Stop competing fiercely in new technologies. Actually, these basic abilities will hold their value better in the future.
In an era where technical expertise can become obsolete within just a few years, foundational skills are more important than ever. Abilities such as collaboration, problem-solving, and a solid mathematical foundation are transferable across different jobs and help teams adapt to new challenges. The key to effective human resource management lies in prioritizing these skills both in recruitment and employee development. This will build a resilient, adaptable workforce that can thrive in a constantly changing environment.
As technologies like generative AI reshape the workplace, it's easy to think that pursuing higher technical capabilities will help ensure a long and lucrative career. Following this logic, in a competitive market, companies should look for candidates with specialized knowledge when hiring for entry-level positions. However, our latest research shows that foundational skills such as collaboration, mathematical thinking, and adaptability may be more important for both individuals and companies.
In this new study, we analyzed large-scale data from over 1,000 occupations across industries in the United States between 2005 and 2019, including 70 million job transitions and hundreds of skills. We divided skills into foundational skills (including reading comprehension, basic mathematical ability, and teamwork skills) and more specialized advanced skills (such as blockchain-related capabilities). We examined how people's skills change and develop over time and throughout their careers.
We found that those who score higher in foundational skills are more likely to earn higher salaries, be promoted to higher-level positions, learn specialized skills more quickly, and be more adaptable to industry changes throughout their careers. The possession and development of foundational skills not only give employees an edge in the competition for entry-level positions but also determine how high they can climb on the career ladder.
Foundational Skills Boost Employees' Career Ceilings
To help leaders fully understand the value of these skills, we also studied how they affect employees' long-term performance, adaptability, and career development. Our research found that people with a wide range of solid foundational skills (including reading comprehension, basic mathematics, and communication skills) tend to learn faster over time and can master more complex abilities.
Think about the NBA draft. Teams don't always pick the top scorers from college leagues but look for players with high potential, those with good fundamentals such as speed, agility, ball control, court awareness, and shooting form. These players may not stand out at first, but they often grow into stars because their fundamentals provide room for development.
The same principle applies to the workplace. For example, Jane Street Capital is known for hiring people with strong quantitative analysis skills. It's not because these people already know how to trade financial derivatives but because they have the basic mathematical skills to learn quickly and achieve long-term development.
Of course, not all organizations bet on potential. For instance, startups may prefer to hire candidates with ready-made specialized knowledge because they need people who can contribute immediately. In other cases, companies in low-trust or high-turnover environments often don't value foundational skills as they don't expect employees to stay long.
However, for companies with a long-term vision, foundational skills are crucial. They shape a person's growth path and long-term career ceiling. Moreover, there are other reasons for companies to value foundational skills beyond individual employee performance.
These Skills Provide Flexibility in a Rapidly Changing World
Our research found that employees with a wide range of foundational skills are more adaptable to industry changes. Given that specialized skills are experiencing rapid rise and fall at an unprecedented pace, this adaptability is particularly crucial today.
For example, Adobe Flash was once the gold standard for interactive web content, creating a generation of developers. But when Flash stopped being updated and browsers phased it out, only those developers who could switch to HTML5 and JavaScript remained in demand. Recently, niche technical skills like Hadoop engineering and blockchain development have also experienced significant fluctuations. HackerRank's "2025 Developer Skills Report" listed Hadoop as one of the fastest-declining skills. LinkedIn data shows that as investment and focus shifted to AI, job postings and developer activity related to blockchain dropped by more than 40% in just one year.
This rapid cycle is no longer rare today. Researchers estimate that the "half-life" of technical skills (the time it takes for half of the knowledge you've mastered to become obsolete) has shortened from about 10 years in the 1980s to 4 years today and may soon be less than 2 years.
Specialized skills may rise and fall quickly, but our research results show that those who can stay on top of each wave have the same skill set: strong problem-solving abilities, clear communication styles, and good teamwork skills. These core strengths help employees relearn faster, enable companies to redeploy talent without starting from scratch, and ultimately stabilize employees' job performance when new technologies arrive. In a constantly changing world, companies should pay more attention to employees' foundational skills because it's these skills that make long-term adaptation possible.
Foundational Skills Unite Talent
Our research also found that a specific subset of foundational skills - social skills - is particularly helpful for employees to achieve the highest level of career success. Today's work is made up of many intertwined parts: cross-functional projects, remote teams, and tools that are updated quarterly. The more moving parts a company has, the more it depends on people who can coordinate goals, share knowledge, and reduce friction.
