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We Don't Have a Skills Gap
We have a capability illusion
Every few years, organisations rediscover “human skills”.
They give them new names — soft skills, power skills, 21st-century skills — and produce longer lists. Creativity. Resilience. Collaboration. Emotional intelligence. Learning agility.
The language improves, frameworks multiply and yet, very little changes in practice.
This isn’t because human capability doesn’t matter.
It matters more than ever.
How the illusion forms
The problem is not intent, it’s abstraction.
When researchers examine long lists of so-called human skills, they find heavy overlap. Different labels. Similar measures. The same underlying capacities appearing in different settings.
We’ve been multiplying names — and mistaking naming for development. This creates a comforting belief: that capability can be listed, trained, assessed, and certified
in isolation.
That judgement, trust, collaboration, or communication can be developed independently of the day to day reality in which people actually work together. They can’t.
Skills, capability, and conditions
Part of the confusion comes from collapsing three different things into one:
Some aspects of human capability are general foundations — such as attention, reasoning, emotional regulation, and social awareness. These are real, developable, and relatively transferable.
Other aspects are situational expertise — judgement, prioritisation, sensemaking, and action under pressure — which only emerge inside specific conditions, with real constraints and consequences.
Capability is not one or the other, it is the interaction between foundational human capacities and the conditions in which they are exercised.
Ignore reality and capability becomes theoretical.
Ignore the foundations and performance becomes brittle.
Why AI complicates this further
The rapid uptake of AI has intensified the illusion. Not because AI is replacing human capability wholesale — but because it excels at abstracting it.
AI can mirror language, summarise patterns, and simulate reasoning in ways that look like skill. This creates a subtle but powerful confusion: that judgement, expertise, or insight might be captured, automated, or scaled independently of the situations in which they were formed.
What AI can support well are general foundations: information access, pattern recognition, option generation. It cannot replace is situated human judgement — the ability to weigh trade-offs, read context, and act responsibly under real constraints.
When organisations forget this distinction, they risk designing work and learning systems that optimise fluency while actually weakening capability.
Why so many initiatives disappoint
Most skills initiatives focus on what is visible and measurable.
Behaviours. Techniques. Language. Self-reports. What they often miss is the deeper layer beneath: relationships, reality contact, collective sensemaking, and the capacity to stay present when situations become uncomfortable.
People return from training more articulate — then re-enter systems that quietly erode the very capabilities they were meant to strengthen.
This is not a failure of effort, it is a mismatch between how capability actually forms and how we attempt to build it.
The opportunity for HR and people leaders
This is where HR holds a critical — and underused — role.
Not as the curator of ever-longer skills lists, but as the steward of capability-forming conditions.
​HR is uniquely positioned to shape:
• How people are brought into work
• How learning is embedded in real situations
• How experience and maturity are valued rather than sidelined
• How AI is used to support judgement, not substitute for it
Capability develops when people:
• Work in environments where trust can form rather than be performed
• Are supported to name real conditions without rushing to narrative
• Engage in dialogue that changes understanding, not just alignment
• Practise judgement together in situations that actually matter
This work is slower than skills training, but far more durable.
A different advantage
In an age of automation, the advantage is not human “skills” as a category.
It is the human capacity to stay in contact with reality, to think together under pressure, and to adapt without self-deception.
That capacity cannot be labelled into existence, automated out of context or developed without attention to the reality in which people work.
For HR, this is not a loss of relevance, it is an invitation to lead at a deeper level — shaping not just what people learn, but how capability is enabled to emerge.
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