Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
It’s that time of year again: the annual compliance module.
Nobody is looking forward to the endless barrage of emails threatening to lock you out of your next paycheck if you don’t hurry up and complete your 90-minute “training”. You know, the one where you basically sit on the couch, mute the module and binge Hallmark movies because at least one of those stories ends with someone getting a better job.
This is the season HR lives for — it’s their Super Bowl of compliance. For decades, companies have piled more and more responsibility onto HR: hiring, onboarding, layoffs, engagement, surveys, and now AI training.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it isn’t working — not because HR leaders aren’t capable, but because the work keeps stacking onto a function that was never designed to do it.
What are HR teams actually for?
In truth, HR was built for one thing: to protect the organization. But the problem is the architecture of the function. Nothing in their mandate is truly about protecting workers.
It’s a department engineered around compliance, policy, and risk mitigation. And somewhere along the way, we started treating HR like the catch-all for developing skills, coaching, and performance. While many HR teams have well-intended people doing their best, the structure of the function is working against them.
And the numbers prove it. Today, 84% of all employee training is still focused on non-skill-building functions like compliance or risk mitigation. Whatever dollars exist for corporate learning flow overwhelmingly toward protection, not performance. And recent surveys show frontline workers saying they haven’t received upskilling or a learning pathway in the last five years.
We have a leadership gap, not a talent gap. Workers are capable and motivated — they just need the right guidance and opportunities to thrive.
They want to grow and they want opportunity, but the system we built was never intended to deliver either. The result is wasted opportunities, wasted potential, and wasted talent.
Today, that problem has reached a breaking point.
To fix it, we need a new role in the C-suite built for the reality of work today: the Chief Skills Officer.
This is the core argument of my new book, Wasted Talent: How Greed, Exploitation, and the Promise of the Future of Work has Failed the Front Line, and a Plan to Fix It. Work isn’t working for everyone…and that’s bad for business. When talent is wasted and potential is stifled, everyone loses.
What is a Chief Skills Officer?
A Chief Skills Officer wouldn’t manage payroll, legal protocols, performance reviews, or policy. They would own a different mandate entirely, developing the organization’s skill engine.
Where traditional HR is designed to protect, the Chief Skills Officer is designed to build. A Chief Skills Officer would map existing skills, identify gaps, design continuous bite-sized training built for how people actually learn, uncover internal talent traditional HR hides, and measure ROI in performance and productivity, not compliance checkboxes.
Think of it the way elite sports teams operate. While coaches reduce injury risk, they also hire PhDs in biomechanics and physiology to ensure their talent is constantly getting bigger, faster, and stronger. That’s the model businesses need now.
AI’s impact on work will be real, and it will be exponential. And because AI compounds, the organizations that move fastest get the biggest advantage — which is why we need a Chief Skills Officer to accelerate this.
Successful companies require someone focused entirely on unlocking productivity through skills, so putting this under HR would be like handcuffing your quarterback and asking him to throw a touchdown.
Forward-looking companies are decoupling skills from HR because they understand training is a growth function rather than a compliance function.
This is not a “nice-to-have,” and it’s not a future idea, because it’s already happening. Forward-looking companies are decoupling skills from HR because they understand training is a growth function rather than a compliance function. HR should continue doing what it does best: managing risk and protecting the organization. But to build a workforce that can keep up with AI-driven change, you need a role dedicated to speed, iteration, and continuous learning.
HR cannot move at the velocity this moment requires. That’s not an insult — it’s the reality of a department structured around safety and defense. AI, automation, and shifting markets require a department built around offense.
Business leaders who adopt a Chief Skills Officer now will gain a competitive advantage. They’ll reduce turnover because workers who grow stay. They’ll uncover hidden talent. They’ll build teams that are adaptable, cross-functional, and ready for the unpredictable. They’ll stop wasting talent and start activating it. And the companies that don’t will fall behind not because they lack talent, but because they lacked the system to unlock it.
We’re entering a new era of work. If we want our business to keep pace with the future, then we need the skills of our people to move at the speed of change. We need to stop treating skills like an annual exercise and start treating them like a strategic asset.
Though, fixing it does come with one downside. Fewer compliance modules means fewer excuses for some to watch their Hallmark movies.
