Image: AI-generated
When jobs change every two years, experience is a poor forecast. Skills are a better one.
Have you ever read a job ad whose most important requirement is ten years in the same job? I always wonder two things. Does the candidate still enjoy it? And did they really do exactly the same thing for ten years?
I have worked in risk management for more than fifteen years. Had the job not changed again and again in that time, I would have left the field long ago.
So much has changed in those fifteen years that my experience from back then, even from five years ago, is worth only so much. What is worth something are my skills. They are the reason I kept adapting, developing and getting better.
The trap of being good at it
There is a catch. The same skills now let me solve most of what my job asks of me, and solve it quickly. That is comfortable, and it is a risk every experienced professional knows: a job that no longer stretches you is a job you slowly stop wanting to do. Motivation drops, and productivity follows.
Now put that on the labour market. If companies search for experience but actually need skills, they hire people who have done the job for years and may no longer want to, and who take it because they see no alternative. In Switzerland, the share of senior positions in job ads for AI-exposed occupations has risen by 26 percent. The motivated ones, who want a new challenge, are willing to learn and have the skills, stay outside.
The price of the mismatch
About ten years ago, I read a study by the McKinsey Global Institute on exactly this problem. Its estimate: matching people better with work could add 2.7 trillion dollars a year to global GDP by 2025, two percent of the world's economic output. Read the other way round, that is roughly the price of sorting people by the wrong criteria. Boston Consulting Group later put the cost of the global skills mismatch at 8 trillion dollars for 2018 alone.
What AI changes
AI makes exactly these skills decisive. Working with AI will change jobs at the root over the next few years, and experience from two years ago will not help much. What helps is knowing how to work with an AI, questioning whether its output is right and checking its work. All of that rests on skills that already exist today: judgment, scepticism, curiosity and creativity.
So the question is not whether the skills are there. It is whether the right people are doing the job, and whether they want to. And if not, how do companies and their HR departments make the match between the skills a job needs and the people who have them? That is the next part of this series.
Jean-Claude, by the way, has no CV at all. He was hired on skills.
Part three of After the Agents, a series on what work looks like once agents take the tasks. It follows The First Rung Moves Up.