Reskilling Has Never Been Such an Asset for Growth

If you have been following the business press over the past 6 months, you may have already seen the IKEA story. It has been picked up across HR publications, featured in Harvard Business Review and keeps resurfacing because it stands out from the generalised fear of job loss in our AI-adaptive world.  

If you haven’t heard, this is what IKEA did. When AI began handling close to half of their customer enquiries, the company retrained around 8,500 call centre staff as remote interior design advisers rather than reducing headcount. And it monumentally paid off, the new service generated around 1.3 billion euros. 

At a time when much of the business world was absorbed with what AI might eliminate, IKEA asked a different question entirely: what have we regained and where could we invest this? 

IKEA recognised the important competencies and skills it already owned. Those 8,500 people were carrying something irreplaceable: years of product knowledge, deep fluency in the company’s culture and values and customer relationship know-how built through thousands of conversations. They also had the ability to build trust quickly with someone who has a problem to solve. These capabilities were developed in their previous role and did not disappear when the role was no longer needed.  

IKEA chose to see those employees as a foundation to further grow out. They became an opportunity, and that decision changed IKEA’s commercial outcome entirely. 

The asset that keeps compounding 

The knowledge and cultural understanding a long-tenured employee carries is among the most valuable things a business holds. Research from Deloitte finds that an external hire takes around two years to reach the level of institutional insight an internal employee already starts with. A separate analysis puts the fully loaded cost of an external hire at between 1.5 and 2.5 times the annual salary of the role being filled. And LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report found that organisations with strong internal mobility retain employees nearly twice as long as those without it. 

These findings point to a clear opportunity for any business. The person who knows your products, your culture, your customers and how your organisation works is an asset that has been compounding in value for years. Reskilling is not a consolation when a role changes, it is a high-return investment in something that took years to build and cannot be purchased at speed from the outside. On top of that, changing and adapting their roles makes people want to stay longer. 

Sometimes the best question to ask is not “what skills do we need to hire in?” it is “what do we already have, and where could it be of even greater value?” 

Psychometrics at scale: seeing what a title alone doesn’t show you 

Answering the question “what do we already have, and where could it be of even greater value?” 

confidently and across an entire workforce requires the right diagnostic. Job titles show what someone has been doing. They reveal little about practical preference inclinations and what specifics a enjoys doing and puts energy towards. 

This is where psychometric tools become particularly powerful. The Team Management Profile works through two connected models that together give a complete picture of both the work needed and the people doing it. 

The first maps the types of work that every team needs to have covered, regardless of industry or size: Advising, Innovating, Promoting, Developing, Organising, Producing, Inspecting and Maintaining plus Linking. These Types of Work describe the full range of activities required for any team to function, grow and deliver. Every business needs all covered. The balance changes by context but the need for all nine does not. 

The second model maps each person’s natural work preferences against those types, showing which they gravitate toward with enthusiasm and which they approach with more effort. This is not about what someone can do under pressure; most of us can stretch when required to, especially as we build experience. Rather, the model is about highlighting where people unconsciously want to put their energy and where their best work will consistently emerge. In contrast, other types of work might not come to their mind as readily. 

Together, these two models give leaders powerful workforce planning insights. They show what the workplace needs, and who in the organisation would enjoy being part of it and give it the best go, all of it based on evidence, not assumption. 

The person doing the job shapes the job 

Research from Professor Amy Wrzesniewski and her team at Yale, found that people naturally shape their work over time to better suit how they think and what gives them meaning. This process, which they named job crafting, consistently produces measurable improvements in engagement, performance and resilience. A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology found that employees who actively craft their roles report significantly higher work engagement and are more likely to stay in their organisations. A companion finding is that people who craft toward their natural strengths report greater wellbeing and stronger sustained performance. 

When work aligns with how a person prefers to operate, performance lifts and retention improves. When organisations can identify those alignments systematically across an entire workforce, the benefits scale accordingly. 

Seeing it in action: the IKEA model through a TMP lens 

To understand how this works in practice, it helps to walk through what the TMP could have shown IKEA as it considered its reskilling options and the most appropriate roles within that new Interior design department. 

Customer-facing roles attract and develop people who are energised by interaction and relationship. On the TMP’s work preference scale, a call centre team would probably show a skew toward the extroverted end: people who gain energy from direct engagement, who are drawn to conversation and who find satisfaction speaking out to reach solutions.  

Now consider the types of work a remote interior design adviser needs. Deep product Advising, Creative Innovating around tailored solutions, enthusiastic Promoting of ideas and possibilities and Developing detailed plans that match a brief to a result. The people-facing preferences transfer directly. The product knowledge is already embedded. What IKEA added was a new and better container for capabilities the workforce had been building all along. 

This can be drilled down to a more granular level: 

While those are the overall tasks that interior designer advisers are expected to do, you can imagine that any given person loves only one of those activities, likes 2 more quite a bit, but probably needs to put more effort into finalising the others. All rounders do exist but are rarer.  

The advantage of breaking down roles in such a way is that you can create a few specific sub-roles in charge of a specific Type of Work. The people who prefer Inspecting work can be pulled together into a dedicated quality standard and client satisfaction audit function. But a preference doesn’t necessarily need a change in title and can indicate instead who should take ownership of a type of work without it becoming their main focus. Someone who prefers Organising might run the weekly scheduling meeting that keeps the team’s consultations and workloads on track, while someone who prefers Maintaining takes on a monthly review of compliance standards and employee feedback. Neither task asks them to become a specialist in that area, but support specific team pods, giving that type of work a reliable owner who will enjoy doing the task. 

Reskilling and reimagining roles in an AI-rich world 

The World Economic Forum estimates that 59% of the global workforce will need reskilling by 2030. The organisations that move ahead of that curve are the ones investing now in understanding what their people can bring, not just what they have been doing. An accurate, evidence-based picture of your workforce’s natural capabilities means that when roles shift, you are not starting from scratch. You know where the Advising strength sits, who is energised by Innovating and where the Promoting and Developing capacity lives across your teams.  

That intelligence, built systematically through a consistent diagnostic, turns workforce change from a challenge to navigate into an opportunity to build from. IKEA did not go looking for interior design advisers. They went looking at the skillset they already had. The ground capacity was there and offered a perfect scaffold for building new knowledge which increased their revenue channel. 

What IKEA’s experience points to is that the people already inside a business often carry tremendous value : years of product knowledge, cultural fluency and customer trust take a long time to build and are hard to replace quickly from outside, which is part of why reskilling can be such a strong investment when a role changes rather than a compromise to manage. Seen this way, an existing workforce isn’t just a starting point to work around, it’s often the strongest asset a business already has. 

Getting that shift right across thousands of people is a lot easier with a reliable diagnostic tool. Research on job crafting suggests people tend to stay more engaged and remain in businesses longer when they get those opportunities, which is ultimately what any reskilling strategy is trying to achieve in the first place. 

Curious about using our tools for reskilling or job crafting in your organisation? 

The Team Management Profile gives leaders and practitioners an evidence-based picture of team’s work preferences. Get in touch with us to explore how it could support your organisation. 

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References 

• Deloitte, “Onboarding New Employees: Maximising Success” (SHRM Foundation). 
• LinkedIn Learning, Workplace Learning Report. 
• Wrzesniewski, A., Berg, J.M. and Dutton, J.E. (2010), “Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want,” Harvard Business Review. 
• Tims, M., Bakker, A.B. and Derks, D. (2012), “Development and validation of the job crafting scale,” Journal of Vocational Behavior. 
• World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025.