Imagine this scenario: You are behind your competitors in digital transformation and are even more worried about startups with massive funding that may leapfrog you. You are trying to make progress, but cannot hire enough data scientists, agile coaches, engineers, product owners, cyber experts, or design thinkers. They are going to fun, young organizations, not the old-school companies with siloes, command-and-control leaders, and matrix structures that grind decision making to a halt.

At the same time, many of your current workers are in roles that are slowly becoming obsolete due to automation. What’s more, you have too many unproductive middle managers, and your digitally unskilled frontline workers are not prepared for the changing world ahead.

Does this ring familiar? These are the challenges we’re hearing from many of our clients, and they’re representative of the crossroads we’re at in the global skills crisis. The World Economic Forum estimates that more than half of all employees around the world need to upskill or reskill by 2025 to embrace the changing nature of jobs. Many organizations in these situations are turning toward reskilling to build the talent they cannot acquire or productively deploy. And yet a 2020 global BCG study showed that “talent and skills” was the second-most underinvested area in corporate transformation efforts.

As companies reimagine how they bring learning to a scale of thousands of people and at speed, we share six practical insights based on BCG’s extensive experience supporting more than 100 clients globally, touching hundreds of thousands of learners in the past four years.