The Half-Life of a Skill: Training the Workforce for an Era of Digital Transformation

Currently, the main area of focus for most firms is on leveraging AI to achieve greater efficiency as organizations seek to keep pace with or outperform their competitors. Nobody wants to be left behind. However, understanding how people fit into this new framework will be essential to getting the most out of AI.

As AI is embedded within the workplace, it will continue to challenge which critical skills are required. In addition to investing in reskilling existing employees, Gallagher's AI adoption study also found that many firms are creating new job roles — such as chief AI officers and data scientists — to target talent with specialist digital skills.

"AI has the potential to revolutionize everything from customer experience to operational efficiency," says Ben Warren, head of Digital Transformation and AI, Communications Consulting, Gallagher. "But AI adoption requires continuous reskilling — it is an ongoing process. If businesses can get past the initial hurdles, they will be positioned to thrive in a rapidly changing landscape."

But there's still a long way to go. According to Gallagher's AI research, nearly half of businesses haven't committed to training and reskilling programs for AI.

Expectations are shifting — particularly from younger workers. New graduates are coming into the workplace with experience using AI tools.

In the academic sector, university lecturers have had to pivot with respect to how students submit their work. And with students quickly becoming accustomed to using AI during their education — with clear rules as to when they can and can't use it — there will be a high expectation for that to continue when they enter the workplace.

Providing access to AI training and reskilling and adopting the right change narrative will continue to be key as the workplace adjusts to digital transformation.

"How businesses contract with their employees on this transformational journey will be crucial to ensure that, as they go through the change curve, the employees they would like to remain (and who are likely to be in demand with the company's competitors) actually want to stay," says Ben Reynolds, global managing director, Communication Practice, Gallagher.

Continuous learning and more effective skilling pathways

Employers often struggle to fully understand the skills present within their workforce, either because they lack the proper systems to track and assess skills or aren't using them to their full potential.

Further, many companies lack skills pathways to enable the effective movement of experienced individuals into areas where there's the most need.

According to a 2023 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) adult skills study,⁴ nearly a third of workers aren't well-matched to their jobs based on qualifications, skills or fields of study. This mismatch can manifest as overqualification or underqualification, resulting in lower productivity, reduced job satisfaction and the underutilization of available skills. It's also a source of people risk, given the increased potential for mistakes and accidents.

For Aidan Hewitt, divisional director, Culture Change Consulting at Gallagher, the model that a global internet provider created to help workers transition to a digital economy in the 2000s still holds up.

"They created an internal academy where you could gain credits to reskill yourself as a data analyst, for instance," he says. "What that meant was they retained employees who knew the business inside out and helped them get ready for the future."

Successfully tackling skills gaps means moving beyond traditional learning and development models. The answer may lie in agile and adaptive learning systems, using AI as part of the answer to tailor learning to individual needs and career paths.

"Whereas training 10 years ago was likely to have been physically in the room, if you look at the options now, be it listening to a podcast or using learning platforms, you've got access to more than you know what to do with," continues Hewitt.

"And then when you layer frontier technologies over the top, it makes the concept of a personalized learning journey much easier to deliver," he adds. "The question really is about time and how to build it in so it's something that is done continuously."

In addition to identifying what skills are most needed, businesses also need to think about how to make it easier for talent to move into the right roles. Targeting the skills gap is as much about continuous learning as it is about recruitment and helping people find the right opportunities.

Finding the right opportunities isn't as easy as careers become less linear. Designing more transparent and personalized skilling pathways can help to better match experience to roles. Moving beyond traditional learning and development models implies a growing need for personalized learning platforms, which allows employees to progress at their own pace and in their own way.

By incorporating AI, such platforms can facilitate on-demand learning at scale where each member of staff receives customized content and recommendations at times that fit with their schedule. Digital wallets can help workers better capture their learning experiences, which can move with them from one job to the next.

Whereas companies previously had to choose between offering bespoke learning or reaching large audiences, AI is now making it possible to do both. In the future, AI-driven personalization is likely to become a key trend in corporate learning.

The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2025  found that 71% of L&D professionals are already exploring, experimenting with or integrating AI into their work routines.⁵ They're using AI tools for tasks like analysing learning needs and curating learning content, freeing up trainers to focus on adding the human touch through mentoring and coaching.

Flexing the "learning to learn" muscle

Meeting growing expectations for personalized and easy-to-complete training is becoming a key differentiator in the battle for talent and skills.

The ability to redesign and streamline what were once lengthy curriculum programs improves speed to competency and is extremely attractive for sectors where skills gaps are widespread.

It's also a more attractive prospect for workers who may come to feel that traditional degree and certification programs are taking too long and costing too much against the juxtaposition of a declining skills half-life. Going forward, more collaboration will be needed between education and business sectors to meet changing needs and close gaps in learning paths.

By accelerating learning cycles and making them more continuous and adaptive — through agile feedback loops, for instance — it becomes possible to continuously upgrade worker skills without requiring too much upfront commitment. This means reskilling can take place without overwhelming individuals.

At a time when so much change is already happening within the workplace, such an approach centers learning and reskilling as an iterative and ongoing process. This can be summarized by the cycle of self-regulated learning.

Gallagher's Reynolds likens the process of continuous learning around change initiatives to operating system updates.

"If you're an iPhone user, your iOS system is being updated all the time in the background," he says. "You never hear anybody saying to the board of Apple, 'You need to slow down because we've all got change fatigue.' They just keep updating and improving the system all the time, and you continue using your iPhone."

Gaining broad acceptance for continuous learning ultimately requires a shift in mindset toward the acceptance of lifelong learning with an emphasis on goal setting, critical thinking and self-regulated learning. The latter falls under the broader concept of "learning to learn," where "metacognition" — or awareness of one's own learning processes and strategies — is the overarching goal.

By creating environments that encourage self-reflection and opportunities for practice, employers can do their part to foster a culture of learning. Leadership commitment is necessary to achieve this culture. By becoming advocates for continuous learning, senior leaders can set the right tone to develop dynamic, learning organizations ready to take on future challenges and opportunities.

"High performers, particularly leaders, will create a space in their organization and ideally in their team to constantly adapt, learn and kind of evolve," says Hewitt. "That inevitably attracts like-minded people who go to where they see an ecosystem that uses continuous learning."

Published October 2025

Sources

¹"$1.1 Trillion at Stake: Pearson Report Urges Action, Solutions for Skills Gap," Pearson, 22 Jan 2025.

²Ali, Ambreen. "The Half-Life of Skills & How It Can Affect Your Enterprise," Adobe, 17 Apr 2020.

³"Future of Jobs Report 2025," World Economic Forum, Jan 2025. PDF file.

⁴"Adult Skills and Productivity: New Evidence From PIAAC 2023," OECD, 19 Dec 2024. PDF file.

⁵"The Rise of Career Champions," LinkedIn, accessed 16 Jun 2025. PDF file.

⁶Flynn, Jack. "35 Key Employee Training and Development Statistics [2023]: Data + Trends," Zippia, 9 Mar 2023.