By rethinking candidate qualifications and leveraging AI to enhance skill-building opportunities for new hires, HR leaders can embrace adaptability and fill critical roles.
By Maggie Mancini
It’s a common refrain: Workers need experience to find a job, but they need a job to gain experience. This conundrum, which often impacts entry-level workers and career changers, has become even more prevalent as technology and other forces reshape the world of work. As organizations struggle to hire the experienced talent they need, workers are having difficulty finding roles where they can gain the experience needed to compete.
Over two-thirds (66%) of managers and executives say most recent hires are not fully prepared for the changing demands of work — and experience is the most common failing, with the number of traditional entry-level roles shrinking, according to Deloitte’s latest Global Human Capital Trends Report. Recently hired workers may find themselves under pressure due to their lack of experience and could end up unemployed or underemployed as a result.
While the experience gap is not widely acknowledged as a key challenge for organizations, with just 48% of respondents saying it’s very or critically important, a higher percentage of respondents cite an “urgent need” to prioritize human capabilities like curiosity and emotional intelligence. Yet, these two factors are closely related, the report finds. Closing the gap is possible, but it requires changes on both sides of the market.
“We need to redefine experience,” says Kyle Forrest, U.S. future of work leader at Deloitte. “Experience should be the contextual application of a skill. For example, 10 years in finance might not be helpful to an organization if in those 10 years, the individual has never experienced working with a cloud-based finance application. A business leader might need the person who’s only been in finance for one year but has spent that year working with a cloud-based finance application.”
The second step — after redefining experience — is to rebuild how career pathways are delivered, Forrest says. Rather than focusing heavily on 10-week internships, for example, some companies are experimenting with 18-month developmental programs, where entry-level professionals can gain full-time experience and organizations can develop inexperienced talent. If that person doesn’t end up fitting into the role at the end of those 18 months, he adds, they still leave with experience that can help them out in the market.
The third step is, of course, determining how to leverage AI. “AI is certainly impacting some of those entry-level role opportunities based on some of the tasks that organizations are using it for,” Forrest says. “At the same time, you can use AI capabilities from a learning perspective to help people find more opportunities for practice in the right context that organizations are looking to skill-build in.”
Embracing the Digital EVP
The report finds that while organizations are looking to use AI to drive and enhance productivity, workers are anxious about the impact that could have on their roles, tasks, and career opportunities.
“Our call-to-action for organizations is to develop an AI-forward employee value proposition that says to candidates in the market here is how we’re going to help you build AI skills,” Forrest explains. HR and business leaders can figure out how to reshape their onboarding process to teach new hires how to leverage the company’s AI tools to enhance their productivity and help them make an impact on the organization.
HR leaders must also determine how they will develop and essentially “re-recruit” their existing employees within this framework, as they are the ones who are probably the most anxious about AI and the ways it will impact their roles, Forrest adds. They’ll want to know what this AI disruption will mean for them.
Organizations need to be able to send a message to those employees that explains how upskilling programs will help them utilize AI tools and provide them with useful, practical experience as their tasks are being changed or disrupted due to AI adoption, he says.
“One of the things we’ve seen a number of organizations consider as they look at those upskilling programs is how they start to identify and encourage this mindset of curiosity and creativity,” Forrest says. “The World Economic Forum’s most recent report still says nine of the top 10 skills in demand are human skills like critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity. Emphasizing the ability to use AI with those types of human capabilities allows people to build some agility in how they work.”
While it’s important to redefine experience and embrace a digital EVP, Forrest adds that organizations need to address and reimagine the role of the manager. The report finds that 40% of managers’ time today is focused on administrative work like performance management, processes, travel, and expenses, for example.
“If you’re able to use something like AI and automation capabilities to reduce the amount of time that managers are spending on administrative tasks, they can spend that much more time investing in employees and helping to close the experience gap,” Forrest says.
This is particularly important when it comes to managing younger, entry-level employees, he adds. Gen Z workers crave time with their managers to learn, grow, and develop their skills. Reimagining the role of the manager to help invest in the growth and development of their employees is another key part of closing the experience gap.
AI Bridging the Gap
The fissure between talent needs and workers’ experience, the report finds, will likely have a major impact on organizations, as recent studies suggest there may be a global talent shortage by 2030. By redefining experience to focus on the contextual application of skills rather than time served in a role, HR and TA leaders can take a “whole work” approach to hiring to fill critical talent gaps and help workers build adaptability.
When used responsibly, AI can be integrated into the design of work and roles to help close the experience gap. Though technological disruption is part of the reason for the experience gap, it can be part of the solution, too.
“A number of organizations are now starting to explore personalized AI coaches,” Forrest says. “An AI coach can help an employees prepare an agenda ahead of business meetings, help them determine what information is important to know going into the meeting, and provide next steps. It can help prepare an employee with data and insights to lead a quality conversation.”
It can also help with harvesting knowledge, supplementing the actions of less-experienced workers, and supporting reflection to help enhance learning, the report finds. Still, it’s important to use AI thoughtfully, because it has never been error-free, Forrest says.
“The people who have been in university for the last few years, they have lived through some incredibly dynamic change. They have had to show curiosity, creativity, resilience, and adaptability in ways the folks before them didn’t have to,” Forrest says. “When placed in the right environment, with the organization focused on AI upskilling from day one in the learning and onboarding program, these folks may end up driving and delivering real-world outcomes much faster.”
