Skills Volatility Explained: How Leaders Can Prepare Their Workforce with Brandon Carson, Chief Learning Officer

Julia: Welcome to L&D in 20, your go-to resource for all things workplace learning brought to you by Go1. I'm your host, Julia Neradka, Manager of Customer Success at Go1. Today on the show, I'm very excited to be joined by Brandon Carson, Chief Learning Officer at Docebo, and one of the leading voices shaping how organizations learn in the age of AI.

Over the past 20 years, Brandon has helped companies like Starbucks, Walmart, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, and Microsoft build learning strategies that reach millions of people and deliver real business results. He's also the founder of L&D Cares, a non-profit community supporting learning professionals worldwide, and an author and a speaker known for helping leaders modernize learning to unlock both performance and human potential. Welcome to the show, Brandon.”

It's great to have you.

Brandon: Thank you. It's good to be here, Jules.

Julia: Well, on today's show, we are going to be diving deep into the world of skills volatility, a critical concept for every organization that they really need to understand. We're going to dive into what it is, why it matters more than ever, and what actions leaders should be taking to keep up with the pace of change in this area. So, Brandon, can you tell us a little bit about your definition of skills volatility?

Brandon: When I talk about skills volatility, I'm describing the rate at which skills lose value. Change shape, or get replaced, which is often faster, especially now, than organizations can quickly respond, or respond fast enough. So, let's be clear, it's not just about new skills emerging, because a lot of people are always talking about upscaling or rescaling.

This is about existing skills decaying. Something that made you effective two years ago may not now be sufficient, or they may even become irrelevant. So, because of technology, automation, AI, and changes in how the work gets done.

And now, the thing to know, skills volatility has two distinct components. The first is skills instability. That's when the skills required to perform a role are constantly shifting because of technology, automation, AI, like I just said, or new ways of working.

What made someone effective last year may not work today. The role may still exist, but the skill requirements underneath it are becoming unstable because of change happening in the role in which those skills exist, in the tasks that people perform. The other component of skill volatility is skills flux.

That's the movement of skills across roles. So skills don't stay neatly contained anymore. I think we just talked earlier about human skills.

I think human skills as fluid more than static. In a sense, they're more like a data stream, and they're changing constantly. Nuances within them are changing constantly.

They migrate, they re-combining, and they show up in unexpected places across functions, levels, job families, things like that. Just like all humans, skills are messy. Ways of working may evolve faster than many orcs can plan for and keep up with, or they should evolve.

What we don't want is for job architecture, the constraints of job architecture to slow down workplace evolution. If you put those together, skills instability and skills flux, then skills volatility isn't just about learning new things. It's about the fact that skills are eroding, reshaping, and moving often faster than organizations are designed to respond.

And again, I think that human skills are not this static inventory, like I just said, right? They're not that of someone's capability. They don't, I mean, literally, they, and I don't think they ever really have been, but literally we used to go to school and then go to college and we'd get, we'd study history or we'd study biology, get our degree credential.

And then rarely did we revisit that curriculum through our careers, right? So that doesn't really work anymore. So think of skills as like a live data stream.

They're constantly changing based on context, technology, and demand. And skills volatility exists, especially even more so in today's world, because skills are exactly what I just said. They're not fixed assets.

They're flowing, eroding in one place, emerging in another. The mistake organizations make is trying to lock skills into taxonomies and job architectures. And human skills to me are exactly that, right?

The organizations that win are the ones that can read the signals in real time and rapidly respond.

Julia: Absolutely. And those human skills are extremely important, even though the world is changing and our jobs are changing. And you and I talked a little bit about things like critical thinking, for example, being able to make decisions in any role in an organization and having the confidence to do so.

Brandon: And those sorts of things can underpin the ability to be able to withstand skills volatility in the future. And if our systems, our job architecture, or even our mindsets are too rigid, they can actually slow the organization down.

Julia: 100%. I agree with you. And candidly, a lot of us are talking about just all these things that are going on in the world.

Brandon: And one thing that we're under is the single largest job transformation in human history. That's what we're all living through right now. And so, it's a little bit, you know, intimidating at times to think of this.

And that's why I talk a lot about skills volatility. We see it almost everywhere too. It shows it differently depending on the role and where people are and what they're doing.

But I think we have to give ourselves some credit, if you will, of at least, you know, peeling the layers back in our skills strategies and trying to figure out what is the best way to go forward with this. Almost every aspect of every job is going to be impacted by AI and automation and augmentation, right? And so, we have to give ourselves a little prompts that we're actually going and investigating this stuff and studying it and then trying to understand it and trying to do better with what we're doing with our skills strategies.

