By looking at their supply of skills and talent in a new light today, organizations can take actions that better prepare their companies for tomorrow’s challenges.

CEOs and HR leaders worried about the viability of their talent strategy may be excused an occasional sleepless night. After all, there’s a closetful of bogeymen to pick from as disruptive technologies such as digitization, automation, and artificial intelligence combine with demographic forces to continue transforming the nature of work, how it gets done, and by whom. The resulting job displacement could be massive—think Industrial Revolution massive—affecting as many as 800 million people globally by 2030 and requiring up to 375 million of them to switch occupational categories and learn new skills.

Companies are already feeling the heat. Fully 60 percent of global executives in a recent McKinsey survey expect that up to half of their organization’s workforce will need retraining or replacing within five years. An additional 28 percent of executives expect that more than half of their workforce will need retraining or replacing. More than one-third of the survey respondents said their organizations are unprepared to address the skill gaps they anticipate.¹

The competitive implications are profound. Organizations that expect to benefit from a digital transformation or a promising new strategy won’t get very far if they lack the people to bring the plans to life. What might seem like an irritating talent gap today could prove a fatal competitive liability in the not-too-distant future.

How can organizations better prepare for what’s coming? For starters, they should embrace a more expansive and dynamic view of their talent supply—one that tosses out the usual preoccupation with titles and traditional roles and looks instead at the underlying skills people have. Indeed, we find that when companies start with skills—the ones they need, the ones they have, and how the mix may change over time—they can free up their thinking and find more creative ways to meet the inevitable mismatches.

In this article, we’ll show how forward-looking organizations are grappling with these challenges and highlight ways that CEOs and senior leaders can spark progress that is tangible, practical, and quite often beneficial for both employer and employee alike. Oftentimes, taking the first step can be as simple as asking: For our five most important skills, are we long—or short—on talent?

Shift happens

Consider the European bank whose market position was threatened by new, more digitally savvy rivals. The shifting competitive landscape required action, but when the bank’s leaders compared their proposed strategic response with a three-year projection of the bank’s talent pool, they saw a mismatch. The plan made sense, but executives feared that their people couldn’t execute it.

For example, the bank would soon have serious skill gaps in its retail-banking unit, particularly among branch managers whose roles needed to change to encompass areas such as sales expertise, customer orientation, and digital capabilities, given the new strategy. Meanwhile, the bank’s IT group faced both undersupply and oversupply: programming skills would be too scarce, while IT infrastructure skills would be too plentiful. To complicate matters, the bank faced strict regulatory and labor restrictions that prevented most layoffs. Any solutions would require flexibility and creative thinking.

To respond to the imbalances, the bank developed a range of interventions. For example, the bank is rolling out upskilling programs to help prepare its retail bankers for the aspects of their jobs that are changing; elsewhere, reskilling and retraining programs (including new digital and analytical skills) are helping employees secure new roles in the company. Still other employees have been offered part-time positions, an option intended to appeal to those nearing retirement.²

Finally, for some employees, the bank is exploring secondment opportunities with selected not-for-profit organizations. Under the arrangement, both organizations pay a portion of the employee’s salary. In principle, this benefits everyone: the not for profit (which gets a talented employee for less money), the employees (who are doing meaningful work using skills that are in high demand), and even the bank (which pays less for skills it already has in surplus, while potentially enhancing its visibility in the community).

While the bank’s overall approach is still a work in progress, its example is instructive not only for its breadth but also for the outlook of its leaders. Instead of just looking at its talent supply through the lens of its traditional jobs or roles, which after all are changing, the bank’s executives pushed themselves to take a more objective, skills-based look. Similarly, the bank’s experience underscores the importance of setting aside long-held assumptions about which roles are most important, as prevailing opinion may be outdated or biased.