand which skills are changing and which are emerging. That is precisely the purpose of an AI skills framework — a true compass for workforce transformation.
During Septeo Future Insights HR 2025, Laurie Fabiani, HR Director at Artefact, explained:
“The goal is to identify the required skills, the current skills, and the gap between the two. Then you need to work out how to close that gap — either using AI if the use case is relevant, or without AI when it isn’t necessary.”
In practical terms, the approach begins with an analysis of the technical and behavioural skills impacted by AI, carried out with managers. On that basis, HR can build a role-based framework that sets out expected proficiency levels and development priorities.
A diagnostic of the skills available within the organisation (for instance through performance reviews) then helps identify gaps: which skills need strengthening, acquiring, or redeploying?
Acculturation IA : comment impliquer toutes les parties prenantes ?
Tackling skills obsolescence cannot rest on HR alone. It requires a collective effort: leadership, managers, employee representatives and employees must move forward together.
Logically, the first people to upskill should be those who will support others. As Frédéric Bardeau, President and co-founder of Simplon.co, notes:
“Train yourselves — HR — before you train your employees.”
Upskilling HR in AI literacy helps them better understand the ethical, technological and organisational challenges of this transformation. Managers, meanwhile, play a key role in supporting their teams over time and encouraging curiosity.
But the success of any AI literacy initiative depends above all on early involvement from senior leadership and employee representatives. Their participation in setting priorities, key moments, and internal communication builds the legitimacy needed for this culture to thrive day to day.
From training to continuous learning: building a sustainable response to skills obsolescence
Once the foundations are in place, HR’s challenge is to prevent skills from losing value by promoting continuous learning and strengthening soft skills — real safeguards against future shifts.
Embedding continuous learning into company culture
In the age of AI, hard skills expire quickly and traditional training pathways struggle to keep up. Organisations need to foster continuous learning so employees can remain agile. As Eneric Lopez summarises:
“Becoming an AI-oriented organisation requires the right company culture: a culture that enables empowerment, test-and-learn, and continuous learning.”
To make this happen, there are several levers to activate:
- Embed continuous learning into company values and team objectives
- Establish cross-mentoring between beginners and experts
- Run quarterly retrospectives (use cases, successes and lessons learned)
- Highlight employee stories that share learning and progress
AI soft skills: the safeguard against skills obsolescence
Adopting AI tools and understanding their limitations requires far more than technical capability. Curiosity, adaptability, collaboration and critical thinking become essential soft skills.
As Isabelle Rouhan points out:
“Soft skills aren’t affected by planned obsolescence. On the contrary, they improve with time, like a good wine. These are precisely the skills that make someone employable for life and absolutely strategic for using AI.”
The next step is creating the conditions for these skills to develop within teams. HR can:
- Train employees to validate, challenge and correct AI-generated outputs
- Embed these capabilities into annual reviews, strategic workforce planning, and learning pathways
- Assess them through 360-degree feedback
Measuring progress and adjusting actions
Skills transformation is not a one-off initiative, but a continuous improvement approach where each step feeds the next. As Eneric Lopez reminds us:
“To transform processes deeply, you need to work on the trio of people, process, tools — you must evolve all three at the same time.”
In other words, success does not depend solely on technology, but on HR’s ability to develop skills, ways of working and tools in parallel. To maintain momentum, it is essential to regularly measure progress and adjust actions based on results. Here are a few KPIs to track in order to steer skills development effectively:
- AI tool adoption rate
- Satisfaction levels after AI training
- Proportion of employees who have acquired at least one key skill during the year
- Changes in skills mapped in the AI skills framework, to track gaps between baseline and achieved levels
Monitoring these indicators helps HR operate within a continuous improvement logic that strengthens talent resilience in the face of skills obsolescence.
Key takeaways
Skills obsolescence is a challenge for both employees and HR. On this topic, HR plays a strategic role: initiating AI literacy.
By helping everyone understand AI, learn continuously and develop the right soft skills, HR enables employees to become active drivers of their own development.
Ultimately, this proactive approach gives the organisation the ability to anticipate rather than suffer skills obsolescence — and to keep pace with the speed of innovation.
FAQ – Skills Obsolescence and Skills Management in the Age of AI
Innovation cycles are shortening and knowledge is evolving rapidly. In this context, one-off training is no longer sufficient.
