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Human Capital Investing in employee training can improve productivity and deliver a competitive advantage. By Bethany Lawrence and Lynn MacDonald
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n the Future of Jobs Report 2025, the World Economic Forum surveys businesses around the world and looks for patterns in the data. The 2025 job survey shows that worldwide, “employers expect 39 percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. While this represents significant ongoing skill disruption, it is down from 44 percent in 2023.” Employers in the U.S. alone anticipate 35 percent of workers’ core skills to change. With so much rapid change that requires workers to have different skills, businesses around the world seem to be relying more
on training programs that promote “continuous learning, upskilling, and reskilling.” The top core skill that employers value, according to the 2025 survey, is analytical thinking. In fact, analytical thinking has maintained the top spot over multiple years of this report, with seven out of 10 companies viewing it as essential. Other top core skills are resilience, flexibility/agility, and then leadership and social influence. Creative thinking, motivation, and self-awareness ranked high as well. While these skills are ranking high worldwide, it’s not a complete list of necessary skills, and the
Contributors ________ Bethany Lawrence is an English Studies major at St. Cloud State University, expected to graduate in 2025. Lynn MacDonald, Ph.D., is an associate professor of economics at St. Cloud State University.
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reported level of importance does differ by industry. Upskilling (teaching new skills) and reskilling (teaching new roles) are different ways to train and develop employees. The proportion of the workforce who have engaged in some kind of training has grown to 50 percent in 2024, over the 41 percent that reported engaging in training in 2023. This growth was found in nearly all industries. Economists refer to training and education as investments in human capital. According to a report by Harvard professor David Deming, developing human capital — people’s skills, knowledge, and aptitudes — has long been recognized as an investment that generates returns. Human capital is an important driver of both economic performance and long-term economic growth. Upskilling and staying on top of trends is important for business sustainability, and “the rate at which organizations and individuals learn” is an important factor in establishing a “sustainable competitive advantage,” according to a 2014 study by Associate Professors Uday Bhaskar and Bijaya Misra. There is an emerging body of economic literature attempting to analyze the relationship between training and business performance. Economists Jozef Konings and Stijn Vanormelingen set out to study how on-the-job training affected both wages and productivity. Using data from Belgium, they found that,
when the share of trained workers increases by 10 percent, it resulted in an increase in productivity from between 1.7 percent to 3.2 percent. Interestingly, they found a slightly higher impact of training in non-manufacturing businesses compared to manufacturing. They also found some evidence suggesting that most training programs were general in nature. General training refers to developing skills, such as communication, that workers can carry into several different roles. The survey results from the World Economic Forum emphasize the importance of core workplace abilities like collaboration and adaptability. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) corroborates this emphasis by stressing that soft skills are becoming more important at work. These soft skills include professionalism and work ethic, communication (both oral and written), teamwork and collaboration, and critical thinking/ problem solving. The U.S. DOL goes further to include necessary core competencies such as networking, professionalism, communication, and enthusiasm, just to name a few. While training programs do cost money, they can lead to productivity gains and may help provide a competitive advantage. In Minnesota, the Department of Employment and Economic Development offers resources for job seekers that stress the importance of both on-the-job training and lifelong learning as being necessary for career success.