In the age of AI, it’s human skills that employers want
Advances in generative AI mean workers need less technical knowledge in order to benefit from technology. The focus is therefore shifting to cultivating the interpersonal skills that are needed to get the most out of tech-driven insights.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often referred to as “the great equalizer.” Within the financial industry, while early adopters and fast followers could enjoy a period of outperformance over the late majority as they exploit AI’s efficiencies and insights, the playing field will be levelled eventually.
When that happens, according to Lara Partridge, HSBC’s Head of Talent Asia Pacific, the big question will be: “How are we going to make ourselves distinctive?”
“We have to go and find what we can be unique at,” said Partridge. “It’s the human aspects: empathy, flexibility, adaptability, resilience, relationship-building. That's where I think the world of work will be contested in the future.”
Firms now expect a minimum level of technical literacy, “not just for IT or tech roles, but for all roles, including back office, middle office and customer-facing roles,” said Sagar Goel, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group and Global Insights leader at BCG Henderson Institute, BCG's strategy think tank.
But the insights derived from data and technology can only help firms to the extent that they are communicated across teams effectively and used to drive change.
“We need people who can not only understand, contextualize and interpret, but can then tell a story and inspire people,” said Rebecca Kellogg, Global Head of UBS University, the bank’s in-house learning and development institution.
“That’s very important: being able to foster collaboration, to drive innovation,” she said. “Technology, for the sake of technology doesn’t do it. How humans interpret that technology — that’s what makes us stronger, and that’s what makes us more effective as an organization.”
Core human skills
In line with the greater focus on such skills, Partridge said that the language around them is changing. She views the still-common tendency to refer to them as “soft” skills as diminishing their importance. The term probably originated in the early 1970s, used by the US military to distinguish between skills related to operating technical machinery and interpersonal skills.
Partridge said it was high time to replace this with the more apt “human” skills. Others even suggest using words like essential, durable and power.
The UK’s Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC), based on extensive research, identifies six core human skills – behaviors – that have become more important in driving firms’ growth: adaptability, coaching, creative thinking, empathy, relationship management and teamwork.
“It’s been interesting to see the continued emergence of these skills, because it’s not what we would have expected as recently as five or six years ago. Then, it was all around more technical skills,” said Mark Hoban, FSSC Chair.
Hoban pointed out that the human skill that saw the fastest growth in demand among its members in its latest Future Skills Report was empathy. “How do you enrich the customer relationship or the relationship with the team? You need to be more empathetic,” he said.
Hoban gave the example of a call-center employee. “They’re the main point of customer contact. They need to have sufficient digital literacy to understand what the data is telling them about that customer, and they need to have a good enough grounding in banking or insurance or asset management. But they also need the interpersonal skills to build an empathetic relationship with the customer in order to give effective advice or sell a product.”
A similar trend is seen in the wealth management industry. As technology lifts the administrative burden on advisors, they have more time to build trust with clients, improving the chances of clients following their advice.
Human skills are learnable
As this shift gathers pace, it’s important to stress that there is no need to worry if one feels that one’s own human skills — such as empathy — are lacking, because they can be learned.
“It’s a mistake to think of empathy as just something you either have or you haven’t,” said Hoban. He added that several members of the FSSC are now actively seeking to teach empathy: how to deal with different situations, how to build relationships, listen actively, and ask the right questions. “There are ways in which you can learn to build empathy with your customers: it doesn’t have to be an innate skill,” he said.
Kellogg at UBS is continuously looking for new ways for employees to practice their communication, presentation and interpersonal skills.
“We can create some interactive solutions and programs that allow people to have those experiences and also give them some new technical skills,” she said. “It can be through simulations, case studies or AI-enabled learning. It’s a combination of what you read in a self-directed fashion, what you practice with your peers, and what you might practice or discuss with a coach.”
The idea is to have a system of teaching human skills “that is comprehensive, scalable and fit for purpose,” said Kellogg.
Using AI to assess human skills
As well as facilitating skills-based learning, AI can also help organizations assess whether a candidate has the skills needed for a given role.
“There are already a lot of generative AI assessment tools that do first-round interview screening, or which provide a co-pilot alongside the human interviewer and summarize the behavioral and empathy cues that were observed, and the personality profile of the individual,” said Goel.
“How does the candidate pause and think about the challenge critically? Are they thinking about alternate ways of solving this? AI today can actually already assess all of these,” he said.
Goel’s team has built a custom tool for a client based on ChatGPT to assess whether first-round interviewees are a good cultural fit.
“All you have to do is give the parameters — what skills or competencies you need to assess. The Gen AI assessor generates a set of case questions and interview questions to give, and at the end gives a summary recommendation of whether there is or isn’t a fit against these competencies.”
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