What does 2023 hold for your workforce?

Annee Bayeux, Chief Learning Strategist at Degreed, predicts what 2023 will hold for your employees.

A New Year brings fresh opportunities and challenges, with business leaders facing a mixed bag in 2023 especially when it comes to their workforces. Evolving attitudes to work, market and societal changes, and the pace of technological advancements, are impacting workforces in all industries this year. For those who rise to the challenge, it is an exciting time to connect more deeply with your workers, plus futureproof their careers and your organization.

Changing skills

You see this evolution very clearly when you consider the skills that workers were prioritzing at the end of 2022. The top 10 skills that people sought out on the learning platform Degreed were:

1. Leadership
2. Data analytics
3. Change management
4. Project management
5. Machine learning
6. Design thinking
7. Microsoft Excel
8. Problem solving
9. Agile development
10. Entrepreneurship

It’s an interesting mix of skills that directly link to some of the bigger changes in the workplace, like the increasing adoption of automation and AI. Alongside this, you can spot more transferable skills (which are now being dubbed power skills, due to the power they hold for employers and employees). Leadership, change management, project management, and design thinking are relevant in many different departments. Likewise, you can use Microsoft Excel in almost any role.

Shifting from jobs to tasks

It highlights another workforce trend that’s growing in popularity among some business leaders, and that’s the skills-based organization. In short, that describes a new way of structuring work, away from rigid jobs and roles, towards more task and project-based work. People are moved from task to task, project to project, based on their skills. You can see how someone with more power skills, who remains relevant across many different roles, will have an edge over another with more hard skills.

As Deloitte explains, “Jobs are quickly giving way to more fluid ways of working. We found that 63% of current work being performed, falls outside of people’s core job descriptions. 81% say work is increasingly performed across functional boundaries, and 36% say work is increasingly being performed by workers outside of the organization, who don’t have defined jobs, at all. We believe the answer is the Skills-Based Organization, a new operating model for work.”

Time to learn quickly

Learning agility (the ability to quickly learn a new skill) is another key skill that all employees should cultivate this year. Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork and member of the World Economic Forum council, currently puts the half-life of a learned skill at around five years. That means in five years time, your workforce’s current skills will be worth about half as much as it is today. This number is dropping fast, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution causing widespread changes, the half-life of skills will soon fall to four, or even three years.

You can improve the learning agility of your workforce through their learning environment, and the opportunities they can access. Your learning environment consists of infrastructure (like giving someone enough time and the technology to learn effectively) and culture. Having a strong learning culture additionally impacts your competitiveness and revenue, with 166% of workers in organizations with strong cultures stating that their companies grew revenue faster than competitors.

A strong learning culture is built through consistency — people are encouraged to learn often and share what they’ve learned with their peers. Rewarding people for learning, by recognizing a ‘learner of the month’ and awarding badges and points for course completions, can help with this. Likewise, hosting ‘lunch and learn’ sessions can improve knowledge sharing and motivate people to learn more.

Changing work expectations

This brings us nicely to another important focus area this year, creating ‘good work’ for employees. They are no longer satisfied with a 9-5, stable job. Instead, employees are seeking employers who care for them alongside their work. They want to be recognized as whole individuals, with life goals, families, and experiences, that influence their work. It’s creating a new social contract that is more expansive than past employee-employer expectations.

The World Economic Forum’s Good Work Framework (one of the areas my colleague and Degreed CLO Kelly Palmer has been influencing) looks at five objectives for employers to focus on to create ‘good work’.

1. Fair pay and social justice
2. Flexibility and protection
3. Health and wellbeing
4. Driving diversity, equity, and inclusion
5. Employability and learning culture

Understanding how to create ‘good work’ for all of your employees, at all levels and life stages, will pay dividends in retaining them for longer, maintaining an attractive employer brand, and boosting job satisfaction.

Remote and hybrid continues

Simultaneously, it’s worth mentioning that many employees are no longer working from the same physical location, five days a week. Some may be in the workplace a couple of days a week, others may not meet their colleagues at all. This impacts your workforce culture massively, as well as communication, team work, and skills.

Two-thirds of hybrid employees feel disconnected and collaborate less when not working from the same physical location. Unfortunately, when they feel disconnected, employees are more likely to leave their employer, they have lower productivity and work quality, and more missed days at work. It also makes it harder to understand each worker’s skills and learning needs.

Using data to personalize work

The answer to this lies in the data that employees create every day. As they complete a learning course, get a peer or manager review, complete a task, and share a project file, your employees are generating data that you can use to better understand their needs. This data can personalize the employee experience, much like how we’ve become used to personalized recommendations on Netflix and Spotify. Learning opportunities can be tailored to someone’s career goals, stretch assignments might be offered based on current learning, and an employee can be redeployed to another team if they have the right skills. It builds an experience that shows an employee that they matter to their employer — and that’ll make them feel more connected and likely to remain for longer.

Well-prepared for 2023

Of course, you cannot know everything that 2023 holds. There will still be some curveballs thrown at us as the year progresses. But if you understand your people, their expectations, needs, and skills, you’ll be well prepared for whatever comes your way.