The three skill types worth training for

You're clearly on the right path thinking about planning for career paths, role changes, and training based on reading our most recent post in the series. However, most SMB training budgets are spent on whatever the vendor offered or the manager requested. The McKinsey research gives a more useful way to sort the spend. It groups the skills that help workers move, move up, and keep adapting into three types:

• Essential
• Enabling
• Empowering
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Essential skills are the ones that make an employee portable inside your company. Someone with strong problem solving and communication can move from support to account management to operations. They are also the skills a manager can see and coach on the job.

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Enabling skills are where wages rise. They support moves into coordination, business operations, and project leadership. In the report's examples, the office assistant who becomes a project manager is building exactly these. For an SMB, enabling skills are the bridge between an individual contributor and a team lead, and many companies skip it and then wonder why promoted people struggle.

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Empowering skills are the newest category and the fastest moving. The report says demand for AI fluency has increased 11 times since 2022, demand for adaptability has increased fivefold, and demand for resilience, curiosity, and willingness to learn has tripled. Growing occupations also ask for more of everything, averaging 68 skills compared with 47 for declining ones.

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Here is how to use the framework. Pull last year's training spend and sort every line into one of the three types, or into a fourth bucket called technical and job specific. If most of the money sits in the fourth bucket, that is reasonable, since people need to do their jobs, but it leaves little for the three skill types that determine whether someone can move.

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Then choose one action per type for the next quarter.

1.     Essential: add a structured skill to team meetings, such as a rotating owner for a customer problem and a short debrief.

2.    Enabling: give each high-potential employee a scoped decision to own, with a budget and a review date.

3.    Empowering: run a hands-on AI session using your own work and ask each person to bring one task they would like to speed up.

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On empowering skills, treat curiosity and willingness to learn as things you can set up conditions for. People learn when they have time, a safe place to be bad at something at first, and a manager who asks what they tried.