The challenge is no longer simply attracting talent, but identifying existing skills, closing capability gaps, and ensuring employees are equipped for the future. Is your HR Strategy keeping pace?
There is a particular kind of organisational anxiety that sits just below the surface of most HR conversations in 2026. It is not panic, exactly. It is the creeping awareness that the skills employees have today may not be the skills the business needs in two years, and that the gap between those two points is widening faster than anyone quite planned for.
Christopher Youness, executive director of people and culture at Creative Australia, Claire Badger, SVP of Zalaris Consulting APAC, and Matt Campbell-Davies, Partner Success Director at Go1, will be speaking at a Zoom webinar on the topic above and more, hosted by sponsor Zalaris Australia on June 25 at 11am AEST. To find out details and to register, click here.
The pressure is showing up everywhere: in recruitment pipelines that no longer deliver the profiles organisations are looking for, in performance conversations that expose capability gaps no one had mapped, and in board-level discussions about resilience that HR teams are increasingly being asked to lead. For mid-sized organisations in particular, the challenge is acute. They face the same pace of technological change as their larger competitors but rarely have the same resources to respond.
The visibility problem
Before any organisation can close a skills gap, it needs to see it. That sounds straightforward. In practice, most HR teams are working with incomplete pictures of what their workforce can actually do, let alone what it will need to do as AI becomes embedded in more roles and more processes.
Badger said the core problem is one of visibility. "HR leaders are [dealing with a situation] where technology, particularly AI, is reshaping the skills organisations need," she said. "While many businesses are investing in AI and digital transformation, workforce capability is not keeping pace."
The lag is not for want of effort. Many organisations have invested in learning platforms, training budgets, and development programmes. The difficulty is that those investments have often been made without a clear map of what they are meant to address. Badger said the challenge has shifted well beyond talent attraction. "The challenge is no longer simply attracting talent, but identifying existing skills, closing capability gaps, and ensuring employees are equipped for the future," she said.
Compounding the problem is the pressure HR teams are under from multiple directions at once. "HR teams are expected to deliver measurable business outcomes while improving engagement, retention and productivity, often with limited resources and competing priorities," Badger said.
From training programmes to capability strategy
The organisations making headway on this problem tend to share a common starting point: they have stopped treating learning and development as a series of discrete programmes and started treating it as an ongoing business strategy. That shift changes what gets measured, what gets funded, and what gets reported to the board.
Badger said the first move is a change in orientation. "The first step is shifting from reactive learning initiatives to a capability-led strategy," she said. "Organisations need visibility into the skills they have today, the skills they will need tomorrow, and practical ways to bridge that gap."
Once that visibility exists, the logic of what comes next becomes clearer. Rather than running training that feels disconnected from the work itself, organisations can design learning that is personalised, targeted, and tied to specific business priorities. Badger pointed to the risk of investing in development without that anchor. "Rather than implementing learning for learning's sake, HR should focus on aligning workforce development with business objectives, using data to identify priorities and delivering personalised, continuous learning experiences," she said.
The longer-term goal is cultural as much as structural. Badger said the organisations that get this right are the ones that make development part of daily working life rather than something that happens in scheduled blocks. "Creating a culture where upskilling becomes part of everyday work will be essential for long-term success," she said.
Creative Australia's experience will provide the practical backbone of the June 25 session. Youness and his team have been working through the real-world complexity of building workforce capability while managing organisational change and shifting skills requirements. The session will draw on those lessons, including the decisions that made a difference and the ones that had to be revisited, rather than present a polished endpoint.
People, not just platforms
Much of the public conversation around AI in the workplace has focused on what technology will replace. Among HR professionals, a more useful question is gaining ground: how do you use AI to make your existing workforce more capable, more adaptable, and better positioned to contribute in new ways?
Badger said this framing matters. "The conversation around AI often focuses on technology, but the real differentiator will be people," she said. "Organisations that invest in developing their workforce today will be better positioned to adapt, innovate and remain competitive tomorrow."
She was direct about the commitment that requires. Workforce capability, she said, is not a project with a finish line. "Building workforce capability is not a one-time initiative, it's an ongoing business strategy," she said. "The organisations that succeed will be those that empower their people to continuously learn, evolve and contribute in new ways."
Attendees at the June 25 session will hear from Youness on Creative Australia's specific journey, Campbell-Davies on how modern learning platforms including SAP SuccessFactors and Go1 are being used to connect investment to measurable outcomes, and Badger on the wider strategic context for HR leaders across the Asia-Pacific region. The session is framed as a peer learning conversation rather than a technology pitch, with practical takeaways aimed at organisations at different stages of their capability journey.
The webinar will take place virtually on June 25 at 11am AEST. To find out more and to register, click here.