Continuous learning involves:
- Encouraging progressive skills development
- Multiplying short, practical formats (microlearning, workshops, peer learnings)
- Promoting experimentation and a “safe to fail” mindset
- Valuing knowledge-sharing between peers
This learning culture helps the organisation remain agile while strengthening employee engagement, as people become active owners of their professional development.
No role is completely shielded from technological, organisational or regulatory change. However, the intensity of the phenomenon varies by sector and function. Highly technical roles or those linked to specific tools are generally more exposed to rapid change. Conversely, roles rooted in analysis, coordination or human interaction evolve differently — but they are not static.
It would therefore be reductive to treat skills obsolescence as a targeted issue. It affects the whole organisation, but at different speeds. That is why a structured, organisation-wide approach — supported by strategic workforce planning and regular skills mapping — is essential to assess impacts objectively and prioritise action.
While AI strongly accelerates current transformations, it is not the only driver. Skills obsolescence results from a combination of factors: digitalisation, regulatory change, shifting customer expectations, the green transition, and organisational transformation.
AI acts as a catalyst by significantly reducing the lifespan of certain technical skills. It increases the pace of change and reinforces the need for a continuous learning culture. In that sense, AI does not create the phenomenon, but it amplifies its speed and visibility.
Protecting employability does not mean guaranteeing a job for life; it means ensuring the ability to evolve. This requires investing in transferable skills, supporting internal mobility, and providing visibility on potential career pathways.
Career conversations, learning and development programmes, and bridges between roles are essential tools. The earlier an organisation supports transitions, the more it can limit abrupt disruption. Employee ownership is also key: by enabling people to take charge of their development, the organisation builds a shared momentum around skills growth.
Yes. The acceleration of change requires HR strategy to evolve. An annual training plan is no longer enough to respond to shifts that can now happen quarterly. HR must adopt a more agile approach, grounded in data, experimentation and continuous adjustment.
This means strengthening strategic monitoring, shortening cycles for updating skills frameworks, and involving managers more in identifying role changes. HR becomes a central driver of organisational resilience by connecting technological transformation, skills development and career security.
It does not undermine expertise, but it changes its nature. Being an expert no longer means mastering a tool or technique once and for all — it means being able to continuously update knowledge. Expertise becomes dynamic.
In this context, the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn gains strategic value. Organisations should therefore value not only depth of skill, but also the ability to evolve it over time. Tomorrow’s expert is both a specialist and a continuous learner.
At first glance, rapid skills change might seem to weaken retention. In practice, it is often the opposite: employees are more likely to stay with an organisation that invests in their development and gives them the means to remain employable.
By offering clear development pathways, regular learning opportunities and internal mobility options, an organisation demonstrates commitment to its people. Retention is no longer built purely on job stability, but on the richness of learning and progression opportunities.
Skills obsolescence is characterised by a rapid loss of relevance in certain capabilities — particularly technical ones — due to technological change.
Strategic workforce planning provides a structured response by:
- Mapping existing skills to provide a clear and objective view of internal capability
- Identifying strategic gaps and highlighting which skills to strengthen, transform or acquire
- Planning the right actions: learning, mobility, reskilling, targeted recruitment
- Involving employee representatives in a collective reflection on how roles will evolve
Rather than reacting to change, strategic workforce planning enables HR to anticipate skills obsolescence risks and protect employability over the long term.
Skills obsolescence is often seen as an organisational weakness or even a social risk. Yet it can become a powerful driver of change. When a skill loses relevance, it usually signals a deeper shift in roles, technology or the business model. Instead of trying at all costs to preserve declining know-how, organisations can use this momentum to redefine responsibilities, reposition employees towards higher value activities, and automate repetitive tasks.
Adopting this mindset requires HR to embed skills management within a logic of continuous anticipation. By supporting employees towards new expertise and valuing adaptability, the organisation strengthens agility. Employees, in turn, gain employability and greater visibility on their future. Skills obsolescence is no longer suffered — it becomes a catalyst for innovation and sustainable transformation.
A skills management system provides a structured, up-to-date view of the organisation’s human capital. It centralises data on roles, proficiency levels and career pathways, enabling HR to build a precise skills map of available capability.
This visibility makes it easier to identify gaps between current skills and those required by the organisation’s strategy.
Beyond monitoring, these tools allow you to analyse trends over time and inform decisions on learning, mobility and recruitment. When they include AI capabilities, they can even generate personalised recommendations or highlight emerging skills. The system becomes a decision-support tool for strategic workforce steering, embedding skills management within a continuous, data-driven approach — essential in a fast-changing environment.
Discover the mpleo skills management software.