Adapting employees’ skills and roles to the post-pandemic ways of working will be crucial to building operating-model resilience.

By Sapana Agrawal, Aaron De Smet, Sébastien Lacroix, and Angelika Reich: “Even before the current crisis, changing technologies and new ways of working were disrupting jobs and the skills employees need to do them. In 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as many as 375 million workers—or 14 percent of the global workforce—would have to switch occupations or acquire new skills by 2030 because of automation and artificial intelligence. In a recent McKinsey Global Survey, 87 percent of executives said they were experiencing skill gaps in the workforce or expected them within a few years. But less than half of respondents had a clear sense of how to address the problem.

The coronavirus pandemic has made this question more urgent. Workers across industries must figure out how they can adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and companies have to learn how to match those workers to new roles and activities. This dynamic is about more than remote working—or the role of automation and AI. It’s about how leaders can reskill and upskill the workforce to deliver new business models in the post-pandemic era…

In this article, we offer six steps leaders can take to ensure that their employees are equipped with the skills critical to their recovery business models.”

Source: McKinsey & Company