Perhaps it’s disingenuous to say that job titles don’t matter. After all, many of us spend years working towards the holy grail of being Chief Something Officer, with all its associated benefits and responsibilities.

And there’s a satisfying neatness to hierarchy – a sense that we all understand where we sit, to whom we report and who reports into us. We get to where we get through our experience and qualifications, and we either stay there or progress depending on business performance. It all links together. It all makes sense. 

And because it makes sense, and has done for so long, we don’t question it.

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that we’re in a time of exponential change. Generative AI exploded onto the scene in 2021, and is fundamentally changing how certain industries and disciplines will operate and recruit…as well as the changes we can’t yet envisage. Rapid transformation is defining the business landscape.

Accepting what we don’t know – the skills we don’t yet have – is the clearest view a CEO can have of their organisation. It is not job titles or seniority which will give us our competitive advantage in the years to come. It can only be skills.

Skills: an Organisation’s DNA

Skills and experience are not the same thing. We hire based on what people have achieved, and because their qualifications and education fall within the parameters of what we know and expect. But those things are having less and less to do with the tasks we need to accomplish. A marketing director in 2024 needs to know an awful lot more than a marketing director did in 1994.

HR, for years an exemplar of compliance and regulation, is reinventing itself as an engine of engagement and productivity. As tech evolves our imagination evolves with it, opening up new routes to growth and success but demanding ever more knowledge to use it effectively. At the same time, we’re embracing systems and ways of working which help us to break things down, to use project management tools to create workflows and key milestones, and to turn daunting projects and initiatives into lists of tasks.

This is the environment in which talent marketplaces should flourish. In a rapidly changing world, it seems like common sense to throw open projects to the people who are best placed to steer them. But then, having broken these projects down into tasks, we assign those tasks based on job role.

We jam the pieces together when we could take a moment to find a better fit. A clear view of what needs to be done, complemented and fuelled by a robust chain of upskilling and learning geared precisely towards those tasks, is the ideal environment for talent to find its way to the work it’s best suited for.

Perhaps the prospect of a skills gap analysis seems daunting. On the face of it, creating an exhaustive picture of the skills your people have (and to what level), as well as the ones they need to support the business plan, does feel like a challenge. Many CEOs will envisage a lengthy, complex series of face-to-face interviews; HR tied up for months compiling datapoints; managers thrown off their work by endless requests for additional information.

The truth is that the very technology making this process necessary also makes it achievable. After all, what is AI really good at? First and foremost, it’s crunching vast amounts of data: market data, expressed in job adverts and your own data, held in your people systems. Creating a taxonomy of relevant skills is simply a matter of looking at what’s out there.

AI can even assess the levels of those skills based on performance and productivity data. A full picture will obviously need some 360 input – after all, managers and peers will see how skills are being applied in context. But as long as managers are having regular performance conversations with their people, that information should be close to hand. This gives you facts, not instincts, which in turn inform a programme of tailored learning opportunities. It’s about what the organisation needs – not what it hopes it has.

Building a Clear Picture of Skills

AI is a useful tool – a labour-saving device which can take the grind out of a whole host of mundane, repetitive tasks. Write me a template for this, find me some research on that. It can do the rapid legwork and provide the headspace to think of ideas and create solutions. The skills businesses need may be detailed, complex things in and of themselves but the fact – or not – of their existence is simply a series of points on a graph.

In the context of what an employee can actually do, and the level to which they can do it, job titles are labels: a useful guide, perhaps, but not the whole picture. There is the place we are at – the skills we have and are able to deploy – and the place we want to reach, where the organisation has exactly the skills it needs to meet its objectives. This is what the CEO and the business actually care about – team readiness – and AI can draw the map.

AI can inform the learning content which guides us from one place to the other. All it needs is a desire to lead with skills: to recognise that it’s skills, not CVs and certainly not job titles, which will drive us forward.

Many HR thought leaders have touched on the importance of clarity: clarity in the expectations our managers have of us, clarity in our role and its responsibilities, clarity around opportunities for progression. This is, perhaps, the best route to creating strategic lucidity on what a business needs to thrive. It’s about unpicking a dense knot of responsibilities and competences and asking if they’re fit for purpose, now and in ten years time.

It’s about understanding what assets a leader has available to them, and what they’ll need to achieve the plan. And it’s about clarity of opportunity for individuals: a chance to learn what help they need, and how best to target the skill gaps which will help them to grow as individuals. Job titles, in this context, are the label on the box.

So let’s open it.

CEO & Co-founder at 

Nelson Sivalingam is CEO and Co-Founder of HowNow - the AI-powered learning and skills platform. He is also the author of award-winning book 'Learning at Speed', and co-host of the popular 'L&D Disrupt' podcast. Nelson has been recognised by Virgin Media Business as one of the top 30 young innovative founders in the UK, and recently featured on Bloomberg's Entrepreneurial Mindset documentary.