Future HR Skills Transformation

Vijay Swaminathan

min read

23 March 2026

I hope you're doing well. One of our customers highlighted the need to map the granular future of HR skills. There is a lot of noise today around AI and the future of HR. Many discussions remain at a very high level. Instead of speaking broadly about AI, we mapped the skills emerging across six HR areas — Talent Acquisition, People Analytics, Employee Experience, Learning & Development, Total Rewards, and Workforce Planning.

For each function, we looked at five layers of capability:

Core skills that remain foundational
Sunrise Wave 1 skills — AI-assisted capabilities already emerging today
Sunrise Wave 2 skills — more advanced capabilities as agentic AI matures
Specific AI verification skills (as it applies to the areas)
Human skills that remain the real differentiator

An example that illustrates the sample finding in the paper.

In Talent Acquisition, core skills like skills-based hiring and employer branding remain important.
Sunrise Wave 1 includes AI-assisted job description creation and predictive candidate matching.
Sunrise Wave 2 moves toward agentic sourcing and automated interview orchestration.

But what gives a competitive advantage are these specific verification and human skills

The paper is packed with insights. I hope you like this paper. Thanks again for your valuable time

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