The 44% Problem: Why Skills Mapping Is Already Obsolete

At SHRMTech26 in Mumbai this May, a panel on the future of talent opened with a number designed to unsettle the room: 44% of the core skills organizations rely on today will be irrelevant by 2027. Arti Dua, Partner and National Talent Leader at EY, wasn't being alarmist when she said it; she was making a practical point about timing. That falls within the next planning cycle, not some distant horizon.

The panel, titled "Workforce 2030: The Next Frontier of Talent and Transformation," brought Dua together with Sushil Baveja, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) at Jindal Stainless, and Gautam Sinha, CHRO at Birla Opus Paints (Grasim Industries). She argued that organizations are measuring the wrong thing. For years, talent functions have gotten good at cataloguing what people can do, comparing that against what roles require, and closing the gap through training. That approach worked when skills had a long shelf life. However, it struggles when nearly half of those skills turn over within a couple of years.

The panel's shared response was to move the unit of analysis from skills to capabilities: the underlying, more durable capacity to learn, adapt, and apply judgment across changing contexts. Capabilities compound over time in a way that specific skills don't, because the skills attached to any given tool or process keep changing while the capacity to pick up the next one stays useful.

Dua was direct that this requires structural change, not a training budget layered onto the same hiring and evaluation processes. Most organizations, in her telling, are still trying to solve a capabilities problem using skills-era tools, and the fix is a genuine redesign of how people get hired, assessed, and developed.

What gave the discussion weight beyond the diagnosis was that Baveja and Sinha had each already built something in response, arriving at surprisingly similar organizational architecture from very different starting points.

At Jindal Stainless, Baveja described Workforce 2030 as a deliberate operating structure rather than a single initiative: strategic pillars were identified, cross-functional teams were built around each, and culture diagnostics were run specifically to surface informal leaders across the organization. That last piece is worth pausing on. Jindal's transformation doesn't rely only on the formal org chart; it actively looks for people who carry influence without holding a title, then channels that influence through a program Baveja calls "influence the influencer," using existing networks of trust to move change through the organization faster than hierarchy alone tends to allow.

He was equally clear that this only works with sustained follow-through. Workforce 2030's communication has to reach every employee in a way that feels personally relevant across a genuinely multi-generational workforce, and middle management needs ongoing engagement, regular communication, and recognition built into the rhythm of the organization rather than delivered as a single town hall. Jindal's mechanism, pillars, cross-functional ownership, informal leadership networks, and continued middle-management support are built to outlast the initial launch energy that most transformation efforts run on.

Sinha's story came from a different kind of pressure: speed and scale, rather than legacy inertia. He walked through Birla Opus Paints' entry into India's crowded decorative paints market, backed by a capital expenditure of roughly ₹10,000 crore, six greenfield projects, and 180 products rolled out across segments. Capital moving at that pace puts real strain on an organization's ability to keep up, and Sinha's answer was to treat agility itself as something to build deliberately.

He described this through five pillars, with open idea-sharing and cross-functional teams doing much of the practical work, alongside a sustained push to embed technology across the organization rather than leaving it to a single function. The detail worth noting isn't the speed of the launch: plenty of capex-heavy entries move fast and then stall on execution. It's that Birla Opus built the agility in parallel with the factories and product lines as infrastructure, rather than expecting it to show up on its own once the plants were running.

Set Baveja's and Sinha's experiences alongside Dua's framing, and a pattern starts to form. In both organizations, capability building wasn't a parallel HR initiative aligned with the business strategy. It was part of the same structure, with pillars and cross-functional teams working simultaneously on transformation architecture and capability building.

The panel's closing stretch turned toward leadership, and this is where the conversation went beyond the usual future-of-work talking points. Baveja named three capabilities he sees as essential for leaders over the next decade: adaptability across rapidly shifting economic, geopolitical, and skill-related terrain; the ability to balance technology with human judgment; and a personal commitment to keep learning at the same pace leaders are asking of everyone else.

That second point, balancing technology with the human element, ran through the whole session. Leaders need to bring clarity to their teams during uncertain periods, read what's actually happening, and address mindset before rolling out new tools. When technology adoption skips that step, processes tend to feel transactional, and the human element that HR is meant to protect can get lost somewhere in the rollout.

This matters more in organizations where, as one panellist noted, the workforce is now close to half Gen Z. Different generations bring different needs, aspirations, and friction points, and leadership that treats "multi-generational" as a box to check rather than something actually to design around will keep missing the people it's trying to lead.

The panel closed on its most understated claim: that HR's core function, beneath the frameworks and capability models, is handling emotions and caring for people, especially now, as disruption from technology and AI moves faster than most organizational processes can absorb. The skills will keep turning over. The capital investments will continue to grow. The technology will keep arriving ahead of schedule. What stays constant is the work of helping people stay oriented and engaged while all of that happens around them.

The 44% figure is a useful provocation. The more durable takeaway from this panel is what to do with it: build capability infrastructure that outlasts any single skill, build it through trust rather than hierarchy alone, and keep in sight that the point of all of it is still the people involved, not the roadmap.