We’re getting better at mapping skills. Just as skills are becoming less stable.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect 39% of workers’ existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. (World Economic Forum)

At the same time, AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, but so are creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility.

That combination is significant.
We need new technical capabilities because technology is changing. Precisely because technology is changing, we also need people who can adapt when tools, tasks and roles change with it.

This creates a paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to map every skill in your workforce, while the changes driven by AI make a static map of those skills less durable.

Skills remain highly relevant. But an inventory of them is particularly good at showing what a person can do today.
For workforce decisions that look several years ahead, we also need insight into where that person could develop next.

This becomes particularly relevant when looking at internal talent.

Imagine someone who has worked in the same domain for ten years. Naturally, a skills profile based on their career history will contain many skills related to that work.

AI can now extract those skills with increasing precision and compare them with thousands of roles. At first sight, that seems very forward-looking.

But when matches are mainly based on similarity with the skills someone already uses, the result can easily be more of the same. We risk recommending variations of what someone has done before, rather than identifying genuinely new directions.

In other words, better technology can help us describe someone’s past with impressive accuracy without necessarily revealing much more about their future.

The person who spent ten years doing analytical work may have competencies that transfer far beyond their current domain. Someone managing complex projects may have capabilities that are valuable in roles that look very different on paper.

This is why broader, transferable competencies deserve more attention.

A specific tool can disappear. A process can be automated. A job description can change. The ability to analyse complexity, solve problems, communicate, structure information or adapt can travel much more easily across contexts.

Looking at those underlying competencies already widens the range of possible career moves.
But capability alone is not enough.

Vocational interests are often missing from the skills conversation.

Two employees can be equally strong at analysing data, coordinating projects and presenting information. Yet one may be naturally drawn towards investigating complex problems and deepening expertise, while the other gets energy from influencing people, initiating projects and creating momentum.
Their skills overlap. Their most promising next career step may not.

This is where models such as Holland’s RIASEC framework become relevant. RIASEC looks at the types of activities and work environments people are naturally interested in.

Research suggests that this matters. A meta-analysis covering more than 60 years of research found vocational interests to be related to performance and persistence, with the fit between a person’s interests and their environment showing a stronger relationship with performance than interests on their own. (Nye et al., 2012)

Another meta-analysis, covering 74 studies and 141 independent samples, found relationships between vocational interests and job performance, training performance and turnover. (Van Iddekinge et al., 2011)

Interests will never predict someone’s future with certainty. They do, however, add information that a list of current skills cannot provide.

A lot of skills technology today is very good at solving a matching problem.
What skills does this employee have? What skills does this role require? Where is the overlap? What is missing?

Those questions are valuable, particularly when filling an existing role. But internal mobility, development, succession planning and workforce planning require a broader perspective.

A more proactive approach also considers the transferable competencies underneath someone’s current skills, the work they are naturally drawn towards, what motivates them and which adjacent directions could fit as the organisation itself changes.

That is also why, at myCareerCompanion, we deliberately chose not to build our Compass around a static inventory of current skills. We combine broader competencies, vocational interests and motivational drivers to understand a more durable layer of the person behind the job.

For a long time, HR decisions were dominated by what someone had done: their diploma, previous roles and experience.

Skills-based thinking is helping organisations move beyond that history and focus on what someone can do today. That is an important step forward.
As work changes faster, however, current capability becomes only one part of the picture.

Understanding future talent means looking beyond the skills people already use. It means recognising transferable competencies, understanding what motivates them and identifying directions in which they have the potential to grow.

The next step for skills-based HR is not to map more skills.
It is to get better at seeing the possibilities behind them.