AI Is Shaking Up the Workplace. But It’s Talent Leaders Who Will Shape the New World of Work, Says LinkedIn’s CEO

The explosion of new generative AI tools and capabilities is shaking up the workplace, and no one is feeling those reverberations more sharply than the talent leaders who must forge the new world of work.

“In this room,” LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky told a summit of global talent leaders this morning, “are the people who will shape — perhaps more than any other people anywhere else in the world — what the world of work is going to look like, not just in the coming years but over the coming decades.”

Ryan was speaking at Talent Connect, LinkedIn’s annual gathering for talent acquisition and talent development leaders, where the theme of the two-day conference is “Work changes today.”

Why today? 

In part, because of the rise of the hybrid workplace and the challenges of a five-generation workforce. But primarily because of the proliferation of mind-boggling generative AI tools and the shift to a skills-first approach to talent. 

“The old playbooks won’t work in this new world of work,” Ryan said. “They won’t.” And new playbooks will be needed regardless of your region or industry.

And while developing these contemporary playbooks won’t necessarily be easy, they won’t be impossible. “The good news is that AI is not just accelerating the need for new playbooks,” Ryan said, “it’s also going to be a great tool in helping you all build them, with everything from building skills graphs to identifying emerging talent for the business.” 

So, who’s writing these breakthrough playbooks? Ryan shared case studies of three companies, Genpact, Siemens, and IBM, that have put skills at the center of their talent strategies — with riveting results — and one company, Canva, that has rethought how HR even comes together. 

Genpact leverages its Skills Graph to drive employee and company growth

Building talent systems and processes around skills is not easy, even if it’s necessary. For starters, as Ryan noted, what are the reliable signals that confirm a person has mastered a skill? 

Genpact, the global professional services company whose name comes from the phrase “generating business impact,” has decided to tackle that issue themselves. They’ve built a skills graph that has 90 core skills and another 900 adjacent skills.

“They use this graph,” Ryan said, “to look at the needs of the business, then project out skills gaps that are coming, which they fold back into their hiring plan. Then they identify the gaps that exist right now and fold it into their learning plan.”

How does that play out? Well, for one example, Genpact saw a need to upskill its whole workforce on generative AI. So, the company elevated training courses that explained the basics of prompt engineering and large language models.

Over time, Genpact has tied more than 600 skills to courses. But that’s just the beginning. “People learn best from other people,” writes Genpact CHRO Piyush Mehta, “and with the advent of AI and technology seeping in so deep and so pervasively, it’s important organizations leverage experts that exist within the system and identify ‘knowledge gurus’ and ‘knowledge brokers’ — people who are accessible to many of their colleagues.” 

Identifying those internal experts at Genpact, Ryan said, led to a big jump in engagement. “The number of Genpact employees,” he said, “spending at least 15 minutes a day learning went up threefold in the first year that it was launched.”

Siemens built a platform that makes personalized learning recommendations to employees based on identified skills gaps

When you’re as big (over 300,000 employees in more than 190 countries) and as old (the multinational technology giant celebrated its 176th birthday on Sunday) as Siemens, it’s easy to get stagnant. 

Not so at Siemens.

“Last year,” Ryan said, “to build more agility into their workforce, they started acting as a skills-first company, bringing skills to the center of their internal learning platform.”

At Munich-based Siemens, they call the internal approach for individual learning and career journeys MyGrowth, which brings together all the tools, instruments, and experiences they make available in one place. The learning process starts with employees doing a self-assessment, alongside their manager, and then feeding those assessments into the company’s robust skills graph to receive personalized feedback about skills gaps and potential learning paths. 

“So far,” Ryan reported, “more than 55,000 [Siemens] employees have done that analysis and are on the path to continuous learning that is tied not just to career development but to company growth.” 

How do you say “win-win” in German?

IBM has launched a successful apprenticeship program centered on learning courses and on-the-job training

Back in 2017, IBM decided to use an apprenticeship program to develop the skills that were essential for future roles at the company.

“They started small,” Ryan said, “with a test-and-learn approach. They built a framework for an apprenticeship program centered on learning courses and on-the-job training for essential roles for the company.”

But what is small at an international behemoth like IBM? Seven apprentices.

“We ultimately got lucky with some senior leaders who liked the idea and wanted to take a chance,” says Kelli Jordan, vice president of IBMer growth and development, “and it snowballed in a really positive way from there. We had our first cohort come in October 2017 with seven apprentices because a senior leader said I love this and want to take a chance.”

By now, they’ve had a thousand apprentices across 35 roles, including cybersecurity, software development, data science, and design. The success of the program led IBM to commit to investing $250 million toward Registered Apprenticeship and other training programs by 2025. 

“They did it all,” Ryan noted, “by focusing on programs and the tools that help their employees understand and learn the skills that they need.”

Canva has rethought how HR functions

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Canva, the Australian software company that promotes unbridled creativity with its suite of design products, should be at the forefront of redesigning HR.

“They have started writing new playbooks,” Ryan says, “by embracing the need to adapt and tearing down historical HR silos.”

What does that look like? 

Canva brought together internal mobility, contingent workforce, talent programs, and workforce planning into a team they call “Talent Agility,” whose sole mission is to bring fluidity to the company’s workforce and culture.

“So, as a company, they’re now able to move much more quickly,” Ryan said, “as the market evolves around them, with the right skills on the right goals at the right time — around the world.”

Final thoughts

These four companies are not done rewriting their playbook. In fact, they’re just getting started. But they have already seen impressive results and have become better positioned to keep moving forward successfully.

“I don’t think anyone can say they have it all figured out,” Ryan said. “But the companies and teams and leaders who will succeed most in the coming years are those that are starting to figure it out right now.” 

Work changes today.