Human Skills Development as a Strategic Priority: HR Trends 2026

This is the time of the year when you get to read forecasts for the upcoming year. A consistent trend across multiple reports that I picked up is a strengthened focus on soft/human skills development. 

As automation and AI accelerate, it is human skills that will give a competitive edge to both individuals and organisations. They are rightly called “power skills” by many.

Science of Human Skills

Human skills tend to have some unique characteristics. Understanding and appreciating these characteristics can go a long way in strengthening our approach towards developing the associated skills:

• They are long-lasting – technical skills are impacted by disruptions in the environment, and their shelf life is often short. On the other hand, many human skills, like resilience and innovation, are timeless. Our forefathers knew resilience better, and without innovation, the world wouldn’t have moved ahead. These skills are applicable at all fronts, often across our lifetime
• No one right definition to understand or develop them, Professor Roberto Rigobon of MIT says, “A ‘hard’ skill, like solving a math problem, is comparatively easy to teach. It is much harder to teach a person these critical human skills and capabilities—such as hope, empathy, and creativity.” Unlike technical skills, human skills do not confine themselves to a linear process. The same skill can be displayed in a hundred different ways.
• Application is not confined to a single context – related to the earlier point is its applicability across multiple personal and professional contexts. The same skill –  influencing – will change shape and form while being deployed with one’s teenage son / daughter, versus a difficult customer. To adapt is an important requirement and one cannot master that through mere conceptual inputs
• Interpersonal context influences expression – Many of these skills come to play in an interpersonal context. How others behave can influence one’s own skill. One may communicate very well with team members, but may have a challenge while communicating with seniors.

What Does It Mean

All of the above highlight factors to be kept in mind for developing human skills. This would apply both at an individual and organizational level. So what are some key points to bear in mind?

• Prioritise – Both at an individual and organisational level, one needs to make soft skills development an area of focus and not leave it as a “nice to do” thing
• Focus on human-intensive skills – while there are numerous human skills, there are those that cannot be effectively mastered by machines, and humans will continue having an edge. MIT has identified five skills, abbreviated to EPOCH, as listed below –

1. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
2. Presence, Networking, and Connectedness
3. Opinion, Judgment, and Ethics
4. Creativity and Imagination
5. Hope, Vision, and Leadership.

• Focus on the complete value chain – considering the adaptive nature and applicability across different contexts, it is important to look beyond knowledge dissemination.
  • Unlike technical skills, people are often unaware of their current status with respect to many human skills. For eg., someone might assume that they are very good at empathy, while in reality that may not be the case. The learning should focus on helping one understand their current gap
  • Focus on application during and after the learning is important.

The 4-step process that would enable this is as follows –

• New Blend – Traditional blended journeys have e-learning as pre-work, followed by classroom sessions and finally, a post-connect; that blend is changing. AI coaches come in handy for safe practice; communities help in reinforcing the learning, and multiple on-the-job elements can be included depending upon the topic and objective.  

How to go about it

• Identify the human-intensive skills that your context needs – the needs will differ depending upon one’s individual and organisational context. At Reliance, we have 4 key human skills, Judgement, Achievement, Relationship and Learning Agility that are used across all our people processes.
• Have a robust mechanism for assessing needs – this starts with the individual and can throw light on the skill demographics of the organisation. The approach can vary from a 360-degree assessment to an elaborate assessment centre. This will take care of the “Know” stage in the value chain
• Education – a structured education approach that leverages both human facilitators and technology is needed. The instructional design should focus on designing and delivering for application. Multiple practice elements, like role play,s can be incorporated to help learners understand how to apply the same skill in different contexts
• Learning from others – this is key considering that we can’t confine many of these skills to a standard template. Experienced individuals will be able to pass on knowledge. Als,
  • o learning from peers will be important. A virtual community of peers can be helpful.
  • Coaching has remained exclusive for a long time. It is time to make it accessible to a larger set of employees. Developing managers as coaches is an important step in this direction.

• Leverage AI – AI has huge potential across different aspects
  • Personalization across different learner contextsJust in time learning in the flow of workFaster and immersive content creation using multiple tools
  • AI coaches for learning and feedback; multiple online platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera have enabled this feature

Conclusion

If human skills are our true competitive advantage, we must focus on them sharply. They give us the power to stay relevant by mastering fast-changing technical skills.

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