🧩 Jobs, skills, capabilities – how do they fit together? In today’s fast-changing world, static job roles no longer cut it. Skills matter, but without structure, they’re meaningless. 

💡 Ben Satchwell explores why the future of work isn’t about replacing jobs with skills, but blending them with capabilities to create agile organisations 🚀 

Traditional job architectures are broken. They were built for a different era – one where careers were linear, jobs stayed static and the skills required for success didn’t change much over time. That world doesn’t exist any more. Jobs still matter. But they’re not enough. 

The future isn’t about moving from jobs to skills. It’s about layering skills and capabilities on to existing job architectures

In my experience, too many organisations are trying to modernise workforce planning by throwing out job architectures altogether, replacing them with endless lists of skills. It’s a mistake. Skills matter, but without structure, they become meaningless. 

The future isn’t about moving from jobs to skills. It’s about layering skills and capabilities on to existing job architectures, giving organisations the agility they need while still maintaining clarity around roles and career progression. 

Why jobs alone don’t cut it any more 

The problem with traditional job architectures isn’t the concept of jobs – it’s the way they’re managed. They’re rigid. Slow to change. Built around static role descriptions that quickly become outdated. 

Take a look at most job descriptions today. They were probably written years ago, listing responsibilities that may or may not reflect what the role actually involves. They don’t account for emerging technologies, shifting market demands or the fact that career paths are no longer linear. 

HR teams feel the strain. Hiring managers struggle to match candidates to roles. L&D teams roll out training that doesn’t align with what employees actually need to progress. And workforce planning? Often disconnected from reality. This is why skills-based approaches have gained traction. But here’s the catch – skills alone don’t fix the problem. 

The skills-only trap 

There’s been a surge of interest in skills-based hiring and internal mobility. The idea is simple: if we break jobs down into skills, we can create more flexible career pathways and respond faster to business needs. Sounds great in theory. But in practice? It falls short. 

A skills-only approach fragments the way we think about work. Instead of seeing an employee as a professional with a defined role and purpose, we risk reducing them to a collection of competencies. That’s not how organisations function. 

Skills are task-specific. They’re transactional. Someone can have strong data analysis skills, but that doesn’t mean they know how to apply those skills to drive strategic decision-making. That’s where capabilities come in. 

Capabilities: The missing link 

Capabilities bridge the gap between individual skills and business outcomes. They define how skills are applied in context. 

I’ve seen organisations struggle to map skills to job roles because they miss this step. They end up with an endless taxonomy of skills that doesn’t actually help employees navigate career development or HR teams manage workforce planning. Instead, when you introduce capabilities as a structured layer, everything starts to make sense. Here’s how it works. 

Jobs remain the foundation. Skills sit at the granular level, evolving as needed. But capabilities provide the structure – grouping skills into meaningful categories that align with role expectations, performance outcomes and business strategy. 

For example, ‘problem-solving’ is a skill. But ‘critical thinking in high-pressure decision-making’ is a capability that determines whether someone is ready for a leadership role. 

Capabilities bring coherence. They connect skills to roles, roles to career progression, and workforce planning to business goals. 

Making the shift without breaking everything 

Modernising job architectures doesn’t mean tearing everything down and starting from scratch. The best approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary. 

First, define the key capabilities that underpin your business strategy. Then, map skills to those capabilities. Finally, integrate this structure into job roles, career pathways and workforce planning processes. 

Done well, this approach unlocks agility without losing the clarity that job architectures provide. Employees get a clearer sense of what they need to develop. HR gets a framework that actually supports talent mobility. And organisations can finally align hiring, L&D and workforce planning in a way that makes sense. 

The future of work is structured, not fragmented 

The rush towards skills-based models has been well-intentioned. But in my experience, a purely skills-based approach creates more problems than it solves. 

Jobs still matter. They provide the foundation for how work is structured. But they need a dynamic layer of skills and capabilities to stay relevant in an unpredictable world. 

HR leaders who get this balance right will build workforces that are adaptable, high-performing and future-ready. Those who don’t will find themselves constantly playing catch-up, struggling to align talent strategies with business needs. 

The choice is clear. Keep jobs. Modernise them with skills. But don’t forget that capabilities are the key to making it all work. 

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