Your Company Is a Campus: Why Buying Talent Is Out and Building Capability Is In

Two powerful trends are simultaneously buffeting corporate hiring and talent development. The first has been emerging steadily for years: People are living and working longer, leading to careers that span 60 years or more. The second is more recent but has dominated conversations in every corner of business: AI is transforming job roles and workflows at unprecedented rates.

Both trends require workers to retool their skills continuously. In the case of longer work spans, workers must reskill for multiple pivots over the course of their careers. And in response to AI, companies need workers equipped with the capabilities to use the newest, most critical technologies.

Fortunately for chief human resource officers (CHROs) and other corporate talent leaders, there is a pathway to address both trends with a single solution: treat your company as a campus. Organizations that invest in reskilling and upskilling their existing workforces can unlock a tremendous competitive advantage by developing in-house talent to have needed capabilities continuously over a longer period of time.

For decades, organizations essentially bought talent from outside. Colleges delivered talent with necessary capabilities, and then they worked until they retired. But in an era where AI is rewriting job descriptions every six months and careers are stretching many decades, the “buy talent” model is broken. To succeed today, organizations are pivoting to become builders of capability.

Consider that Fortune 500 companies employ roughly 31 million people — about twice as many currently enrolled in high school and twice as many currently enrolled in undergraduate programs. Organizations have grown skeptical that traditional education talent development pipelines can adapt quickly enough to deliver workers with necessary capabilities. However, this pool of employees represents a massive-scale opportunity to meet their talent needs.

A new study from the Learning Society, the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and Stanford University’s Center on Longevity finds that a new social contract is emerging to capture the opportunity. Shared responsibility between workers and employers for skill development is replacing the old model in which workers alone bore the burden of investing in college degrees.

How America’s Leading Employers Are Reshaping Talent Development in the Age of AI

In the study — The Future Is Now: America’s Human Resources and Talent Leads on AI and Learning at Work — the report authors asked 15 talent development leaders at corporations such as Walmart, Accenture and IBM questions on four topics:

- How is AI transforming roles and workflows?  

- How do organizations build employee skills that match emerging tech demands? 

- How do organizations support development over lengthening careers?

- What do novel talent development partnerships between business and higher ed look like?

The leaders’ responses led to four key takeaways, all of which support the foundational conclusion that the era of buying talent is being replaced by an imperative to build capabilities.

1. The AI Inflection: AI technologies are transforming demand for human capabilities and reshaping work as much as they are replacing tasks.

2. The Capability Imperative: Traditional talent pipelines are not adapting quickly enough, and employers are growing skeptical of college degrees as proxies for worker capability. In response, workplaces are developing differentiated ways to understand people’s skills, adaptability and potential. They’re also increasingly becoming innovative sites of talent development.

3. Capitalizing on Longer Careers: Continual investment in workers across lengthening lifespans is becoming more common. As lives lengthen, economic resilience matters more — for individuals and for the companies that depend on adaptive, capable workers.

4. The ROI of a Build Mindset: Organizations aren’t replacing higher education. They are instead shifting to view traditional college degrees as a measure of aptitude, then partnering with higher ed providers to integrate new forms of learning into their daily operations. These collaborative partnerships lead to higher worker retention, faster technology adoption and more resilient leadership pipelines.

An Opportunity for Competitive Advantage

While some companies have leapt ahead of the curve creating alternative talent development pipelines to build worker capabilities, many are still stuck in the talent-buying past.

That is a mistake.

Companies that don’t adapt will continue to struggle filling roles that require mastery of cutting-edge technology. They will suffer from a high cost of turnover as employees seek work at organizations willing to invest in their development. They won’t be able to capture the value of emerging technologies like AI due to talent and capability deficits.

Traditional buy-model organizations will become brittle and talent-starved while learning-based, build-model organizations become more agile and talent-rich.

But even the largest corporations don’t have the talent development resources to turn into a learning organization on their own. Talent leaders can tap the strengths of higher ed to build strategic partnerships that create transformational learning experiences for employees.

Making the shift from buy to build is a CEO-level priority, and it’s already happening at leading organizations. The question for leaders at the start of the journey is: How long can they afford to wait before they invest in the future of talent?

The Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning conducts high-level talent development research and provides a strategic bridge to practical implementation of research-based talent models. Darden Executive Education & Lifelong Learning works with organizations to provide personalized, transformational learning experiences that meet development needs at every career stage.