That makes career development increasingly difficult: skills take time to build, while organisational requirements are changing faster and with far greater uncertainty. This creates a fundamental strategic problem: how do you invest in skills today when you cannot be sure what will matter tomorrow?

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The “learn to code” movement offers a useful lesson. A decade ago, there was widespread alignment around the importance of coding as a future-proof skill. Governments invested heavily in coding education, and global campaigns reached tens of millions of people. Coding was seen as one of the safest bets you could make in your career.

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But what happens when the skill we spent a decade promoting is no longer scarce? What happens when tasks that once required years of training, such as writing code, analysing data, and producing content, can now be performed by AI in seconds?

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This is not a hypothetical shift. Research from the World Economic Forum and others suggests that nearly half of core skills will change within the next five years, and that change is already underway, even if unevenly distributed across organisations.

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Three forces are reshaping the landscape simultaneously. First, AI is transforming work, automating increasingly complex tasks. Second, organisations are operating amid heightened geopolitical, economic, and organisational change and uncertainty. Third, human wellbeing is under pressure as work becomes more demanding and ambiguous.