State of Skills Data Analysis Reveals Emerging and Declining Skills Across Industries, Guidance for Upskilling Future Workforces

PHILADELPHIA, May 15, 2024 — Phenom today released its State of Skills: 2024 Market Data Report, providing a detailed analysis of the emerging skills and roles needed to evolve, grow and upskill workforces across industries. This report serves as a guide for talent management and development professionals, talent acquisition leaders, people managers, strategic workforce planning practitioners and CHROs as they lead their organizations in the shift to a skills-forward approach — which has become critical to remaining competitive and succeeding in the midst of economic, technological and societal change.

Built from a massive data set leveraging the Phenom skill, role and industry ontologies that have been curated over the past 12+ years, the State of Skills Report outlines rising and declining roles and skills, how current roles are evolving, and popular roles in today’s market. Leveraging these insights, enterprises across industries including Financial Services, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Manufacturing, and Technology and IT organizations will be better equipped to adapt and guide hiring, development and planning activities (including whether to focus efforts on internal or external talent). They will also gain a stronger understanding of the baseline roles and skills that are required to help them bridge future talent gaps.

Key highlights from the report include:

• Emerging Skills that have risen in the industry over the past year

• Emerging Roles that will be required to meet changing business needs 

• Required Skills for Emerging Roles across industries

• Evolving Roles that are the best starting point to develop into emerging roles with minimal upskilling

• Declining Skills that are not in demand due to industry changes

• Declining Roles that have experienced significant reduction in postings over the past year

• Most Popular Roles across industries that have the most competition for talent

The rise of Generative AI is impacting businesses across all industries and markets, including both frontline and knowledge worker roles. Digital transformation has also become mainstream across many industries, including: 

• Financial services, where AI-driven algorithms facilitate financial advice and securities trading without having to speak with an advisor. This makes skills such as robo-advisory service design more critical than manual securities trading. 

• Online health services, which have expanded to allow patients to visit more specialists virtually. As a result, skills including those for telemedicine and digital health coaching have become essential — and new roles that encompass user experience and user interface design skills are rising in demand. 

To survive change, organizations must upskill, reskill or hire new talent based on the new skills and roles required to conduct business.

“Skills are the currency of meaningful work,” said John Deal, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Phenom. “The productivity and success of every organization depends on its ability to align people to the right skills and the right role. Investment in skills needs to happen now to avoid falling behind — organizations need to pick use cases and get started.”

In the spirit of helping organizations start their skills journey, Phenom has gone beyond the report by providing a Skills Snapshot to over 100 companies. This includes an overview of their roles, skills, and progressions from the Phenom ontologies to help them visualize their data and next steps toward becoming a skills-based enterprise.

Ongoing Investment in Skills Technology

Phenom continues to innovate around skills-driven technology. Several specialized X+ Agents were recently released to help talent acquisition, talent management, and strategic workforce planning teams use skills in impactful ways throughout a variety of processes. There are also new products and enhancements to Workforce Intelligence, focusing on skills for frontline workers and robust intelligence for managers.

• X+ Source optimizes the effectiveness of sourcing efforts by using natural language queries to quickly surface best-fit talent.

• X+ Workforce Intelligence uses skills as the foundation to connect data interactions from employees, management, HR teams, candidates, and recruiters with insight and context to deliver real-time talent intelligence for proactive retention and growth.

• X+ Fit Score enables talent acquisition professionals to extend the typical criteria used to formulate fit scores or customize the scores in the context of the role.

• Frontline Employee Experience introduces a new mobile-optimized solution built specifically for deskless workers — making it easier for employees in industries such as Transportation, Retail, Hospitality and Manufacturing to visualize career options. 

• Performance Intelligence streamlines coaching, mentoring and manager 1:1s by using the common language of skills to deliver insights that empower people managers to better support their employees’ career development. 

With Phenom, candidates find and choose the right job faster, employees develop their skills and evolve, recruiters become wildly productive, talent marketers engage with extreme efficiency, talent leaders optimize hiring processes, managers build stronger-performing teams, HR aligns employee development with company goals, and HRIS easily integrates existing HR tech to create a holistic infrastructure.

To read the full State of Skills: 2024 Market Data Report, download here.

To dive deeper into the report findings, attend the live webinar on May 21. Register here.

To request a Skills Snapshot to identify existing roles, skills and progressions — and the next steps towards becoming a skills-based enterprise, visit here.

About Phenom

Phenom has a purpose of helping a billion people find the right work. Through AI-powered talent experiences, employers use Phenom to hire employees faster, develop them to their full potential, and retain them longer. The Phenom Intelligent Talent Experience platform seamlessly connects candidates, employees, recruiters, talent marketers, talent leaders, hiring managers, HR and HRIS — empowering diverse and global enterprises with innovative products including Phenom X+ Generative AI, Career Site, Chatbot, CMS, Talent CRM, One-Way Interviews, Automated Interview Scheduling, Interview Intelligence, Talent Experience Engine, Campaigns, University Recruiting, Contingent Talent Hiring, Talent Marketplace, Workforce Intelligence, Career Pathing, Gigs, Mentoring, and Referrals.

Phenom has earned accolades including: Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing companies (4 consecutive years), Deloitte Technology's Fast 500 (4 consecutive years), five Brandon Hall ‘Excellence in Technology’ awards including Gold for ‘Best Advance in AI for Business Impact,’ Business Intelligence Group's Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards (3 consecutive years), and a regional Timmy Award for launching and optimizing HelpOneBillion.com (2020).

Headquartered in Greater Philadelphia, Phenom also has offices in India, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom.

For more information, please visit www.phenom.com. Connect with Phenom on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.