Sunrise and Sunset Skills - Gartner London Edition

I hope you're doing well. I’m sharing our latest framework on Sunrise and Sunset Skills, which we presented at the Gartner conference in London.  This framework combines Draup’s labor market intelligence, role decomposition models, and Workday-integrated skill architectures to help organizations prepare for the next wave of AI transformation.

The presentation demonstrates how identifying granular, emerging (Sunrise) and declining (Sunset) skills enables HR leaders to manage the impact of workforce agility, reskilling, and automation with precision.

Key themes explored in the deck include:

• The new skill tension: balancing individual growth (broader skill accumulation) with enterprise agility (fewer, continuously refreshed skills).
• The half-life of skills: today, the time it takes to master a skill is often the same as its obsolescence cycle, demanding continuous market-aligned updates.
• Converging roles and blurred boundaries: software, data, and cloud engineers now share overlapping workloads and tech stacks, necessitating a workload-based model instead of static job descriptions.
• Root–Core–Tech Stack–AI Model framework: a structured way to visualize how foundational capabilities evolve into AI-augmented competencies (e.g., FP&A Analysts moving toward predictive, generative, and anomaly-detection models).
• Dynamic Skills Architecture: how real-time market signals, skill sequencing, and continuous taxonomy updates power future-ready job profiles and integrations with enterprise systems like Workday.

For Workforce Planning and Talent Acquisition leaders, this framework offers:

• A clear method to quantify the financial and productivity impact of AI at a workload and process level.
• A foundation to align hiring, internal mobility, and learning investments with the pace of technological change.
• Insight into which roles and skills are rising or fading (AI Engineering, Cloud Architecture, FP&A, Cybersecurity, etc.) and the underlying labor-market cost pressures shaping them.

In essence, the Sunrise and Sunset Skills model provides a blueprint for re-architecting work — transforming static job frameworks into living, data-driven skill systems that continuously evolve with the business.