New book · 2026
The Death of Skills
What AI reveals about your talent, and what your skills are hiding from you.
Why I wrote it
For much of my career I have worked with HR systems that describe people through jobs, competencies and skills. Those models have been useful, and I have built plenty of them. AI is making me question where their limits are.
A skill tells us something important about what a person can do today. It tells us much less about how quickly that person can learn, how far they can move, or what they may be capable of next.
The Death of Skills grew from that question.
How it connects to my career
My interest in this comes from several sides of my work. I have implemented HR systems, led Talent and then an HR department, worked on transformation programmes across more than 50 entities in 22 countries, and taught HR professionals. Each of those roles looks at people through a slightly different lens.
From the systems side, a skill is a field with a definition and an owner. From the HR side, it is a judgement about a person. From a multi-country programme, it is a vocabulary several organisations have to agree on, and then keep agreeing on as the work changes. Seeing the same object from those angles is what made me want to write the book rather than another article.
What the book explores
The question it works through is simple to ask and harder to answer: if current skills are becoming a weaker guide to what people can do next, what should an organisation look at instead?
It examines what happens to hiring, development, internal mobility and reward when the half-life of what someone knows keeps getting shorter. It is written for practitioners rather than for researchers.
The five frameworks
The book develops five frameworks to make the discussion more practical.
Potential Stack
A way of reading a person in layers, with demonstrated skills on top and learning capability underneath.
Time-to-Skill
The question behind it: how long would it actually take us to build the capability we need?
Fortress, Front Line, Laboratory
Three different ways of meeting AI, applied deliberately to different parts of an organisation.
Trajectory Radar
In the book I use this one to look at direction rather than position: where is this person or team heading?
Pay-for-Agility
What should we reward when roles and skills are changing faster than job descriptions?
Who it is for
CHROs and HR leaders
People responsible for a talent model that has to keep working as the jobs it describes change.
Executive teams
CEOs, COOs and CIOs who want workforce decisions to stand up to the same questions as any other investment.
Academics and students
HR Master's programmes and business schools working on skills, AI and the future of work.
The book website
Publication details, availability and updates are on the official site.
My career is described in About, and the way I work in the Logician-Engineer Method.
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I am open to selected executive opportunities, strategic assignments, speaking and academic collaborations across EMEA. If any of that fits, write to me.
- Executive and leadership opportunities
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- Teaching and academic collaboration