Julia: Let's make this real for the people listening. Let's get into the practicality of this and where you see skills volatility taking place across the organization the most. Do you have some different examples of how it plays out in today's workforce?

Brandon: It's really everywhere. I like to think of the two main worker types, your physical worker and your cognitive worker. Physical workers, a lot of us think of these are folks maybe on the front line closer to customers or they're in the supply chains or the manufacturing facilities, things like that.

But on the front line, in those roles, technology changes the job frequently. It kind of always has, so that's not necessarily new. I mean, when I was at Delta, we brought in technology for bag scanning, so that we would be able to tell in the app, we'd be able to tell our customers at all points where their bags are, when they've been loaded on the plane, when they've been taken off the plane.

Well, to make that customer promise work, then we had to bring technology to the ramp where the folks are loading bags of the planes, and so every bag is getting scanned now. So it is everywhere. As companies continue to integrate technology into the workflow, we're going to see jobs change even more rapidly than we've seen in the past necessarily.

Any job actually even beyond the front line, any job from now on will be using technology. If you think of retail associates, for example, customer service reps, technicians, digital tools, automation, and AI-driven workflows, they won't eliminate all these jobs, but they're going to change that skill mix. Like we mentioned, problem-solving, judgment, tech fluency, all these things matter more than task repetition, for example.

Now, in the cognitive space, you have cognitive workers. So in the cognitive space, AI is reshaping what good looks like. When you think about writing, analysis, coding, marketing, my daughter is a copywriter right now.

So in marketing and in copywriting, AI is being leveraged quite extensively to augment the products they're creating in that space, for example. So the differentiator becomes context, critical thinking like we talked about earlier, judgment, sense-making, decision quality, not just execution, because you're going to be augmented. So you're working with other, what I might call digital employees, if you will, or the AI and the automation to get the job done.”

So different skills come into play. Probably the biggest lift people have had in the cognitive space over the last couple of years is prompting, working with your AI or your agent to really make sure that they're doing or it is doing for you what you needed to do. And then at the leadership level though, you have skills of volatility there as well.

And it actually, it's often invisible there, but it can be more dangerous at that level, right? Or maybe risky is the right, the better word. Leaders are expected to manage complexity, lead to ambiguity, for example, make decisions with imperfect data.

Yet, many were developed for stability, not flux. So skills volatility is everywhere. It's not isolated to one function across the enterprise.

The question is, does the organization see this clearly, or do they only see it when performance drops, right? And so I think that's why I say all the time is like, let's look surgically at the roles, at the jobs and the job architecture, as we're bringing in and integrating more augmentation into these jobs to see where the skills volatility really amplifies the most.”

Julia: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it feels like the danger zone when organizations don't see this clearly, they only feel it once maybe company or team performance starts slipping and frustrations start to show up.

Brandon: Yeah, 100 percent. And that's where candidly, especially for leaders, but really for anyone, sense-making is really kind of important. That brings together critical thinking and kind of be able to synthesize things in the moment.

And that's a challenge for leaders because we've got a firehose of information coming at us at all times, right? And the value comes from the meaning of that information, not the volume, so separating the noise from the signals, so that you can, as a manager or as a leader, make the right decisions in the right amount of time. And that's challenging, and it's not going to necessarily slow down that firehose of information that will be coming to have people, and actually even more data coming to leaders that need to be able to derive insight and story-tell around that as well.”

Julia: Yeah, another key human skill that I love. And I think that leads really nicely into the risk side of all of this. Brandon and I would love to know from your side, what are the risks and implications of skills volatility if we and L&D leaders and organizations choose to ignore them?

Brandon: The biggest risk is probably a sense of false confidence, believing you're capable because you were successful in the past maybe or because maybe you have an LLN telling you something that you, a lot of times they're very complimentary to you, those kinds of things. When organizations ignore skills volatility, though there is risk, three things tend to happen. Performance gaps can actually widen.

Right now, roles are starting to evolve faster than people do, faster than leaders can misdiagnose a problem. That misdiagnosis can just kick the can down the road and make problems even more challenging. The second thing with skills volatility in that sense of not recognizing it across the organization, is talent mobility can break down

And so if skills aren't visible or updated, if organizations default to hiring externally instead of redeploying talent internally, because sometimes it's easier just to go buy the skills on the market, that can be slower and more expensive. So let's also be clear, upskilling and re-skilling though is hard. I get that.

