Skills Keep Shifting

On February 7, 2021, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 31–9 in a dominant performance to win Super Bowl LV. Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady threw three touchdown passes: two to his former Patriots teammate Rob Gronkowski, one to wide receiver Antonio Brown, and Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette also scored a rushing touchdown from 27 yards. Brady won Super Bowl MVP for a fifth time and wins his seventh Super Bowl overall. 

But now it’s the 2024 season. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are in the playoffs again, facing the Washington Commanders in the first round. Imagine you’re the Washington coach and you’re drawing up a plan for how to defeat Tampa Bay. You walk into the team meeting and start playing game film of Tom Brady, strategizing ways to limit his effectiveness in the passing game. 

Your team would be appalled and you’d be laughed out of the room, because you’re missing some crucial information: Tom Brady has retired. Baker Mayfield is the starting quarterback for Tampa Bay. Gronkowski, Brown, and Fournette have also retired. Bruce Arians is no longer the Buccaneers head coach; Todd Bowles is. 

This year’s Buccaneers have the same name as the team from a few years ago, and they still wear red uniforms and play at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, but it’s not the same team. Its component parts (the players and coaches) have changed—and, for the record, this changed team had a different outcome: instead of winning the Super Bowl, they lost to the Commanders in that first-round game, 23–20. 

Here’s how this applies to the labor market: you can’t use information from 2021 to make a plan for 2024. New Lightcast research shows that on average, the skills needed for a given job have changed by 32% from 2021 to 2024. For 25% of jobs, 75% of all skills have changed. 

The job titles have stayed the same, but the component parts have changed—just like a football team’s roster from one year to the next. So if a business were to build a workforce strategy based on only what job titles its employees hold, they would also be missing crucial insight into how different those titles are compared to even a few years ago. The skills that are being taught to a college sophomore might be obsolete by the time they graduate. 

So if we can’t count on skills to stay the same, how can we build a future-ready workforce strategy? When the targets are moving, what should we aim for?

The most important step is to use skills to understand jobs, so that you can understand which parts of a job are changing. This is why Lightcast stands for skills: they’re the basic unit, the building block of the labor market. From the report: 

“This difference in skills despite a shared job title can also be applied over time: if job postings for a “writer” in 2021 required drafting, editing, and grammar skills, but postings in 2025 require prompt engineering and familiarity with generative AI models, it’s clear something has changed—a shift not visible if you only looked at the job title on its own.” 

A skills-first perspective for understanding your workforce lays the foundation for all kinds of analysis to follow—for example, the report gets you started with an occupation-by-occupation scorecard on which occupations are changing most, on a scale of 1 to 100. If your job, or the one you’re hiring or training for, is seeing a high degree of disruption, it might be time to prioritize upskilling and reskilling. Looking at what kinds of skills are gaining the most momentum can indicate where you or your organization should be directing its focus for the future. 

Neither a job nor an organization are static monoliths—both can be broken down until the common denominator is skills. A company’s workforce is made up of individuals, all of whom have a specific skill set, so the workforce can be understood as a collection of available skills. In the same way, an occupation is also a collection of skills; a person gets hired because they have that specific skill set, which is necessary for accomplishing the tasks required. 

Going back to the football comparison, the skills are the individual players that make up a team. In order to get the most out of the team, you need to make the most effective use out of the individuals you have, and you can improve your team by going out and acquiring others. And this Lightcast report—”The Speed of Skill Change,”—it’s your scouting report, with an inside look on which skills are being requested and which jobs are changing most. And it’s out today: