The AI Skills Gap: How to Identify and Address It in Your Organization

Artificial intelligence has already begun to transform workplaces and industries.

According to Pearson's Skills Outlook, AI can now streamline and automate many routine and repetitive tasks — freeing up employee time and energy for higher-value activities, such as:

To fully leverage AI’s potential, it’s crucial to equip your workforce with the necessary AI skills. A Salesforce survey highlights that 60% of public sector IT workers in the UK consider a shortage of skills to be the primary barrier to successful AI implementation.

In this blog post, we’ll explore why understanding the AI skills gap within your organization is essential. We’ll provide practical tips and insights on how to assess and address these skill gaps, helping you to better prepare your team for the evolving demands of AI.

Why Managing the AI Skills Gap Matters

The most competitive employees and employers of the future will be those who use AI to augment their capabilities. For successful organizations, this will include:

1. Navigating economic disruptions: IDC market research indicates that by 2026, global tech talent shortages will cost organizations $5.5 trillion. 
   While AI can help mitigate these disruptions, its effectiveness relies on proper training. 
   
   Nearly 43% of HR executives foresee AI creating a skills gap in their organizations, highlighting the need for proactive upskilling and reskilling. Organizations that address these skill gaps effectively will be better positioned to leverage AI’s benefits and minimize the financial impact of tech talent shortages.
   
   
2. Improving efficiency: AI can streamline and automate repetitive and routine tasks, boosting productivity. Pearson Skills Outlook shows that 19 million hours of UK workers can be saved weekly with the help of Gen AI.
   
   
3. Retaining talent: Employers that invest in AI skills development will be more attractive to existing and future employees. As workers view their employers as willing to help them learn and advance, engagement and retention will rise.
   
   
4. Creating competitive advantage: AI can drive innovation, enable new products and services, and even help generate new business models. Organizations with a skilled AI workforce are more likely to outperform their competitors.

Addressing the AI skills shortage goes beyond just filling gaps; it has profound long-term impacts. By effectively managing this challenge, organizations can enhance their competitiveness, drive strategic success, and ensure that their technology investments deliver maximum returns.

Key Steps to Map and Address the AI Skills Gap

Understanding your organization's current skills landscape is the foundation for building a workforce ready to thrive alongside AI. By systematically identifying gaps and aligning talent strategies with future needs, you can ensure your employees are prepared for the evolving demands of AI-driven work. Here's how to effectively pinpoint and address the AI skills gap in your organization:

1. Understand Macro Trends: Use predictive insights from sources like Faethm to grasp how broader labour market trends will impact your workforce. These insights, powered by advanced AI and data science, help you anticipate challenges and opportunities, ensuring your workforce is prepared for future demands.

2. Utilize third-party reports: Leverage trustworthy insights, such as the 'Pearson Skills Outlook' or the 'Impact AI: 2024 Workforce Skills Forecast' survey by ServiceNow and Pearson, to gain detailed insights into skill trends and emerging needs. These reports provide valuable information on how AI and other technological advancements are shaping the skills landscape, helping you align your talent strategy with current and future requirements.
   
   
3. Conduct a skills inventory:  Evaluate your workforce's current skills to identify strengths and gaps. Engage with powerful AI solutions like Strategic Workforce Planning by Pearson to help address AI skill gaps by pinpointing existing deficiencies and forecasting future AI-related needs. It aligns workforce development with AI advancements, ensures skills are transferable, and supports internal mobility by providing clear pathways and upskilling opportunities for future AI roles.
   
   

   Snapshot Zurich Insurance, a leading global insurer, used Faethm by Pearson to analyze their workforce and address future needs. The analysis revealed 270 unfilled roles in robotics, data science, and cybersecurity by 2024, and identified £1 million in potential savings through upskilling. Result: Zurich invested £1 million in reskilling in 2020 with an established plan to retrain two-thirds of their workforce, and implemented 120 automated interventions, with 100 more in the pipeline.  [Discover more]

   
   
4. Analyze job ontologies and requirements: Map out key roles in your organization that rely on AI or could benefit from it. Skill requirements within these ontologies can highlight gaps in AI skills.
   
    
   *Skills Ontologies Explained
   
   The Pearson Ontology is a framework that captures relationships between different skill types and their connections to occupations, tasks, and technologies. By using this structured approach, you can better understand how various skills relate to each other and identify gaps in your organization’s AI capabilities.
   
   
   
5. Gather stakeholder feedback: Meet with key managers, team leaders and employees and gather input. How and where could adopting AI technologies enhance workforce productivity and business performance?
   
   
6. Create a plan to bridge the AI skills gap: Prioritize the skill gaps that must be addressed first for maximum impact. You can develop upskilling and reskilling programs and update recruitment strategies to address key skill gaps.

Integrating Training and Recruiting Strategies

After a clearer understanding of the existing AI skills gap and future needs, organizations can focus on building a robust talent pipeline and equipping their workforce with the right capabilities. Here’s what leaders can do.

1. Develop Targeted Upskilling Programs
   The most efficient way to address any skills gaps — including AI skills gaps — is often upskilling and reskilling. Giving employees opportunities to learn new skills can make them more effective and productive, while also heightening engagement.
   
   Although AI is being widely implemented in many industries and roles, it is still new. Defining learning and career pathways for employees with AI skills can motivate them to embrace training opportunities.
   
   
2. Focusing on AI in Skills-Based Hiring
   For new and existing roles that require AI skills, clearly define the required competencies within your skills ontology. Instead of relying solely on work experience and degrees, focus on verified skills demonstrated through assessments and certifications—securely recorded with digital credentials. This approach makes skills-based hiring faster and more reliable.
   
   This involves more than just listing AI skills for a role. By using platforms such as TalentLens, which provides data-driven insights based on your skills ontology, you can better match candidates to roles where they’ll be most successful, ensuring alignment with the defined skill requirements and competencies.
   
   
3. Leverage Digital Credentials to Validate AI Skills
   As organizations seek to understand the potential of AI and incorporate it into the business, reliable AI skills data is critical.
   
   Digital credentials, such as badges and certificates, provide portable, shareable and verifiable evidence of AI skills. They offer several benefits for organizations seeking to navigate into a future where AI is a strategic differentiator.
   
   These benefits include:

• A digital badge issued for completing a training program is an easy way to verify an employee or job candidate’s AI skills.
  
  
• Digital credentials can motivate individuals to complete training and share that accomplishment with colleagues. Digital badges also enable employers to validate and recognize employee learning. [Learn how to empower employee learning with digital badges in the AI era in our blog]
  
  
• As your organization rolls out AI upskilling and reskilling programs, it’s important to measure participation. Digital credentials provide data on how widely training programs are being adopted and completed, giving employers a data-based snapshot of workforce skills. [More on how to utilize data from Credly digital badges]

Over 2 million AI badges have been issued on Credly. L&D leaders can explore relevant AI badges from a global network of training providers by searching the platform, which showcases thousands of AI courses and detailed skill development insights within their metadata.

Next steps

AI technologies are starting to disrupt industries and marketplaces. And while they will contribute greatly to productivity increases, organizations will still face talent shortages.

Understanding the current state of your workforce’s AI skills, how they compare to the rest of your industry, and what your future needs will be enables you to plan for a more competitive future where AI skills are not nice-to-haves but are must-haves for top performing employees and organizations alike.

To better identify the skills your organization needs, complete the form below to download our report on the ‘Top 10 In-Demand AI Skills in 2024 & Beyond’ and start mapping your AI skills strategy today.