Maximizing Your Adaptability
Thriving in Change and Seizing New Opportunities
Like most tech leaders, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reskilling and upskilling for AI adoption.
And for good reason: employers expect 39% of the global workforce core skills to change in just five years, with the need for AI and big data growing the fastest (per 88% of those surveyed).
94% of US firms expect AI and data processing to transform operations within the next five years and 67% of US workers will need training by 2030, which is also well above the global average. (This from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.)
Ethan Mollick, AI scholar and professor at The Wharton School, recently described the challenge for AI trainers and schools on LinkedIn:
“I think caution is warranted when teaching prompting approaches for individual use or if training is trying to define clear lines about tasks where AI is bad/good. Those areas are changing very rapidly… we need to start to think about how to teach people to use AI in a world that is changing quite rapidly. Focusing on exploration and use, rather than a set of defined rules, might work better.”
In other words, people badly need AI training, but the very things we were teaching—and even the model rankings were using just six months ago—are already outdated.
This is the point of today’s article. Change is here and it’s not leaving. The question is only how we live with it, but how do we lead with it, grow, and embrace it, to thrive in this fast-moving world.
The Growing Importance of Adaptability at Work
67% of global employers surveyed in the WEF report identified “resilience, flexibility and agility” as a core skill in their workforce (second only to analytical thinking).
This is adaptability. Being able to adapt in the workplace goes past being open minded or just flexing to accommodate change that you’re being exposed to.
It means anticipating widespread change, preparing for it and doing more than just surviving. It means learning to thrive with it.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently told comedian Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that within the next decade, he believes humans won’t be needed “for most things in the world.” Gates anticipates what he calls “free intelligence” becoming widely available, democratizing expertise.
To his mind, there’s no “upper bound” on what we’re seeing as far as AI’s possibilities.
Now perhaps this is optimistic, but regardless, AI as a technology is reshaping the workplace, and if Gates is only half right, adaptability, our ability to anticipate, adjust, and succeed with change, will only become more essential than ever before.
This of course extends beyond AI—there’s also bioengineering, IoT, robotic automation, and surging cybercrime, not to mention shifting regulations, tariffs, geopolitical tensions, evolving workforce demographics, and the rapidly changing expectations of both employees and customers alike.
Sound exhausting? Alongside adaptability comes resilience, and future-proofing your career may well mean mastering both.
It’s not surprising that employees with both adaptability and resilience exhibit far higher levels of innovative behavior (a recent McKinsey report pegs the correlation as 3.8 times as likely).
Yet despite all this, and the WEF’s ranking of adaptability as the second most needed skill by employers, among employees themselves it is ranked far lower.
Only 26% of 10,000 global employees surveyed considered it a skill of importance.
Flexibility vs Rigidity in Career Growth
This disconnect is one reason why workers today are feeling increased anxiety about the changes that are gripping the workplace.
From the same McKinsey research, of 30,000 global employees surveyed, less than one quarter (23%) said they feel confident handling unexpected events and being positive about unpredictability.
I think this points to the challenge for companies today: how do you actually prepare your workforce, as well as yourself?
Not many organizations or institutions currently train for adaptability. And how many workers are out there taking adaptability bootcamps?
(McKinsey’s survey finds 16% of all organizations queried actually acknowledge the role of continuous learning in career success, investing in adaptability and ongoing learning programs.)
With more than 27 years in the tech recruiting and consulting field at PTP, I’ve seen how rigidity can hamper recruitment, retention, and talent growth. Without a culture of adaptability, even the strongest companies become complacent, losing their best talent to those competitors who are more dynamic and responsive.
Building Workplace Adaptability Strategies
Okay, fine. So let’s be realistic here: how do we improve our capacity to adapt?
For all of us, it begins with understanding that we live in a world where skills are shifting fast. If Bill Gates is right, and AI will soon be enabling access to skills that once were locked behind expensive degrees and time-consuming certifications, this means being willing to experiment and explore, verify and start again.
It also means improving our own awareness on how we adapt now. How well do we consider problems from varying viewpoints? Communication with others is of course essential to this understanding, and a key means of expanding our own approach. If gripped by anxiety or discomfort at the prospect, we can learn to step out of it momentarily, consider the sources of negativity, and focus on separating what we can and cannot control.
I’ve written before how AI can assist in this area, and though it may sound like a trivial thought exercise, I highly encourage you to give it a chance.
Restate the challenge in a short paragraph, and, once it's suitably de-identified of course, query your favorite chatbot about the problem, your concerns and means of facing it, and solicit varying viewpoints.
For challenges, consider the dangers or risks as well as the opportunities that may come from them. You can ask yourself, or once again AI, for best ways to deal with each of those possibilities.
For leaders, a more systematic approach is to embrace strategic optionality in business. This is more than a corporate buzzword, it’s a practical approach to institutional adaptability.
A recent piece in the Harvard Business Review from March (Navigating the Economy Amid Deliberate Policy Uncertainty by Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Paul Swartz, and Martin Reeves) considers this strategic optionality in light of current economic uncertainties.
This means making a physical investment in preparation (documenting alternate sourcing for supply chains, increasing inventory stockpiles, maintaining as much of a financial buffer as possible), but it also means being proactive with your approach to planning and behavior overall.
Their advice includes:
Clarifying uncertainty, as a rise uncertainty overall doesn’t also mean a rise in the likelihood of negative results.
Being reasonable about the worst case. What would it actually take for negative outcomes, and disruptions of a scale that can crack foundations, to come about realistically?
Instead of bunkering, navigate turbulence. The change may be short-term or longer-term, prognostications aren’t sciences but judgement calls.
Embrace optionality. In an uncertain world, some things may be worth prices they once weren’t.
Rather than the traditional approach of creating plans and sticking to them, optionality means monitoring the changing landscape and being committed to adapting on the fly. This of course requires bravery but also realism.
In this way, data-driven decisions become more crucial than ever. It’s impossible to be proactive without being able to see the landscape clearly.
In software development, the Agile methodology came about to embrace this very approach, breaking out of rigid, slow-moving waterfall approaches that could get mired in creeping requirements and delays.
And while the approach is better suited to iterative projects like web-development than more costly systems where there is only one shot to be right, many lessons can be drawn from this for leadership as a whole.
By developing an agile mindset for work, businesses can foreground communication, institute regular progress check-ins, work in manageable (even cross-functional) teams, and in general pivot faster and adjust better to change.
Conclusion: Building Resilience in a Changing Workforce and World
I know this all sounds wonderful in concept: prioritize the ability to adapt at both the personal and organizational levels. No problem.
In practice, it can be far more challenging, especially at organizations of scale with deep-rooted policies and firmly entrenched hierarchies.
Nevertheless, it’s never been more important to understand how we’re facing change at every level. This begins within each of us.
Adaptability, and the resilience that comes along with it, may well be the difference between persevering or becoming rapidly irrelevant.