Upskill Yourself Is Not A Plan

At the Fortune AIQ Summit last week, the Chief HR Officer of a $19 billion homebuilder put it in one sentence. "We're going to give you all the tools, but it's your responsibility to upskill yourself as well." Few organisations would put it that plainly. Many run on it.

Drew Holler of Lennar went on, as Fortune reported it: "We're going to give you trainings, but you, as an individual, have to upskill." Read both sentences twice. The organisation's part ends at tools and trainings. Everything after that belongs to you, as an individual. That word is doing a lot of work.

Now put the numbers next to it. Workera surveyed 1,000 full-time professionals at US organisations with 5,000 or more employees in July. Companies offering AI-specific skills training went from 25% to 58% in a year. 56% of employees get no time during work hours to build AI skills. 84% spend five hours or less a week on skill development. 68% now use AI tools multiple times a week, up from 40%. Taylor Sullivan, Workera's VP of Product and Assessment, put it this way: "Professional development is treated as extra-role behavior rather than part of the job."

So the trainings exist. The time does not. Usage is up anyway, which suggests people are working the tool out on their own. That part works. It was never the hard part.

What you can and cannot do alone

You can learn a tool alone. An evening, a few prompts, a draft that comes faster the next morning. Nobody needs the organisation for that. That is why usage went from 40% to 68% while 56% of people got no work time for it.

You cannot redesign a shared workflow alone. The intake form. The approval chain. The handoff from your team to the next one. The weekly report that three people assemble and one person reads. Those are shared. Changing any of them needs the people who share it, in the same room, with someone present who can say yes. That is the organisation's job. "Upskill yourself" hands that job to the individual, after hours, with no mandate to change anything but their own habits.

Stacy Dillow, HPE's Chief People Officer, named the trap at the same summit: "We've got to force ourselves to think differently, because if we're not trying to change how we work, we're just trying to retrofit and put AI in a process that isn't going to give us a different answer." A trained individual inside an unchanged process is a retrofit. You get the same answer, a little faster.

The same article cites ServiceNow data that only 9% of organisations have built complex autonomous workflows. And the one hard result in it, a custom AI agent at Palo Alto Networks cutting IT tickets by 83%, came from building something into a process, not from asking staff to upskill themselves. Danielle Gonzalez, the company's CPO, says they hire for people who can "unlearn what they thought to be true". Unlearning is not something you do on your own time either. It happens when the work around you changes.

The agents are learning to organise themselves. Your people are not.

Ethan Mollick wrote last week that he had been wrong about something. He expected that organising agents would need careful human design. Instead, he writes, "Organizing work is just one more thing AI can learn to do." He notes that the complexity of managing humans comes from human problems, such as conflicting incentives, silos and communication bottlenecks, which agents do not have. Humans still set the direction.

It is easy to take the wrong lesson from that. The agents organise their own work because they do not have your problems. Your people do. The silos, the incentives, the bottleneck, the manager who was not in the room. None of that dissolves when the model improves. So the agent side of work may be learning to organise itself. The human side does not reorganise itself, and that part stays with the organisation. "Upskill yourself" is the organisation quietly declining it.

One thing to do this week

No budget needed. Take one hour of AI learning that currently lives in someone's evening and put it in the team calendar as work. Pick one live shared workflow, something the team does every week. Manager in the room. Open the tool on that workflow, not on a demo. End the hour with one agreed change to how the team does it, written down, starting next week.

That is capability building inside the work, in work hours, at team level. It is the part a training catalogue cannot supply, and the hour the 56% never get. If the hour cannot be found, you have your answer about whose job the organisation thinks this is.