And sometimes you think, I need this role, I need to fill it fast, we're going to go to market and just try to buy these skills. But re-skilling and upskilling is not just about implementing technology and taxonomies and creating an employee profile card and having people validate their skills. What makes it harder is the simple fact that it's much more than all of that.

When I think about preparing the workforce for the future of work, there's a lot involved that comes around that. Sometimes when we think about skills or re-skilling, we're really thinking about the tasks within those roles. But candidly, if you really are interested and concerned about mobility with your workforce and career growth and development, you really have to start thinking about the cultural connection to that.

In one of my prior roles, I created a model around that are called BVAC. BVAC, just four letters, B-V-A-C stands for Belief, Visibility, Accents, and Connection. It's a way to see if the organization is actually enabling people to adapt as work changes.

So this is the cultural component, and so you can see that many transformation efforts fail, not because people can't learn, we're wired to learn, we can learn. But because one or more of these things be in the BVAC model is missing. So B, the first letter there starts with belief.

These are two ways. It's not just employee believing, it's also employee and employer. So do people believe there's a future for them at this time?

If employees don't believe they can grow or stay relevant, learning becomes performative, and candidly re-skilling them won't work. Do the company's leaders believe in their workforce? Skills transformation starts with psychological safety and confidence, not content and not technology.

Leaders underestimate how much uncertainty kills learning momentum, especially during an era of change as significant as this one is. Now B is for visibility. Do people have visibility into what skills matter?

Can they connect those skills that matter to their aspirations of what they want to become? And do they even know? Do they have visibility into the roles or opportunities within the company?

And don't take that for granted. You'd be surprised, especially in larger companies. Most employees are navigating in the dark.

They don't know which skills are becoming critical or obsolete. So visibility means clarity on critical roles, emerging skills and pathways, not just job titles. Again, hiring managers inside the company also have visibility into the workforce's capabilities.

And do they understand their skills or have visibility to their skills so they can place them into new roles? And then the A is for access. Can people actually build the skills that matter?

Access isn't just about just having content, it's having relevant, timely, role-connected learning. Learning has to fit into work alongside it. If access requires navigating new systems, or learning on nights and weekends, it's not real access.

Do employees and leaders have access to the systems that will send the signals of capability? And then the C, obvious, is for connection. Can people connect skills to opportunity inside your company?

This is where most organizations break down candidly. Skills without opportunity creates a workforce trough of despair. Connection means linking skills to projects, roles, career movement, and real work.

It also means connecting to the internal community that can help move you into new roles and leaders being able to connect to talent. I mean, skills only matter if they lead somewhere, right? So be VAC.

That's how I explain the future of work to executives. Belief creates trust and momentum. Visibility creates focus.

Access enables action. And connection turns learning into business value. If any one of those is missing, then skills volatility turns it to risk instead of advantage.

How does a CLO approach the skills volatility agenda with the C-suite and get this message across to implement solutions across the organization?

One mistake we in L&D and learning, HR in general, that we make often, is that, especially in L&D, is we lead with learning. And what we have to start doing is opening the aperture a bit wider and starting with business risk and business opportunity. So this is what I often say CLOs need capability in three areas.

First, they need deep business acumen. The learning organization needs to know how the work actually gets done. Second, the CLO needs deep technology acumen.

This really is every company is now a technology company, right? So we need that as well in learning. And then the third, I would say, is the CLO needs deep learning acumen.

That's kind of what's in our title, right? We need thoughtful and deep understanding of how humans learn. Now with the C-suite, I frame skills volatility around three questions.

Which roles matter most to our strategy in the organization? You need to identify what I call enterprise critical roles, which ones matter, because that's where you focus first. And then how fast are the skills in those roles changing?

And then what happens if we're wrong or linked? Right? Because again, going back to that whole idea of competitive advantage, right?”

This isn't about boiling the ocean. So remember, I said enterprise critical roles. Let's start with a few of those, ECRs, for the company, not the whole workforce.

Build skills visibility, shorten learning cycles, connect learning directly to work, not catalogs and courses disconnected from the reality of how the workforce spaces their day. And most importantly, this can't live in HR alone. Skills are an enterprise asset.

