The world of work is changing rapidly, driven by technology-driven shifts in employment, pressures in financial and commercial markets, and labor shortages. Organizations in every industry worldwide face increasing pressure to contain costs, grow, maintain profits, and keep pace with competitors. Balancing external pressures while meeting those expectations requires greater agility, flexibility, and a more responsive evolution of the human capabilities that enable sustainable performance and value generation. Advances in technology and work methods are changing the skills required to execute and achieve goals, making many outdated, less valuable, or obsolete. Despite significant workforce shortages, the pressure to upskill or replace workers with those holding the required skills has become such a challenge that the concept of “repurposing talent” has risen as a top talent management solution.

Defining and understanding how repurposing talent works

Repurposing talent means preparing and moving valued, existing employees from roles being partially or fully replaced by automation, technology, or outsourcing into new or expanded jobs, rather than releasing or replacing them. Also referred to in different circles as “workforce modernization”, “workforce transformation”, “workforce optimization”, or “talent upcycling”, the concept closely aligns with talent strategies and management practices related to career development and mobility, reskilling, retraining, and upskilling.

Repurposing talent is a strategy that moves workers out of roles that perform tasks or deliver outputs with low strategic value, less impact on customer, financial, or operational objectives, and/or can be replaced by modern technologies or more efficient processing and delivery mechanisms. At the same time, it supports retaining and continuing to employ process experts who are strong mission and cultural fits and can adapt and grow with the business as it evolves.

The value proposition of repurposing talent is economical, as it preserves (and increases) the talent investments made in these individuals. More importantly, it establishes a disciplined approach to redeploying talent into the organization's highest-priority strategic, financially important, and impactful operations.

There are two primary methods for repurposing talent that are based on: 1) the organization’s operational needs, 2) speed and imminence of new technology adoption, 3) extent of process improvement, and 4) types and level of skills overlap between existing and future task requirements. Those methods include:

• Reskilling involves training existing employees to use a new or significantly changed set of skills that qualify them to move into a new job function and role. For example, system design engineers can transition into customer configuration design, customization, or implementation roles. This assumes they already have the aptitude, motivation, and skills needed for the new role, such as interpersonal interaction and creative/adaptive thinking.
• Reassignment leverages overlapping, transferable skills from a current role into a new, existing, or upgraded role. These opportunities are often identified through a systematic review of skill requirements and proficiency levels across jobs, organizational lines, functions, and business units. 

Another option sometimes promoted is upskilling, which refers to upgrading or enhancing current skill sets within a job family. This is less associated with a repurposing talent strategy because it involves skill growth or proficiency enhancement that does not necessarily lead to a job or career change. It is a common development activity for process changes or technology adoption within the current job or career field.

The challenges that repurposing talent strategies address

The nature of work is changing dramatically in many industries, especially those dominated by white-collar jobs, as business and national media outlets widely report. At the same time, many industry segments in physical career fields are also being affected, even those projected to have little negative job impact, such as healthcare, hospitality, and transportation.

Globally, the World Economic Forum projects that the adoption of AI and other advanced technologies will eliminate or displace as many as 92 million jobs. The same forces, however, will create an estimated 170 million new jobs, with the net effect that 59% of all workers will need to be upskilled or reskilled in order to maintain their employment. The core of this trend is that 39% of job skills currently used will become obsolete by 2030 due to the adoption of AI and other automation, digital (systems) and physical (robotics, etc.), and changing economic conditions that will continue to transform the products and services consumed. The specific job and skill shifts that are in play or emerging include:

How work is performed, and by whom

The advent of, and growing experimentation with and adoption of, automation and AI is shifting who is responsible for performing tasks. Whether partially or fully automated, task assignments are increasingly categorized as supported, augmented, or agent-sourced, and the work is defined as human, agent, or hybrid.

