Published on: July 8, 2025 at 9:43 pm
Recruitment and training and development are transforming, and an emerging labor trend is shaping how people are being recruited, trained, and developed in the workplace.
Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia noted that an increasing number of organizations are moving away from always requiring traditional credentials, such as a university degree and a certification, for many roles.
“I’m seeing a trend away from employers valuing credentials and university degrees, and a much greater focus on micro-credentials and just-in-time training,” Kulik said.
“That shifts a lot of the burden onto the employees to maintain their skills. They need to be very entrepreneurial in how they develop themselves professionally,” she said.
Lifelong learning, including skills acquisition, is no longer a luxury. It’s an asset and increasingly high stakes in landing many jobs and career development.
“Universities have historically delivered generalist training and helped people to develop transferable skills. But now we’re seeing employees express more interest in focusing on very specialized skills that they can develop through trade schools or very specialized professional training,” Kulik said. “It’s a short-term trend with a long-term cost.”
While this trend offers specialization, there’s a downside. Kulik believes that this specialized training could ultimately leave workers without broader, transferable skills in the long run.
Kulik used the rise of AI integration into daily workflows as an example of the value of transferable skills like critical thinking. Employees now need advanced knowledge to “recognize whether the AI agent is giving them something of quality and be able to evaluate, test, and question the AI outputs.”
“Employees and employers both need far-sighted thinking about enabling employees to adapt as organizations’ needs change,” Kulik said. “Transferable skills like critical thinking and problem-solving ensure that employees will be able to identify and develop the more specialized skills that they need in a particular context.”
