| | MARCH 2026MANAGEHRMAGAZINE.COM8In MyOpinionTHE NEXT DECADE OF CRITICAL WORKFORCE SKILLS AND HOW TO BUILD THEMBy Eric VanDerSluis, Senior Director, Career and Skills Management, Edward Jones2) How critical skills will evolveThe next decade will be defined less by specific roles and more by new ways of organizing work. We are shifting from static jobs to a fluid, capability driven model where people match to problems, tasks, and outcomes. Teams will continually form and reform around value streams, drawing on flexible pools of capability instead of rigid hierarchy.Work is also becoming more collective. Complex challenges require shared sensemaking, system thinking and rapid alignment. The teams that succeed will adopt common playbooks, make decisions quickly and adapt together.As skill half lives shrink, learning becomes an everyday experience. Effective organizations will build systems where learning happens through the work itself--supported by nudges, guardrails, feedback and embedded data that help people improve continuously.The capability families that matter most over the next decade include:· Learning Agility: Rapid learning, unlearning, and relearning.· AI Augmented Work: Responsible use of AI--prompt patterns, oversight, automation, safety reviews and ethics.· Systems & Product Thinking: Understanding how value flows and applying iterative, hypothesis driven approaches.· Data & Decision: Causal thinking, experimentation, statistics, probabilistic judgment and tradeoff framing.· Teaming & Influence: Adaptive collaboration, storytelling, coaching and constructive conflict.· Trust, Risk & Compliance: Treating privacy, security and responsible AI as everyday habits.· Change Navigation: Helping teams form new habits that make change stick.These capabilities form the foundation for a workforce that can keep pace with accelerating disruption.2) From training to measurable capability buildingThe core shift is redefining progress. It can't be "I took a course." It must be "I can do this in the flow of work--and here's evidence." That starts with writing capabilities in behavioral terms and tying them to real artifacts. Rather than asking whether someone learned A/B testing, we look for a well designed experiment that influences a customer metric and meets ethical standards.Assessment should resemble real work: simulations, work samples, decision memos, code reviews, customer Eric VanDerSluis
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