Declining or obsolete skills

Tasks long performed by humans are being replaced, so the skills required to do them are no longer needed. While many administrative tasks are being eliminated, a surprising number of professional tasks that have historically required a college degree(s) and even advanced certification (most performed by entry-level or junior role holders) are being absorbed by automated systems and processes. This is increasing the number of workers experiencing technical obsolescence, as their existing skills become irrelevant. Consider, for example: 

• PWC predicts that as many as 56% of accounting jobs will be fully automated in the near future.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects retail cashier jobs to decline by 10% by 2035 as businesses shift to automated self-service (and increasing online purchasing) to reduce costs and speed transactions. 
• McKinsey found that AI-generated computer programming cuts code production time by 50%, supported by widespread reports of layoffs and reduced hiring of software developers.
• A Deloitte study found that 75% of businesses have adopted AI transcription capabilities, using voice-to-text software to take and draft meeting notes, interviews, and other important conversations that require documentation.
• Anthropic research suggests robotization will most likely affect drivers and warehouse-related jobs, with an estimated 97% of taxi driver roles at risk of being eliminated altogether. This will presumably have a similar effect on truck drivers eventually. It suggests that 80% of job tasks, by time spent working, are at risk of significant augmentation or replacement by robots or large language model (LLM) technologies (e.g., GenAI, Agentic AI). 
• Robotics is growing in manufacturing environments, where Anthropic suggests that robots could replace 50% of physical laborers in structured settings like plants or warehouse/distribution centers. However, they are projected to have a substantially smaller effect on skilled and unskilled laborers in unstructured environments, such as construction zones or sites. The cost of robotics also limits its reach, with high expenses and lower ROI to date.
  
  

Rapidly rising, high-demand skills

The demand and availability of digitally literate, analytically skilled workers proficient in AI workflow orchestration, cyber-security, and human-AI collaboration across all career fields and organizational functions are limiting progress, development, and adoption of useful applications. This has driven a stronger shift toward skills-based hiring and away from static job descriptions and hiring requirements and, in turn, created more opportunity to redeploy existing workers into those functions and roles.

The key benefits of repurposing talent

Adopting a repurposing talent strategy that anticipates and develops existing talent for redeployment to more strategic, value-adding contributions to business, financial, and operational objectives offers many benefits to the business and its employees. Consider, for example:

• Cost Savings: The expenses associated with layoffs and severance packages, external sourcing and recruiting, lost production due to unfilled jobs, and the steep acclimation, enculturation, and learning curves of onboarding external hires add up quickly.
• Less risk of reduced productivity: Retaining workers who understand company standards and expectations and have proven ability to adapt reduces the risks of replacement hiring and longer time to competency. The likelihood of poor or unsuccessful external-hire decisions, as shown by significantly higher new-hire turnover rates, makes upskilling and transferring existing workers a safer bet for maintaining team performance and output.
• Retention of institutional knowledge: Maintaining a base of employees who understand the company culture, its unwritten rules, performance standards and expectations, processes and operations, and have networks within and across functions cannot be overstated as a source of stability and operational sustainability.
• Heightened organizational agility: Redeploying employees from lower-value, repetitive tasks that AI automates to high-value work related to strategy, domain leadership, customer interfacing and relationships, and other tasks that require human judgment. 
• Increased innovation and collaboration: Maintaining a more stable workforce by repurposing talent supports knowledge sharing and transfer across organizational and functional boundaries. As people compare and share best practices and work methods across business units and functions, and networks of expertise and collaboration expand exponentially, innovation and new or advanced work and problem-solving approaches spread. 
• Builds a continuous learning culture: Repurposing talent requires employees across functions and businesses to learn, acquire, and adopt new skills, which encourages and reinforces a continuous learning culture. It also helps identify high-potential (HiPo) employees whose natural curiosity and focus on development drive greater impact and adaptability in future roles. 
• Higher engagement and retention: Abundant research shows that managerial and organizational support helps develop strategically critical skills that also inform career options and advancement. While also signaling that employees and their ambitions are valued, this reinforces their proactivity and engagement in development and advancement by giving them greater agency, autonomy, meaning, and control over their career paths and aspirations. These are major drivers of engagement, productivity, performance, retention, and discretionary effort.
  
