🔄 Only 35% of companies are upskilling their own talent

Hey HR Pros!

For years, the instinct when AI skills were needed was to search externally: post the job, compete on compensation, and hope the right candidate exists somewhere in the market.

Now, the external pipeline for AI talent has grown more competitive, more expensive, and more constrained by visa policy all at once.

Now companies are making a deliberate bet on the workforce companies already have. Leaders are finally realizing the way to address this challenge is to rather look at this internally rather than by chasing talent in a tighter and tighter market.

COMING UP

• 🏗️ 83% of HR professionals say their company's success now depends more on upskilling existing employees than hiring externally for AI skills

• 🤖 Gen Z scores 18% below average in Critical Thinking and 17% below average in Attention to Detail, the two skills AI-era roles depend on humans for most

• 🗓️ Employees who spent 2+ hours on open enrollment had a 62% regret rate, nearly 3x higher than those who spent under 10 minutes

• 💬 50% of US Gen Z employees often go entire workdays without speaking to a single colleague

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🏗️ 83% of HR Leaders Say Upskilling Existing Employees Is Finally Taking Priority

Companies that relied on external hiring to fill tech gaps are running into walls, and the strategies that worked three years ago are no longer viable at the same cost or pace.

HR leaders are shifting toward building capability from within, and the data from General Assembly's 2026 State of Tech Talent report shows that shift is accelerating faster than most expected.

4 Stats Behind the Shift to Internal AI Talent

• 📈 35% of companies are now most likely to train existing employees when tech skills are needed, up from 28% in 2024. In the UK, this preference jumped from 30% to 43% in a single year, the steepest year-over-year increase in the data.

• 🔍 96% of HR professionals found it at least a bit difficult to fill tech roles this year, with nearly half citing data analytics and data science as the hardest positions to fill. Scarcity at that level is structural, which is why building from within is gaining ground over waiting for the market to supply talent.

• ⏱️ 47% of companies say not having enough time limits training investment, while 43% struggle to measure whether training is adding value at all. Without a clear proof of ROI, programs stall before they scale, keeping AI adoption fragmented across the organization.

• 👤 50% of HR professionals fear the recruiter role will be completely obsolete within five years. That concern is higher at smaller companies (57%) than at larger ones (41%), meaning the organizations with the least runway to adapt are also the most worried about displacement.

Read more: General Assembly State of Tech Talent 2026

🤖 Gen Z Scores 18% Below Average in Critical Thinking

The assumption that Gen Z workers, having grown up surrounded by technology, would naturally be equipped for AI-augmented roles is now being tested by actual competency data.

Cangrade mapped 71,747 Gen Z and Millennial assessments against AI job postings and found a clear pattern: younger workers score well on skills AI already handles, and fall short on the ones it can't.

Gen Z's AI-Era Scorecard, Broken Down

• 📣 Gen Z and Millennial workers score 14% above average in Communication, ranking 8th out of 40 measured competencies. This is a genuine strength for AI-augmented work, where translating outputs for stakeholders and prompting models effectively have become core job tasks.

• ⚠️ Attention to Detail scores 17% below average, ranking 36th out of 40 competencies. LLMs generate plausible-sounding errors with no indication anything is wrong. A workforce that doesn't catch them introduces compounding risk across every AI-assisted workflow.

• 🧩 Creative Problem Solving scores 10% below average, ranking 29th out of 40. As AI handles pattern-based solution finding, the human contribution shifts to novel and ambiguous problems that fall outside what a model's training data can address.

• 🎯 83% of AI job postings analyzed required at least three of the five key soft skills identified in the study. Organizations cannot screen for one skill and assume the others are present: the job market treats these as a bundle, not a checklist.

Read more: https://www.cangrade.com/research/gen-z-ai-readiness-2026/

[New Webinar] Why Employees Quit After the First Month (...and How to Set Your Team Up for Success)

In this webinar, we’ll break down the factors that drive early turnover and explore how HR, payroll, and operations teams can work together to create a smoother first-week experience.

From onboarding and communication to payroll accuracy and manager preparedness, we’ll discuss practical ways to improve retention before employees start looking for the exit.

🗓️ Open Enrollment Regret Hits 62% Among Employees Who Spend the Most Time on It

Open enrollment is one of the highest-stakes decisions employees make each year, and most are making it without meaningful support.

The experience of navigating benefit options has a design problem: employees arrive at enrollment windows without the guidance they need, spend more time confused rather than informed, and leave with choices they come to regret.

The Benefits Experience Gap, In 4 Numbers

• 🧭 Only 28% of employees felt guided step-by-step through their most recent enrollment, while 46% mostly or entirely figured it out alone. Roughly 1 in 10 said they guessed and hoped for the best, pointing to a decision support gap that completion rates don't surface.

• 📊 35% of employees regret the benefits choices they made during their last enrollment, a rate that has been flat for two consecutive years. Without a deliberate change to how enrollment is designed and delivered, that number is unlikely to move.

• 🎯 Employees who described their open enrollment as extremely personalized reported a satisfaction rate of 76%, compared to just 20% among those who felt no personalization. That 56-point gap is entirely about how enrollment is experienced, not which plans are on offer.

• 💼 Half of all employees have taken or turned down a job because of benefits. Among employees very likely to stay with their employer, more than half are very satisfied with their benefits, making the link between enrollment experience and retention direct and measurable.

Read more: Selerix Employee Benefits Survey 2026

💬 50% of US Gen Z Workers Often Go Entire Workdays Without Speaking to a Single Colleague

The return to office was supposed to restore the kind of casual, spontaneous connection that remote work eliminated. For Gen Z, it largely has not.

The generation that arrived in the workforce most fluent in digital communication is also, it turns out, the most isolated inside it.

The issue is not physical presence, but rather how connection actually forms, or fails to, when proximity is taken for granted.

Proximity Is Not Connection: Gen Z's Workplace Isolation in 4 Stats

• 📱 65% of UK Gen Z and 66% of US Gen Z employees message or email colleagues in the same room rather than speaking to them directly, the highest rate of any generation. Physical presence in the same building is not translating to meaningful interaction.

• 😔 40% of all employees across both the US and UK report feeling lonely at work even when surrounded by colleagues. For HR leaders, this signals that isolation is not a remote work problem that office attendance solves.

• 😶 88% of US Gen Z workers suppress parts of themselves at work, with 55% specifically hiding opinions they believe won't be well received. Workplaces where people self-censor actively undercut the psychological safety that genuine connection requires.

• 🗓️ Around half of employees in both the US (50%) and UK (46%) say meetings are their only opportunity to connect with certain coworkers. For a generation that defaults to digital over verbal interaction, meeting design may be the most direct lever HR has to close the connection gap.

Read more: Kahoot! 360 Workplace Culture and Connection Report 2026