How businesses should approach reskilling for AI

For the technology to achieve its potential, organizations must find creative ways to help workers develop needed skills.

The “reskilling revolution.” It’s an appropriate term for one of today’s most fast-moving advancements. So, it’s gratifying to see such urgency around skilling, with generative AI set to have an enormous impact on the workplace. Cognizant research finds that the technology will disrupt 90% of all jobs in the coming decade.

Training workers to participate in the prosperity promised by advanced technology is a vital first step in ensuring gen AI fulfils its potential.

In previous widespread workforce transitions, employers often focused on the improved opportunities that future workers would enjoy. The implication was that current workers might be obsolete. Today, organizations should lean into both reskilling their existing workforce while tapping into additional talent pools and putting future workers on a path to capture opportunities in the age of gen AI.

Exploring new avenues for upskilling

The worker shortage requires organizations to think creatively to maximize the impact and reach of generative AI skilling programs. Companies should consider doing the following to open doors for current and potential talent:

• Forming consortiums focused on producing skilled AI workers. Consortiums—such as the European Union's Automotive Skills Alliance funded by stakeholders including carmakers—can buoy up the entire sector and even in the competitive world of business, the benefits of such a collaboration are worthwhile, including shared expenses and a focused curriculum.
  
  
• Exploring nonprofit groups as potential skilling partners. Nonprofits can often connect businesses with underrepresented talent in the knowledge workforce. The IT Senior Management Forum is one of the many nonprofits leading the way in this area.
  
  
• Academic partnerships as an ally. Secondary schools, community colleges and traditional four-year universities all have a stake in reskilling success and, thus, have a role to play. Micro-credential programs, created by business-university partnerships, are already providing affordable re- and upskilling pathways. Examples include the IBM Skills Academy and Florida Gulf Coast University's program or edX's “micro-bootcamp” created with several universities—both focused on AI.

At Cognizant, we’re doing our part through our Synapse program, in which we equip young talent to be employable in the future digital economy by equipping them with skills in AI and other cutting-edge technologies through our learning and development ecosystem and a range of powerful partnerships. To train more than one million individuals by 2026, we are working with governments, academic institutions, businesses and strategic partners to create pathways to success that may otherwise be unreachable for many.

Synapse encompasses multiple pillars that address various skilling-related challenges for employers. Our Accelerator program offers courses and assessments to teach jobseekers high-demand skills. We’ve expanded our talent ecosystem through partnerships with India’s NASSCOM, Google and others. Through philanthropic grants, education partnerships, volunteerism and mentoring programs, we aim to ensure inclusivity.

It’s early days for Synapse but we envision the program serving as a bridge and a connector—a platform we’ll use to open doors for future generations of diverse talent.

Ensuring talent is successful once in the door

Technical reskilling is just one—albeit critical—aspect of equipping talent for the future. Among other things, organizations need to address employee anxiety about fitting into this new world while we equip them to be part of it. This includes providing them with all the skills they need to succeed, not just the ones required for the latest technological advances.

Higher education leaders will tell you that some of their students miss out because, in an interview setting, they lack the soft skills needed to sell the tech skills they’ve worked so hard to learn. Organizations need increasingly human-centric leaders to keep teams engaged and deliver results as the world becomes more automated; soft skills such as communication, time management, teamwork and adaptability are at a premium.

Organizations must balance gen AI training with soft skilling programs to ensure employees are well-rounded and equipped to succeed in corporate employment.

What success will look like

As technology continues to do more rote, routine work, future generations will be empowered to contribute in more complex ways. As Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S says, forget problem-solving; in the AI era, it’ll be problem-finding that matters most.

In the past, the world’s major problems were obvious; the challenge was how to address them. But this is changing. AI possesses unprecedented problem-solving power, so the key to maximizing it is to identify the urgent, cross-disciplinary problems that are best suited to the technology.

As organizations, we have a responsibility to help prepare the world for this future. Let’s partner and make the investments needed in talent so that we can capture this opportunity together.

It is not only right to do but it makes good business sense too.