Shifting from Jobs to Skills: Rethinking How Work Gets Done

As artificial intelligence and global disruptions reshape the world of work, organizations will shift from jobs to skills as the new currency of value, creating more agile, resilient, and adaptable enterprises.  

Speaking at Workhuman Live 2025 in Aurora, Colo., Ravin Jesuthasan — author, future-of-work speaker, and global leader of Mercer’s transformation services — emphasized that this shift demands a complete rethinking of traditional work structures. He explained that companies must evolve into skills-based organizations, adopting a new “work operating system” that breaks jobs down into their core components and recombines them in ways that better align with the unique skills and capabilities of individual workers. 

Work Without Jobs

Jesuthasan said that work has traditionally been understood as a job, structured by titles, hierarchies, and qualifications, but that mindset is rapidly getting in the way of future relevance. 

Related Article: Skills-Based Hiring Requires Commitment to Change

“In a new normal of rapidly accelerating automation, demands for organizational agility, and the emergence of alternative work arrangements, the old system based on jobs and job-holders is cumbersome and ungainly,” he said. “The traditional notion of a job is becoming a millstone around the neck of those organizations and their ability to compete in an increasingly AI-powered world, where work is increasingly distributed and where talent connects to work more seamlessly.”  

Jesuthasan explained that the organization of work into jobs, job families, and functions was a result of the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

“The ability to plan long term was much greater in a more stable world,” he said. “In a complex world, the premium shifts to speed and the agility to pivot talent. Talent goes from being an asset to being a service. Work will flow to talent as talent flows to work. Continuous learning will be a part of the new deal.” 

Currently, many organizations are struggling to realize the productivity gains promised by the developing reset of work, not because they lack the technology but because they are failing to rethink and redesign the underlying structures of work itself, Jesuthasan said. 

“We will not only have to re-envision work but close the skills gap to realize the full potential from generative AI,” he said. “In some instances, AI will reduce experience premiums and, in some instances, it will raise the experience premium because you want someone who has done the work before and knows if the AI is producing quality output. The ability to upskill and reskill talent at scale and speed will be critical. Human skills like creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity, and the ability to learn will be the most important skills.” 

Virtually all jobs will see their core tasks change due to AI, he said. Transactional work will decrease, while relational work will increase.  

Jesuthasan also said that HR will have to help organizations redesign work so that talent can flow seamlessly to that changing work while also ensuring that talent has the space and resources to keep reinventing itself for what’s next. That means designing space for learning and well-being into the flow of work, he said.   

“We will also have to create organizations that are as welcoming as possible to all of the talent who can contribute to the mission,” he said, emphasizing the need to focus on inclusive, skills-based hiring practices. 

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Enabling the Skills-Powered Employer

Jesuthasan outlined a continuum of work models: fixed, flex, and flow.  

“We’re mainly in a fixed environment now, where regular full-time employees work under fixed full-time assignments,” he said. “That’s often a degree matched to a person matched to a position. There is a high-frictional cost from work being done under this construct.” 

He explained that the next phase, which some employers are currently experimenting with, is a flexible model in which employees are partially fixed but can move to specific challenges as needed. Such roles often emerge from internal talent marketplaces where regular employees take on additional project-based work within the organization.  

“In the future, talent will fully flow to tasks, assignments, and projects to meet demand across the enterprise,” Jesuthasan said. “An organization may have employees, but they are not organized in jobs. They are more like agile talent pools, driven by continuous learning. It’s a frictionless environment created from the many connections between skills and work and the numerous upskilling and reskilling opportunities to fill skill gaps.” 

The benefits of this shift are exponential, he said, and include reduced time-to-fill, greater visibility to talent, much better insight into increasing or declining work demand, increased productivity, and the speed and agility to respond in an uncertain environment.