The $5.5 Trillion Skills Question: Can Your Organization Actually Do What Its Strategy Requires?

I came across an International Data Corporation estimate recently that put the potential economic cost of skills shortages at $5.5 trillion. Once a number gets into the trillions, I stop pretending I can visualize it and assume someone in finance has a spreadsheet with enough tabs to explain it.

International Data Corporation tied that estimate to consequences leaders understand very well: delayed products, quality problems, missed revenue, and lost competitiveness. Read the International Data Corporation research behind the $5.5 trillion estimate.

The number is interesting, but the more useful conversation is underneath it. When an organization says it has a skills gap, what exactly is missing, and how is that gap affecting what the organization is trying to accomplish?

I have started using the RISE framework to work through questions like this. RISE stands for Radiate, Innovate, Serve, and Endure. It gives leaders four practical questions for connecting capability with performance without assuming that every problem requires another course.

Radiate: What are we trying to accomplish?

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63 percent of employers identify skills gaps as a major barrier to business transformation, while employers expect 39 percent of workers’ current skills to change or become outdated by 2030. Read the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report.

Those figures create urgency, but they still leave leaders with the harder organizational question: what are we trying to accomplish that we cannot accomplish consistently today?

Take artificial intelligence. Saying an organization has an “artificial intelligence skills gap” gives us very little to act on. Perhaps employees need to evaluate artificial intelligence generated information more accurately, redesign a workflow, identify risk, make better decisions, shorten a product cycle, or improve customer service. Each of those requires a different capability.

I would rather define the result first and work backward. Once we understand what the business needs to accomplish, we can identify what people must be able to do differently and whether that capability is actually missing.

Innovate: How will people actually get good at it?

Once the needed capability is clear, the next question is how people will become proficient enough to use it in real work. Formal training may contribute, but completion and competence are not the same thing.

Most of us have completed a course, passed the quiz, closed the browser tab, and returned to work exactly the way we were working 45 minutes earlier. Everyone technically completed the requirement, so somewhere a dashboard turned green and declared victory.

Real capability usually develops through some combination of instruction, practice, feedback, repetition, coaching, experience, and opportunities to perform under realistic conditions. If employees need better judgment when working with artificial intelligence, they need opportunities to make decisions, discover where the technology fails, receive feedback, and try again.

That is where development becomes more useful to the organization. We move from asking whether someone attended something to asking whether they can actually perform.

Serve: What around people is helping or getting in the way?

This is where the conversation gets more complicated.

Imagine an organization introduces a new system and reaches a 97 percent training completion rate. Three months later, adoption is poor. The obvious response may be to assign more training, but that assumes lack of knowledge caused the problem.

Employees may understand the process perfectly well while finding that it takes twice as long as the previous one. Managers may continue rewarding the old behavior. The software may not work with another system employees rely on every day. People may lack the authority needed to make the decisions they were trained to make, or workload may simply leave no room for another expectation.

Organizations are excellent at adding priorities. Removing one occasionally appears to require a committee, three approvals, and a six month pilot.

People work inside systems, and those systems shape whether new capability can be used. Sometimes the organization genuinely has a knowledge or proficiency problem. Other times it has a process, technology, staffing, leadership, workload, incentive, authority, or job design problem.

Before prescribing more development, I want to understand which problem we are actually dealing with.

Endure: How will we know anything improved?

There is good research connecting employee development with organizational performance. A 2026 Journal of Management meta analysis examined 159 studies and more than 75,000 observations and found a positive relationship between organizational training and organizational performance, although the relationship was modest and varied by context.

That seems reasonable when we consider how many factors influence business results. If sales increase after a leadership program, the program may have contributed, but pricing may also have changed, marketing could have improved, demand may have increased, staffing might have stabilized, or a competitor may have made a terrible decision at exactly the right time.

Business results tend to have a lot of parents, and all of them want credit at the quarterly review.

I would rather follow the evidence in reasonable steps. Did people improve? Can they demonstrate the capability? Are they using it in their work? Does the organization support the behavior? Is an operational measure changing? If performance improves, what does that improvement mean for productivity, quality, cost, revenue, risk, customer outcomes, or another result the business cares about?

That gives leaders a credible way to talk about value without pretending that every dollar can be traced neatly back to a development program.

Bringing it back to the $5.5 trillion

The International Data Corporation figure gets attention because it places economic language around capability shortages. If organizations cannot do what their strategies require, the consequences can eventually show up in delayed products, poor quality, underused technology, missed opportunities, rework, customer frustration, higher costs, or slower growth.

I still would not walk into a Chief Financial Officer’s office carrying the $5.5 trillion number and use it to justify a larger training budget. I suspect that conversation would end before the coffee cooled. I would rather explain what the organization is trying to accomplish, where performance is falling short, which capability appears to be contributing to that problem, and what evidence we should expect to change if we address it successfully.

That is the value of using RISE in these conversations. Radiate clarifies the result and capability the strategy requires. Innovate forces us to think about how people will practice until they can actually perform. Serve examines whether the environment supports the new behavior. Endure keeps us focused on reinforcement and evidence over time.

Five and a half trillion dollars may give us a reason to pay attention, but the practical work happens much closer to home. Leaders need to understand what their organizations are trying to accomplish, what people need to be able to do differently, what conditions are helping or preventing that performance, and what should improve if the capability gets stronger. Those questions are specific enough to act on, disciplined enough to test, and useful enough to take into a real business conversation.