The workplace skills that will matter most in the next decade aren’t the ones most UK employers are currently training for.
Three experts at the CIPD Festival of Work this week arrived at the same conclusion independently: futurist and author Tom Cheesewright, AI consultant and author, Rahim Hirji and Graeme Burns, AI Implementation Advisor and Director at Mavai. Speaking separately, each made the same case – UK employers are training their people for the wrong things.
Speaking at the CIPD Festival of Work this week, they each made the case for a fundamental rethink of how organisations develop their people – from very different vantage points.
The Case for Training People to Learn
Most organisations, Tom, the Future-Proof Your Business author argued, are building workforces optimised for today’s tasks – and in doing so, making them brittle. “We cannot just train for the specific technical skills we need at any given point,” he told the audience. “We have got to train a workforce to learn.”
He illustrated his point with a comparison most parents will recognise. A die-cast toy (i.e. a small replica) car is perfect – every detail precise, every surface finished. But it can only ever be what it is. A set of Lego bricks, meanwhile, is imperfect, approximate, and will never be a perfect replica of anything.
“Which one of these toys is going to be played with for longer?” Tom asked the audience. “Which one has a stronger future in that kid’s toy box?”
The answer, he said, holds for workforces too. Though still useful, the specific skills he singled out weren’t necessarily AI certifications or platform proficiencies, but the ability to curate, evaluate and question information – “we have a greater supply of information than ever before, and yet people still believe things that aren’t true” – as well as creativity, and communication more broadly.
Why Soft Skills Determine AI Success
The data presented by Graeme pointed in the same direction. Drawing on recent CIPD research, he noted that around 45 per cent of organisations are taking an adhoc and experimental approach to AI adoption rather than a strategic one – and that in most cases, the gap isn’t one of technology. It’s people skills.
“Soft skills really matter in AI implementation,” he said. “That’s one of those things that gets overlooked in the rush. Everybody is pushing technology into their business. They’re not necessarily thinking about the end-to-end implementation.”
Graeme also referenced a Stanford Digital Economy Lab report that, he said, arrived at the same finding. Published in April 2026, the research analysed enterprise AI deployments across 51 organisations and concluded: “The difference was never the AI model. It was always the organisation. Its readiness, its processes, its leadership, its willingness to change and fail.”
His practical recommendation wasn’t a training catalogue or a technology roadmap – although the suggestion wasn’t that training programmes were in themselves unhelpful. Rather, he stressed that those dispensing that knowledge are just as key to making that training stick. “Think about a really amazing teacher stuck in your head from when you were at school,” Burns said.
“We’ve got to build that skill, that muscle, in our line managers – to help people through a journey that isn’t just about how they feel about AI, but about all the uncertainty they bring with them.”
What Leaders Need to Do Differently
For Rahim, author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, the risk most organisations aren’t talking about is a mindset one. Too many leaders, he argued, are applying AI as a blanket solution rather than asking the right question first. “Does this work better with AI? If not, take a step back and ask if there’s a better way to solve that problem.” He explained that the result of getting that wrong isn’t just wasted budget – it’s a workforce being pushed to move faster in ways that don’t fit the work they actually do.
Giving an example of a CEO who distributed $100 per employee with a simple brief: find the AI tools that actually solve your problems, he added:
“What happened is that people were empowered to use AI tools to solve the problems they actually face,” rather than shoehorning unsuitable tasks into the mix.
Vulnerability and honesty when adopting these tools was also outlined as a key part of bringing businesses into the future. Rahim recalled how, when working as an AI consultant for a large German company, a COO’s willingness to address his team at an all-hands with: “Guys, I’m struggling with AI. I don’t know how to use it. Can someone help me?” meant that employees who’d been quietly struggling felt permission to say so.
“Ultimately, the most important message is to remember to be human,” he added. “That seems like such an obvious thing to say to a crowd of people at an HR conference. But actually, if not you, who is going to say that?” With 45 per cent of UK organisations still taking an ad hoc approach to AI adoption according to CIPD research, it’s a question small business leaders may want to sit with.
