Skills Velocity, Not Just Depth, Is the Future, Says The Josh Bersin Company

• After four years of research across six major industries, leveraging millions of skills profiles from employees, The Josh Bersin Company identified six AI success strategies that set top organizations—or "pacesetters"—apart
• The "Global Workforce Intelligence" longitudinal study analyzed skills, roles, and practices, drawing on billions of data points to reveal what drives performance
• The key insight: skills velocity—the ability to quickly develop new industry and tech skills, is the core engine of competitive advantage, innovation, and growth

OAKLAND, Calif., June 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Josh Bersin Company, the world's most trusted HR advisory firm, today released new longitudinal research showing how top-performing companies across six global industries are outpacing their peers—especially in using AI as a catalyst for organizational transformation—and offering a model others can follow.

What really drives results isn't how many skills you have, but how quickly you can build, apply, and evolve them

The key finding, contrary to much of the current debate, is that skills depth is far less important than "skills velocity," i.e. the speed of acquiring new skills, in business performance, innovation, and growth.

According to The Josh Bersin Company research team, one factor stands out across today's high-performing "pacesetter" companies: they learn, adapt, and adopt new technologies, practices, and models faster than their peers. The team concludes that in today's business environment, it's not just about deep skills anymore—it's about how fast you can build new ones.

The researchers expected the data to highlight the importance of the quality of skills. Instead, across every industry studied, the real game changer is how fast organizations develop, refresh, and apply those skills—and this means innovating at the core, regularly moving people into new roles, and creating a culture that rewards and celebrates new ideas and capabilities.

These insights come from a first-of-its-kind, four-year analysis across six major industries, leveraging over a billion talent, skills, and career data points from Eightfold. Pacesetters in the Superworker Age—The Six Secrets of High-Performing Organizations reveals the six structural practices that consistently set top performers apart across six major industries: Healthcare, Consumer Banking, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Pharma, Automotive Manufacturing, and Insurance.

The study reveals how global brands are achieving AI success through six key practices based on skills velocity:

AI for growth, not just efficiency
Organizations realize AI's true value is beyond cost-cutting—it's about enabling people to fill the gaps around AI to boost customer and innovation outcomes.

Continuous innovation as standard
With innovation in everyone's job, skills must constantly evolve. A leading global beverage company is now offering AI-driven learning journeys through internal academies focused on leadership, commercial excellence, supply chain expertise, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG). Its talent intelligence platform also serves as a career copilot to match development opportunities to each employee's needs and aspirations.

Work redesign for productivity
AI transformation requires redesigning work to identify needed skills rapidly. A Dutch bank's One Agile Way of Working approach, replacing traditional hierarchies with cross-functional squads and product teams, and where meetings are now "rituals," job titles have become skills-based roles—a redesign improved productivity, tech talent retention, and wellbeing.

Talent density over quantity
Success comes from teams with complementary, evolving skills. A major U.S. healthcare provider has built career pathways and internal mobility programs that attract new hires—52% cite them as a reason for joining. These pathways help employees move from entry-level roles, like environmental services or reception, into higher-skilled positions such as nursing or imaging/radiology.

From change management to agility
Traditional change management can't keep up—organizations need fast, ongoing skills velocity to drive agile, forward-looking change.

AI-powered Systemic HR® Modern HR must integrate AI to enable dynamic skilling, career growth, mobility, and recruiting. A well-known biotech company is fusing "obsess over learning" and "digitize everywhere possible" as vectors to drive continuous innovation and digital integration. The company also showed its commitment to AI upskilling at scale when it opened an AI-focused capability academy in 2021, not just for digital or R&D talent but for all employees.

Kathi Enderes, global industry analyst and SVP of Research, The Josh Bersin Company, says:

"With high skills velocity, organizations gain not just expertise but ongoing relevance and the agility to seize market and digital opportunities.

"Today, skills that matter—and their impact—evolve so quickly that success depends less on how many skills you have or how well you know them, and more on how rapidly you can develop, integrate, and, most importantly, leverage them."

Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, adds:

"The 'Skills-Based Organization' was a strong concept—but it proved too static. What really drives results isn't how many skills you have, but how quickly you can build, apply, and evolve them.

"GWI, in partnership with Eightfold, draws on deep talent intelligence—analyzing billions of data points to uncover what truly drives transformation. Just as importantly, the insights are highly actionable, offering a practical roadmap others can use to accelerate their own progress."

To download the report and learn more about pacesetter strategies and GWI (global workforce intelligence) Josh Bersin Company research program, click here.

About the GWI Josh Bersin Company research program
For more than four years, The Josh Bersin Company's GWI initiative has been helping business and HR leaders navigate the transformative workforce trends reshaping organizations globally. This pioneering effort blends data, research, education, and community insight—powered by advanced machine learning analysis of billions of data points from the Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence Platform. Through this work, the "pacesetters" have emerged: leading companies identified and continually tracked to uncover the practices all CEOs can learn from.

About The Josh Bersin Company
The most trusted human capital advisors in the world. More than a million HR and business leaders rely on us to help them overcome their greatest people challenges.

Thanks to our understanding of workplace issues, informed by the largest, and most up-to-date data sets on workers and employees, we give leaders the confidence to make decisions in line with the latest thinking and evidence about work and the workplace. We're great listeners, too. There's no one like us, who understands this area so comprehensively and without bias.

Our offerings include the industry's leading AI-powered HR expert assistant, Galileo®, fueled by 25 years of in-depth Josh Bersin Company research, case studies, benchmarks, and market information.

We help CHROs and CEOs be better at delivering their business goals. We do that by helping you to manage people better. We are enablers at our core. We provide strategic advice and counsel supported by in-depth research, thought leadership, and unrivaled professional development, community and networking opportunities.

We empower our clients to run their businesses better. And we empower the market by identifying results-driven practices that make work better for every person on the planet.

 

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