  

Steps for repurposing talent in a structured, business-aligned, and effective manner

As new and advanced technologies are adopted, processes are streamlined, and job tasks are removed or replaced, building a sustainable, adaptive, and cost-effective talent strategy and talent management approach becomes an operational imperative. Repurposing talent should be a high-priority HR capability exercised continuously, not a one-time initiative. Building this capability requires engaging business leaders as active champions and participants, establishing a robust, comprehensive foundation, integrating HR expertise and processes, and bringing technologies and data together into a supporting ecosystem. Essential steps to consider when creating these include:

1. Engage leadership 

Start by building a business case that explains the context and rationale for the time, energy, and budget needed to establish a comprehensive talent-repurposing process. The narrative should focus executives on the human costs of the technological, productivity, and process enhancements they plan, the critical skill employee segments whose value can be retained, and the financial benefits of reskilling and redeploying those resources to more strategically important job functions. Charter a governance council that can oversee these efforts, track progress, and evaluate returns on those investments.

2. Inventory employee skills 

Develop the infrastructure and processes needed to evaluate the presence, acquisition, and proficiency levels of skills that each employee holds and develops on a continuous basis. This will support baselines used to identify gaps, shortfalls, and often hidden overlaps between role requirements (existing, changing, and emerging) and employee capabilities across functions, roles, job levels, and locations. 

The infrastructure is built on documented skills frameworks housed in a skills library, taxonomy, or ontology. These can be accessed through open-source (e.g., Lightcast), government-sponsored (e.g., O*Net, ESCO), or commercially available sources embedded in major HR/HC Management systems (Workday, Oracle HCM, SAP SuccessFactors) and specialized skills intelligence platforms (e.g., TechWolf, TalentGuard, Acorn).

Develop a process to evaluate employee skill requirements as they evolve with changes in workflows, product or service design and delivery methods, staffing models, performance standards, and expectations. The best source for tracking and evaluating changes to the job architecture is based on updated job descriptions and a role classification system.

Create a process to assess and validate employee skills and proficiency levels beyond self-reporting, including some form of verification or certification (manager rating, formal testing, or behaviorally based expert observation). As groups of employee roles are being (or planned to be) impacted, analyze the traits, behaviors, and skills that predict higher-tenured, continuously learning, and adaptable employees to decide who to encourage to retrain and retain.

3. Enhance workforce planning

Strategic workforce planning is essential for identifying operational changes that will impact job functions and families and creating opportunities to repurpose talent. Conduct regular research to identify and assess technological trends and industry adoption of new methods and approaches. Track labor force and career field intelligence on hiring patterns, posted requirements, and how the company's deployed jobs are changing across the industry and talent marketplace. Review managers’ requests to change job descriptions and hiring criteria in response to evolving job and skill requirements, and conduct ongoing skill gap analyses by job function, family, and job level against projected changes and requirements.

4. Develop a skills-based talent strategy

A talent strategy defines the talent requirements and plans that support an organization’s primary business objectives. It clarifies the capability requirements needed to run workflows that create the value that attracts and meets the needs of its market, customers, and other critical stakeholders. Embrace a skills-based approach that bases talent selection, development, deployment, and advancement on skills possessed and demonstrated proficiency levels. To repurpose talent, review planned and evolving critical role and job family task changes that signal altered skill requirements. Update skills-based profiles to systematically identify and map skill overlaps between new requirements and skills held by existing staff in other roles. Select the best opportunities to repurpose talent most effectively and efficiently, rather than outsourcing, replacing, or automating required work tasks and activities.

5. Redesign and realign the talent management strategy

Use workforce planning and talent strategy outputs to reconsider talent management strategies, practices, and programs, and fully integrate skills obsolescence and skills management into them. Start with job redesign and task analyses to reassign process responsibilities and update job descriptions, then update the skills and associated proficiency levels employees need. Build targeted training pathways and programs that enable pivots into emerging roles at scale (e.g., capability academies, boot camps, or cohort-based learning). Establish skill acquisition and growth (and support by managers) as criteria for advancement.

6. Redeploy career planning and development at scale

As a significant percentage of jobs change, update career paths and options to build visibility for affected employees and their ambitions. Introduce skill stacking as a capability and career-building approach, and update learning management technologies to reflect learning paths and skill-building recommendations aligned with the new range of mobility and advancement options available to repurposed talent. Use change management techniques to educate impacted workers about the changes driving their job changes, the newly available roles and duties, transition and upskilling timeframes, policies and rules, and the new career options available to them. At the same time, managers should be informed and given tools to guide career discussions with their assigned employees and help them understand how skill overlaps can identify candidates for new or updated roles on their teams.

