Here’s Garry Kasparov in his chess-playing prime, playing another Soviet Grandmaster, Anatoly Karpov, at the 1985 World Chess Championship.

Kasparov won the match 13-11, cementing his legacy as the greatest chess player of the time. Today, he is still considered one of the all-time greats of the game.

Just a few years later, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov. And today, a simple app on your phone could comfortably beat him or any other chess grandmaster.

I’ve been thinking about this story more recently because of a quiet revolution in the workplace.

It’s a skills revolution, and it will affect almost every highly skilled worker.

For many years, the most prized skills at work were technical, particularly skills that were niche and essential to an organization. Employees with these skills were the Grand Masters of their companies. It was very difficult to replace them, and if they were at the level of Kasparov, it was literally impossible.

In many cases, these skills were seen as SO necessary that organizations would overlook significant deficits in other areas and even somewhat outright toxic behaviors from their top technical specialists.

Often without realizing it, organizational leaders were making a calculation: Was the replacement possible, and if so, would the cost be worth it? But, over the last few years, the calculation has begun to alter, and for the same reason that Kasparov’s world changed – technology advancement.

Today, the calculation is not “How much would it cost to replace this human with another human at least as technical?” but “How much would it cost to replace this capability with a human, technology, or a combination of the two?”

The interesting thing about many highly technical, specialized roles is that they are well-defined functions with a well-defined associated set of knowledge. They are complicated, sure, but complicated in the way that chess is. There are clearly defined rules to the game. If technology knows the rules and knows the knowledge base well, it can play that game, probably better than humans and without any of those pesky human behavioral challenges.

It’s difficult to overstate how important this is. In the old world, a lot of job security was based on being the smartest person in the room. In the new world, good luck in being smarter than all of the documented knowledge in the world.

So, what makes a valuable employee today?

Many forward-thinking organizations are doubling down on the idea that the difference makers are now the intangibles of great work, such as great human judgment, creativity, and stellar interpersonal skills. Of course, we’ve known about these skills for years and generally called them soft skills. Today, they are increasingly being called durable skills (a change I thoroughly approve of).

So, in no way are these skills new, but the change in their relative value IS new, and it’s happening very fast. It can be summed up in a simple “equation.”

We’ve seen a shift from:

Lots of Technical Acumen + Just Enough Durable Skills = High Value

To:

Just Enough Technical Acumen + Lots of Durable Skills = High Value

And if you aren’t wondering what to do about that, you probably should be….

Getting Serious about Durable Skills

In my next newsletter, I’ll discuss specifics on HOW to learn at work, but for now, I suggest you focus on one thing as an individual and one thing if you are a leader—particularly a leader in L&D.

As an individual, start to think about how much time you actually spend developing your durable skills and why. Even though companies consistently state that durable skills are essential, most employees spend less than 1% of their time actively working on them (and many do not actively work on them at all). Doubling that 1% to 2% can make an extraordinary difference to your value.

If you don’t work on your durable skills, ask yourself why. Perhaps you think you already have highly developed durable skills, but have you ever externally validated that? While there are some exceptions, our primary research on this topic has shown that for most people, the perception of their durable skills maturity is inversely proportional to the reality.

Perhaps you think you should work on these skills but don’t know how. If that’s you, we’d love to chat. Alternatively, you can subscribe to this newsletter, and I’ll give you the scoop next week.

If you are a leader, it’s time to stop complaining about today’s kids lacking basic work skills and start doing your part to address durable skills adequately. For years, many organizations have been in a vicious cycle: struggling to find ROI in learning and development initiatives and reducing L&D spending rather than focusing on developing a culture of learning with high-value initiatives that actually help employees grow.

Remember, when every company can access the same incredibly powerful AI, humans will be the differentiators. If you invest in helping those employees grow, they will stay with you, and your company will reap the benefits.

Footnote

For some, the idea of specialized technical expertise dying is both inevitable and deeply saddening. But I am more optimistic about the future than that. I do not think that all technical expertise will die out, rather it will be combined in new interesting ways with deeply human forms of creativity. Humans love to see other humans at work in their own unique ways, even when computers are better at it. After all, despite the fact that defeating a grandmaster at chess is now trivial for a machine, chess is even more popular today than it was when Kasparov beat Karpov.