Networks & Skills: The Future of Careers for Emerging Talent
- Lara Plaxton
- Mar 18
- 4 min read
There are several reasons why networks and skills are shaping the design of today's organisations and it's not a passing trend. As technology has become more sophisticated, job titles and job descriptions have proved to be inconsistent and unreliable when it comes to creating a universal understanding of work.
Background Context
Think of the traditional organisation chart. It's fairly static and it doesn't tell you much about what people do other than who controls what. You could have two employees with the same job title but different skillsets, working on different tasks and projects. So, how can companies leverage insight to know what people are working on in real time, how colleagues interact to achieve company goals, and how organisations can close critical skills gaps to maintain their competitive edge?
The answer is networks and skills. There are numerous HR tech products in the market that help organisations to map the skills across their workforce so they have a dynamic view of capability. When this is paired with knowledge of tasks and projects that are either part of business-as-usual or ad-hoc requirements, it creates a landscape of how work actually gets done and the results it achieves.
Skills and the Economy
Even the government has recognised the opportunity with the formation of Skills England in June 2025. No doubt prompted by ESCO (an EU initiative that has publicly available data on how skills map to occupations) and large corporations such as LinkedIn, WorkDay and SuccessFactors who are benefiting from user or employee data to build 'skills clouds' or taxonomies/ontologies.
Skills England identifies skills gaps in the economy and uses this insight to improve provision so that people and businesses can access the right training to connect people to jobs.
Skills England has a searchable database called the UK Standard Skills Classification where you can see what skills, qualifications and occupations are related to each other. It also has interactive visualisations to explore local skills and employment data.
These systems and databases, both at the societal and organisational level, provide an opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to surface real time data, infer pathways for dynamic careers and optimise assigning work and training to achieve improved outcomes. Increased visibility on which skills are emerging, which are becoming legacy and the future skill demand, strengthens organisational capability and the wider economy.
Networks and decentralisation
With the emergence of agentic AI, skill capability and task execution is not just limited to human employees. Organisational skills maps will comprise of capability spanning both human and digital 'employees'. Tasks and projects will require skillsets that will be sourced from the most appropriate resource to achieve the goals, as set and defined by the organisation.
This transition enables us to have a more transparent view on interactions that take place and how they form networks over time. Whether the focus is on understanding skills clusters, knowledge transfer or collaboration, we will have a deeper perspective on how a company operates and achieves its results. Historically, organisations have needed hierarchy to control how work gets done, however this becomes less relevant when data is able to effectively distribute work based on how it gets done.
The Future of Careers for Emerging Talent
What does all this mean for emerging talent and how can they navigate the future of careers?
Here's a few tips on how they can maintain their competitive edge:
Be able to translate their qualifications into skills
Students can easily recite the modules they took at university or reference a particular aspect of learning they enjoyed. When asked what skills they gained from education, they often struggle to articulate their transferable skills. We need to make sure this awareness is accessible and part of how describe careers.
Be adaptable as tasks associated with specific jobs will change
Careers are still often discussed in a linear way; if you do this qualification, it will lead to this occupation. This mindset may prove restrictive as jobs adapt more frequently depending on how work gets done. Being open to taking on unexpected tasks or learning new skills will become a continual process.
Be aware of the skills that are in demand
People graduating will have more access to public data and analysis, which will become more sophisticated over time, to understand the skills that are in demand. Multi-directional learning will become more important and emerging talent may find that they possess skills that can help develop more experienced colleagues, if they are aware of their value.
Understand the value of networks and embrace them
Graduates often don't understand the value of networks for their career until they see it in practice, once they've been working for a while. Knowing how to build their network and leverage it to access opportunities or solve complex problems will become even more important. The competitive edge of humans is being able to deal with complex, unpredictable, chaotic scenarios through connecting the dots.
Centre expectations on what's important
Rather than having fixed expectations based on what peers, parents or society may have shaped, having broad expectations based on core motivations will help build the resilience to navigate a disruptive career landscape. At the moment, technology is driving the change rather than design. This means that things will be messy before they become clear.
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