Previous research has revealed why social skills are particularly important today. A landmark study of US employment by David Deming showed that between 1980 and 2012, jobs that required high levels of social interaction increased by nearly 12 percentage points, while jobs with high mathematical requirements but less interaction decreased. Wages followed the same pattern: according to his research, jobs that combined cognitive abilities and social skills had the highest pay premium.
This trend is even more evident in the management field. One of us recently published a paper that conducted a large-scale analysis of 34 million US management job postings, millions of resumes, and employee evaluations. The results showed that since 2007, the proportion of job postings emphasizing collaboration, coaching, and influence has tripled, while the use of traditional supervision-related terms has declined steadily.
Specific examples can illustrate the reason. Amazon's "2025 Skills Up Program" has invested over $1 billion to help hundreds of thousands of employees develop new abilities, from technical training to projects to strengthen language skills, highlighting that soft skills are as crucial as technical knowledge for career development. Spotify's "squad" model also rewards engineers who can connect design, product, and marketing in autonomous cross-functional teams. Google also reached the same conclusion in its "Project Oxygen" research: after analyzing thousands of performance evaluations, they found that the best managers excelled in cross-team coaching, communication, and collaboration, and now use these soft skill behaviors as core promotion criteria. No company can afford to have talent working in isolation; they need people who can connect different parties.
In short, as the complexity of technology increases, the glue that keeps talent working efficiently is social skills, including communication, empathy, conflict resolution, and the ability to coordinate different areas of expertise. But our research shows that in addition to social skills, other basic abilities, such as critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and reasoning skills, are also key components of a vibrant collective work environment in modern enterprises. Together, they provide a shared platform that can unleash the full value of individual expertise, enabling individuals to adjust their specialized skills as technology and the market change, and the demand for these abilities is increasing.
Putting It into Practice: What Leaders Can Do
1. Recruit the Right Candidates: Even when hiring for specialized positions, screen for candidates with foundational strengths such as problem-solving, adaptability, and communication. These qualities are often more difficult to assess, and unstructured behavioral interview questions have limited predictive value. However, companies should not ignore them. Ask targeted questions to understand how candidates learn, collaborate, and deal with uncertainty, even if these skills are not easily quantifiable. Our research found that in the long run, candidates with foundational skills are more valuable than those with highly specialized knowledge but lacking soft skills.
2. Develop Employees: Invest in early career development to strengthen communication, collaboration, and learning agility, not just technical proficiency. Foundational skills are difficult to develop later in life. For example, it's hard for someone with poor math skills to become proficient through just a few online tutorials. The same goes for social skills like critical thinking and empathy; they require years of school education, peer interaction, and mentorship to develop. To build a workforce that can adapt to future changes, companies and society as a whole need to support the development of foundational skills from the start.
3. Lead Teams: Managers can play a key role in demonstrating and reinforcing foundational skills in daily work. This includes recognizing and rewarding behaviors such as thoughtful communication, collaborative problem-solving, and cross-functional learning, and providing young employees with opportunities to strengthen these skills. Tools like peer feedback, mentorship, and team reviews can be designed to emphasize the importance of developing soft skills, thus integrating the development of these skills into the team culture.
In an era where technical expertise can become obsolete within just a few years, foundational skills are more important than ever. Abilities such as collaboration, problem-solving, and a solid mathematical foundation are transferable across different jobs and help teams adapt to new challenges. The key to effective human resource management lies in prioritizing these skills both in recruitment and employee development. This will build a resilient, adaptable workforce that can thrive in a constantly changing environment.
Keywords: #Talent Management
Moh Hosseinioun, Frank Neffke, Hyejin Youn, Letian (LT) Zhang | By
Moh Hosseinioun is a postdoctoral researcher in the fields of management and organization at the Kellogg School of Management. He uses computational methods to transform large-scale data into actionable insights, guiding leaders in planning their personnel and technology architectures and helping individuals find their direction in a changing career path, especially in the current era of artificial intelligence. Frank Neffke leads the "Urban Science" and "Transformative Economy" research projects at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Before that, he was the research director at the Harvard Growth Lab. Hyejin Youn is an associate professor at Seoul National University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Before that, she was an associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Her research explores how complexity and scale shape innovation, organizational, and social systems. Letian (LT) Zhang is an associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Before that, he was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
Qiang Zhou | Edited
This article is from the WeChat official account “Harvard Business Review” (ID: hbrchinese). Author: HBR-China. Republished by 36Kr with permission.