I know what you’re thinking, an executive education provider announcing training alone won’t close your skills gap sounds counterintuitive, but it’s the new reality.
What we’re seeing is organisations asking more of people earlier in their careers. They need to exercise judgement, manage stakeholders, solve ambiguous problems and work across functions, capabilities once expected much later.
Investing in skills is still crucial, but there is another part of capability development that is much easier to overlook: experience.
Recent PwC research found that highly technology-exposed entry-level roles are increasingly demanding traditionally senior capabilities. Roles requiring more than ten new senior-level skills grew 35% between 2019 and 2025, while comparable roles that hadn’t evolved in this way declined by 10%.
Meanwhile, Deloitte has warned that changing patterns of work risk weakening the informal apprenticeship through which people traditionally developed: watching an experienced colleague handle a difficult client, sitting in on a challenging meeting, attempting something unfamiliar and learning why an approach worked – or didn’t.
At IMI, we believe closing tomorrow’s capability gaps requires both, it’s why we have our unique High Impact Transformation model. Learning provides knowledge. Doing turns that knowledge into experience. Reflection helps turn experience into judgement.
That places managers at the centre of development.
The manager of the future cannot simply allocate work and review performance. Increasingly, they need to act as a coach: creating stretch opportunities, bringing people into unfamiliar projects, allowing them to make consequential decisions and, crucially, helping them understand what worked, what didn’t and what they would do differently next time.
This becomes even more important as technology removes some of the routine work through which people historically learned their craft.
The answer isn’t to preserve low-value work. It’s to deliberately replace the developmental experiences that disappear. Formal learning matters. But its value multiplies when people return to an environment where managers create opportunities to apply it.
The question for leaders isn’t simply: what skills do our people need to learn? It’s: where will we give them the opportunity to practise them?
Author: Gary Berney – Head of Marketing & Membership