HR and L&D teams are standing at an uncomfortable crossroads. The playbooks that worked for decades—hire faster, train harder, manage performance by policy and process—are no longer delivering the results leaders expect. Roles are evolving faster than job descriptions can keep up. Employees are disengaged, overwhelmed, or quietly leaving. And no amount of backfilling or one-off training programs is fixing the deeper problem.

The truth is, hiring alone won’t save us. Traditional people management won’t either. The world of work has fundamentally changed, and the skills required to support it have changed right along with it.

As we look toward 2026, HR and L&D must evolve from reactive support functions into strategic translators—bridging what organizations used to be with what they need to become. That shift doesn’t come from new tech stacks or trend-chasing frameworks. It comes from building a core set of human, digital, and analytical skills that allow teams to navigate constant change with clarity and confidence.

In this post, we’ll break down the six essential skills HR and L&D teams need to thrive in the years ahead—problem-solving, emotional intelligence and empathy, communication and storytelling, digital literacy, AI fluency, and data literacy and analysis—and why mastering them is the key to moving from outdated practices to future-ready people strategies.

Human Skills

Problem Solving

People used to rely on processes, SOPs, documents, and the proverbial rulebook to make decisions at work in the past. Now, work moves faster than documentation can keep up – the rulebook is changing daily. And as AI continues to automate mundane and administrative tasks, the nuanced decisions will be left to the humans. Many organizations are working with fewer people and resources, but the workload hasn’t decreased. Problem solving skills will be a fundamental currency for employees in the coming years. 

We have the opportunity to build problem solving skills for our coworkers every time we create learning experiences. By providing consistent, spaced out opportunities to practice solving real problems, discussing case studies, or trying tiny experiments as a team, we can foster these skills. However, it’s important to realize these skills aren’t built with one-time learning. A 30-minute eLearning on leadership isn’t going to give leaders the skills they need. On the HR side, we can do a much better job of incorporating systems that encourage problem-solving, rather than becoming an obstacle. For example, instead of requiring HR approval to change their emergency contact information in the HRIS system, let employees make those small changes themselves.  

Empathy & Emotional Intelligence

Leaders with empathy inspire loyalty, collaboration, and productivity in their teams. According to an article in Forbes, not only do empathic leaders significantly outperform their peers, but these leaders are better equipped to handle stressful workplace situations and respond to immediate issues. Recent studies have also shown that someone’s manager can have as big an impact on their daily life as their spouse. Ignoring empathy because it’s a “soft skill” is a fast path to disengagement, burnout, and unnecessary turnover. And as tech continues to push us forward at all costs, it’s important to remember the human strengths that can’t be replaced, like the ability to check in and get your team’s pulse on a call or reaching out to an employee who has recently experienced a personal hardship. 

In HR and L&D, we have the unique opportunity to impact the empathy of everyone. We can best do this by first creating moments for employees to practice empathy. We do this every time we send a communication from HR or create a learning experience. In fact, studies have shown that increased cognitive load actually reduces empathy, so we should take extra care to reduce the cognitive load of the projects and courses we create. We can also model empathy and emotional intelligence by checking in authentically and regularly with our fellow employees. 

Communication & Storytelling 

The amount of information humans consume has been increasing every year. We consume so much more daily information than our ancestors – we haven’t shown signs of slowing down. When you’re already inundated with information, it’s hard to know what to prioritize, and it’s easy to become distracted. Many times, in HR and L&D, we don’t make it easy for our coworkers. We say something like “Hey, you need to take this mandatory training,” but we don’t take the time to explain the benefits or risks. We do this when it’s time to show our impact as well. We gloat about how 96% of employees answered 8/10 arbitrary multiple choice questions correctly and wonder why we’re not taken seriously. 

The first step to improving how we communicate with the rest of our organization is to take a lesson from our marketing and internal communications teams! These teams often have brand guides and messaging standards that HR and L&D could benefit from adopting. Aligning with the culture is important, so you don’t want to create your own messaging and branding, but we need to act more excited about the things we’re working on and sharing if we want others to be excited about them too. 

Tech Skills

Digital/Information Literacy

Digital literacy refers to the ability to adapt to new digital tools and to stay up-to-date on the latest tools being used at your workplace and for your industry. Information literacy is the ability to evaluate and verify information for credibility and accuracy. On modern, high-performing teams, we work with tech stacks, not just one tool. Those who have been clinging to one authoring tool to create everything will be left behind. With all the information being hallucinated by AI, we also need the ability to determine what is true and right, otherwise we subject our organizations (and ourselves in many cases) to very real risk. 

It’s our job as L&D to make sure our coworkers understand the tools we use as a company. We need to make sure new hire onboarding sufficiently prepares people to use our tech stacks. We can also lead the way in information literacy by making sure our compliance courses on safety and information technology share lessons on how to determine if data, emails, or other communication are safe and reliable. 

AI Fluency/Literacy

It should come as no surprise that employees need a level of AI fluency and literacy to be successful in 2026. As of the end of 2025, one McKinsey study said that 62% of their survey respondents claimed their organizations were experimenting with AI agents. A Thoughtworks press release in January 2026 shared that 77% of business leaders have shifted their AI strategies from cost savings to growth and innovation. If business leaders will be relying on AI for growth, we can expect to continue to see it more in our day-to-day work. 

HR should be working with internal leaders on AI guardrails and internal company messaging. This messaging should aim to educate, not to instill fear. HR and L&D should lead by example by taking the time to hone those AI literacy skills so that we can help the rest of the organization with use and adoption. We’re not going to be much help if we can just generate an AI doll of ourselves, but we don’t understand how the AI in our LMS works. If possible, the L&D team should also be hosting regular events to keep the company up to date on AI initiatives – the L&D team can provide a unique space where employees can come together to learn from each other. 

Data Literacy/Analytics

Completion and survey data won’t be enough to show impact for HR and L&D teams in 2026. We have access to more information, and therefore more data and metrics, than we ever have in our organizations. For a really long time, L&D has reported metrics to leadership that don’t align with performance or business goals. There’s no excuse to continue this when we have so much information at our disposal. It requires thinking about metrics and data in a different way.

Metrics and data don’t have to be numbers, and they don’t have to exist without other variables. If the Chief Revenue Officer at your organization says in a company meeting that your training helped his team more than he’s seen since he started working there, that’s more valuable than showing that 100% of employees clicked next 162 times in your eLearning. We need to remember to share all the stories of our impact and success and start to build templates and reports to begin collecting the data that supports these stories. 

Moving Forward

As we move deeper into 2026, HR and L&D have a choice: continue doing what we’ve always done and hope it works, or step into a strategic role and be the helper we know we can be. The skills outlined here will be the capabilities that determine whether organizations stay agile and innovative or stagnate. Our job isn’t simply to deliver training or push policies. Our job is to equip people with the confidence, clarity, and adaptability to navigate a workplace that refuses to stand still.