7. Implement special rewards and recognition 

When repurposing talent, motivate transitions and reinforce their value by tying successful skill acquisition and continued proficiency growth directly to performance reviews, updated compensation structures, and other rewards and recognition mechanisms for those demonstrating energetic acceptance and adoption of their new roles. Link their demonstrated growth, speed to competency, unique contributions, and job successes to special awards and faster advancement opportunities.

8. Use enabling technologies to power repurposing 

Repurposing talent successfully requires data and access to insights, information, and advance notice of changes in how the work will be performed, the skills and capabilities needed to conduct it, and the availability of talent to deliver it. As such, organizations can leverage a variety of business, HR, and talent-related platforms to generate the insights, planning, and implementation needed. Those include:

• Workforce planning systems provide strategic, business plan-based staffing projections and advance warning, giving time to repurpose talent.
• Labor market intelligence platforms provide relevant, up-to-date information and benchmarking on demand, including changes in skill requirements for targeted roles, from industry leaders and competitors.
• Talent marketplaces offer automated insights and personalized recommendations that match employee skill sets, experience, and preferences with new jobs, projects, and short-term assignments. Using AI, these talent marketplaces can integrate with learning management (LMS) or experience (LXP) systems to recommend relevant courses, certifications, or mentors to target specific emerging skill requirements.
• Talent intelligence platforms collect and integrate employee data with relevant public talent-pool insights and broader labor-market data to identify industry skill trends and critical company skill gaps. Companies use embedded machine learning to map skills, forecast gaps, and recommend talent for roles and assignments, supporting workforce planning, skills-based talent deployment, and internal mobility.
  
  

Planning and managing the culture shift required

Repurposing talent often means shifting primary control of talent planning and management from line leaders and managers to specialized teams of business strategists and operations, HR, and finance leaders. While that alone can be disruptive, doing it at scale (and often on a rolling schedule) across business, functional, and geographic lines will substantially affect operating models and organizational culture. Managers’ expectations and sense of control will need to change, while employees’ will need to be managed pragmatically. As a result, an awareness and change management approach should be promoted and planned for as they relate to some predictable outcomes that require active management: 

• A culture of continuous learning, where skill acquisition and growth are a critical, regular part of the employee experience and employment brands.
• An agile workforce accustomed to changing tasks and taking on challenging assignments and projects as part of their normal workload.
• Higher employee expectations for mobility within and across the organization, so changes in job duties are not a foreign concept but something employees want.
• Managers view talent as a shared corporate resource to avoid talent hoarding and immobility.
• More active access to a broad range of skill-building and development resources and activities.
• Proactive top leadership championing and support.
  
  

Relevant Practices & Tools

Advanced Career Development Practices that Create a Culture of Mobility and Expand Employee Career Horizons with Technology. >

Advanced Career Development creates and manages a culture of career mobility by building a structured foundation for comparing jobs with overlapping capability requirements... more »

Developing a Winning Talent Strategy to Identify Key Capabilities and the Most Appropriate Workforce Mix. >

A talent strategy defines the talent needs and associated objectives necessary to meet top business goals. It is both an integral part of the HR strategic plan and a direct informer of the talent management strategy and planning process... more »

Assessing Current and Future Skills-based Requirements and Gaps to be Filled. >

Bringing workforce planning into a skills-based level of assessment requires cataloging the skills required by the positions to be included, identifying the availability of those skills in the current workforce, determining future needs, and creating a gap analysis to reveal the requirements for subsequent skills acquisition and development... more »

Closing the Projected Headcount Gaps through Talent Management Strategies. >

Once the headcount demand analyses are completed, a clear estimate of the headcount needs for the coming year can be developed... more »

The Skills Taxonomy Tool: Define and Organize Job-relevant Skills Used in Different Jobs Across a Company. >

A tool to categorize and define the abilities needed to perform jobs across the enterprise. It is a catalog that can be used in collecting and assessing the individual and aggregate availability of skills required to perform different jobs in the organization... more »