Workday asked about 6,000 people at work a simple pair of questions about learning in an AI year.
79% said they know what skills they need to succeed. 66% said their employer actually helps them develop those skills.
Workday calls that a 13-point gap. I’d put it more plainly. Most people have already worked out what they need to learn. About a third of them don’t feel anyone is helping them learn it.
What leaders say they’re planning
That gap would matter less if leaders were planning to replace people. Most aren’t.
In the same research, 40% of business leaders said they expect AI to help them get more out of the people they already have. 28% expect it to reduce headcount.
That’s not a reason to relax. 28% is still more than one in four. But it means the more common plan is to keep people and grow what they can do. The trouble is that a plan to grow your people only works if your people know about it, and are given a way to do the growing.
The fear doesn’t fade with use
Here’s the finding I keep coming back to.
Workday ran a separate survey of 5,944 workers and looked at the people who use AI for nearly all their work. These aren’t the reluctant ones. They’re the people furthest along.
62% of them think AI will make their current skills less valuable. 76% expect it to open up new career opportunities.
Same group. Both views, at the same time.
I don’t read that as confusion. I read it as an honest assessment from people who can see their job changing up close. They know the part of their work that took years to get good at is getting easier for anyone to do. They also know the person who learns the new way of working will be worth more. Both of those things are true.
What they can’t see, usually, is which of those futures their employer has in mind for them.
Two conversations, not one
If the fear and the hope sit in the same person, a leader can’t just speak to one of them.
Talk only about opportunity and you sound like you haven’t noticed the worry. People hear a sales pitch. Talk only about reassurance and you sound like you’re hiding something. People hear a restructure coming.
What works, in my experience, is being specific about both:
- Say what AI is for in this business. Not a vision statement. A sentence: which jobs it’s meant to help with, and what happens to the time it frees up.
- Say what it isn’t for. If you’re not planning to use it to cut roles, say that, in those words. If you don’t know yet, say that too. People cope with honest uncertainty much better than with silence.
- Make the learning part of the job. Time inside the working week, on their own work, at their own pace. If learning only happens in the evenings, the people with the least spare time fall furthest behind.
The caveats, plainly
This is vendor research. Workday sells HR software, and its release doesn’t name the countries surveyed or the firm that ran the fieldwork. There’s no New Zealand cut. The heavy-user figures come from a different survey from the 79% and 66%, so they shouldn’t be added together.
New Zealand data points the same way, though. Employment Hero found 51% of Kiwi workers learned their AI skills from YouTube and TikTok. When the help doesn’t come from work, people go and find it somewhere else, on their own time.
Declaring an interest
Helping businesses give their people that time and support is what we do at Coreshift, so weigh my conclusion with that in mind.
But you don’t need us to act on this. Most of your people already know what they need to learn. The two things they’re waiting for are the help to learn it, and someone telling them what it’s for.