CLOs need shared ownership with the business, with IT and with talent leaders. Every night when the CEO is laying their head on the pillow, I don't know how many of them are actually asking themselves, does my workforce have the capability to execute on the strategies I'm bringing forward with this assertive and exponentially rapid integration of new technology into the workplace, right? Well, that is our job to help lead that.”

Julia: I'd love to ask you, Brandon, about AI at work and where we dive into how you're using AI at work to work smarter, not harder, and how you're helping your teams to do the same. So what are your personal AI priorities and advice to others?

Brandon: Personally, my priority with AI is to just give me back time, less friction, faster doing, better output. I brainstorm with it a lot. I do a lot of writing and I use it as a thinking partner to synthesize pressure test ideas, explore scenarios.

It's really clever that way. And you have to be careful that you don't cognitively offload stuff to it. My advice to others is simple.

Don't wait for permission or perfection. Start small, but start now. Start working with AI if you're not.

Use it in your real work. Emails, planning, analysis. It's really great for analysis.

For leaders, I think the real opportunity isn't necessarily in the tools. It's raising the baseline capability of the organization. So everyone knows how to work alongside AI responsibly and effectively.

So that's real. As a leader, I think you need to really understand the foundations of AI, and then even the functional or domain specific. It brings you to always think of AI literacies in each function of the organization, because it's going to impact everything across the organization.

So if you're in supply chain, how does AI impact the work you do in supply chain? If you're in legal, it's more like AI plus legal, AI plus supply chain, AI plus manufacturing. It's going to have something to do with every function.

So get to know it and what it will do for you in the context.

Absolutely. I really like that advice. Moving to our future ready segment, where we talk about the future of work and how L&D leaders can prepare themselves and their teams.

Julia: Brandon, can you tell us about your take on the future of work? What L&D leaders should be preparing for now? And what is a trend that you're currently noticing?”

Brandon: There's a paradox going on right now. In that there's this sort of pandemic of anxiety across the workforces, right? Like, what is AI going to do, right?

Is it going to take my job? At the same time, a lot of people in the workforce are excited about leveraging AI in the work they do. Because to my earlier point, they'll reduce friction, they may bring more productivity, just help you out.

Maybe they'll actually de-stress you a bit, right? I do think the future of work isn't just about job loss. I do think that will be there.

There will be a lot of jobs that just go away. There will be a lot of jobs that change. All the skill quality that we talked about.

I think at the skill level, it's more about job instability. Next decade is going to be interesting for us as companies integrate AI and automation, and trying to find the right balance of AI and human innovation in the work. I mean, nobody really knows to what extent we're going to be augmenting the human workforce.

So I'd say for L&D leaders, we need to shift from just thinking about building programs to building learning velocity, right? So which is about, think about how fast the organization can sense change, build capability, and redeploy talent. So this fundamentally rewires, you know, our 60-year history of L&D.

We're going to be seeing less as the place to go learn something and be seeing more as the orchestrator of performance and career development. And one trend I'm watching closely is this move from static career paths to dynamic skill pathways. Like careers aren't ladders anymore, necessarily.

They'll be portfolios. And L&D leaders who succeed will be those who stop asking what courses should we offer and start asking how quickly can our people adapt when the work changes. And they should know that.

They should know what is necessary to build that more agile and adaptable workforce.

Julia: And now for our final segment, the learning list. My question for you is, what is your favorite L&D related content or resource of the moment?

Brandon: I look beyond our domain a lot of times to get ideas and thoughts about things. I really am interested in a guy named Eliezer Yudkasty, Raffaella Sadan, S-A-D-U-N, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing her name right. But here's some L&D colleagues I would encourage your listeners to lean into.

So there's Mark Ehler. He leads customer education at Qualtrics, Mike Ruska, H-R-U-S-K-A. He is a pioneer, he's pioneering AI-based mentoring and coaching.

And then there's Mike Pino, who's at the forefront of building immersive simulations. These folks are true pioneers that are amongst us and easily accessible. They're leading us to new sites when it comes to how we build human capability and thinking about all of the technology that's necessary for that.

Julia: Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today.

Brandon: Oh, this was fun. Thanks to you all. And I'm always a Go1 fan, so thank you so much.

Julia: Oh, thank you so much. We appreciate that. Thanks for tuning in to the show.

Julia: I'm your host, Julia Neradka, and that wraps up another episode of L&D in 20. To continue the conversation, send me a message on LinkedIn through the link in the show notes. Your comments will help inform future episodes, and who knows, maybe we'll even answer some of your questions on the show next time.

We'll catch you on the next episode, and until then, keep learning.

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