Roles are transforming, skills are evolving, and organisations must adapt at an ever-accelerating pace. Robotisation, digitalisation, artificial intelligence: the changes underway are profoundly redefining what it means to work. For HR teams and leaders, the challenge is no longer simply managing current skills, but identifying those that will be indispensable tomorrow and preparing employees to acquire them.
Roles in Profound Transformation
85% of 2030's Jobs Don't Yet Exist
One of the most striking illustrations of this transformation comes from cinema. In Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Wilbur Bucket begins the film working as a toothpaste cap maker, placing caps manually onto each tube. A few years later, he has become a repairman for the very automation machines that replaced him. In a single trajectory, this character illustrates what millions of workers are experiencing or will experience: not the end of a job, but a profound transformation of their role within the same organisation.
This evolution is documented and measured. The majority of today's roles did not exist ten years ago. According to projections from research carried out notably by Dell and the Institute for the Future, 85% of 2030's jobs do not yet exist today. This figure speaks to the scale of the changes ahead: organisations are not preparing for marginal evolution, but for a profound reconfiguration of their skills requirements.
When the Jobs of Tomorrow Combine Multiple Disciplines
The new roles that are emerging bear little resemblance to those that preceded them. They frequently combine disciplines that were previously distinct, creating hybrid profiles that traditional training programmes have yet to fully cover.
The psydesigner is one concrete example: combining the skills of a psychologist and an engineer, their work will focus primarily on studying virtual robot assistants in order to make them more human in the way they think and interact. Other emerging roles, such as the change manager or the metaverse designer, illustrate the same logic: functions responding to needs that already exist in some organisations, but for which the required skills are still being defined. For HR teams, the challenge is to understand these developments early enough to support employees before the need becomes urgent.
The HR Challenges Posed by These Transformations
Anticipating Needs Rather Than Reacting to Them
In the face of these changes, the role of human resources is decisive. Preparing employees for potential strategic shifts, anticipating skills needs before they become critical, structuring development pathways that offer genuine visibility: these are the priorities that HR teams and leaders must address.
This anticipation requires a rigorous analysis of the organisation's current demographic situation and its future needs. Internal and external mobility, career changes driven by digitalisation, retirements with no like-for-like replacements: these combined factors place considerable pressure on organisations. Those that prepare with method will be better positioned to navigate these transitions without disruption to their collective performance.
Legitimate Concerns That Must Be Acknowledged
These transformations cannot be managed purely in terms of processes. They directly affect employees in their relationship with their work and their professional future. Explaining to an employee that their current role will change profoundly is a delicate undertaking that requires preparation, clarity and genuine support.
These concerns are understandable, for employees and leaders alike. Seeing new roles and skills emerge, new training programmes appear, and retirements with no immediate equivalent: all signals that call for an organised, anticipatory response rather than a reactive one under pressure.
The Tools for Building Tomorrow's Skills
Workforce Planning and Digital Skills Strategies
Workforce planning (known in France as GPEC, or Gestion Prévisionnelle des Emplois et des Compétences) is one of the most structurally important tools for anticipating changes in the world of work. By cross-referencing the analysis of evolving roles with the organisation's demographic data, it enables a medium-term view of the skills to be developed, acquired or renewed to be built, before the need arises under pressure.
At a European level, the European Commission is developing strategies aimed at improving the digital skills of employees. A priority that aligns with the projections: by 2025, 95% of interactions with consumers will involve artificial intelligence, whether through virtual reality, interactive websites or digital communication platforms.
Digital Skills: A Basic Competency That Isn't Basic for Everyone
These projections take on particular significance in light of another figure: 13 million French people describe themselves as remote from the digital world, rarely or never using the internet and feeling at a loss with digital tools, according to the ANDRH magazine. This gap between expected and actual digital skills represents a very real challenge for organisations.
Making this gap visible, measuring it and building tailored training pathways to close it: this is what HR teams and managers need to integrate into their roadmap. Most of the changes ahead will remain difficult to predict with precision. But organisations that develop their teams' capacity to adapt from today onwards, particularly in digital and transversal skills, will be best placed to navigate these transitions without losing either cohesion or performance.
