Even by the standard set over the past five years, 2025 is likely to bring many more disruptions with significant implications for the future of work.

Executives today face a volatile business environment, including sustained talent shortages, rapid technological advancements, and intense change fatigue in the workforce. This is all happening while stakeholders push leaders to cut expenditures while pursuing faster growth.

Gartner research has identified three key challenges executives must tackle in 2025:

• New demands for a future-ready workforce
• The evolving roles of managers
• Emerging talent risks to the organization

Leaders must understand how these forces will shape their organizations, as well as what actions they need to take to remain competitive, attract and retain top talent, and achieve desired business outcomes. Within these three challenges, Gartner has nine predictions for HR leaders in 2025.

New Demands for a Future-Ready Workforce

1. As retirements surge and tech disruption continues, organizations will suffer from a loss of expertise.

In the world’s largest economies, a larger proportion of the workforce will reach retirement age in 2025 than in any previous year on record, draining organizations of their most experienced employees at an accelerated rate.

At the same time, technology has upended the relationship between expert and novice employees across industries. AI has absorbed many of the functions previously provided by interns and support teams, leaving junior employees without the opportunities they need to learn and build expertise. Organizational leaders are beginning to wonder how they will develop future experts when the tasks used to develop novice employees are now being performed by AI.

Exacerbating this expertise drain is a concern shared by both senior and junior employees about a lack of hands-on training. A May 2024 Gartner survey of 3,375 employees found that six in 10 said they aren’t getting the on-the-job coaching they need to support their core job skills.

To address this urgent threat, organizations will need to build their collective intelligence, using technology to ensure that knowledge can easily flow between experts who have skills and novice employees who need skills.

Some organizations have established dedicated knowledge management teams that scrape information directly from experts’ workflows — such as posts in Teams channels, product demos, emails sent providing clarifying answers to questions and Q&A sessions — to identify approaches and actions taken by their in-house experts. They then convert these findings into microlearnings, such as brief videos, articles or activities that teach a single task or activity, that other employees can leverage in their own work. Another approach used by leading companies is to employ workforce management tools that tell supervisors how well employees are performing different tasks and suggest microlearnings that they can push to employees who need more support.

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