In October 2023, we hosted a gathering of over 70 reskilling and upskilling experts at Harvard Business School, and it didn’t take long for everybody to arrive at a unanimous consensus: Reskilling today is a strategic imperative.

The question is no longer “Whether?” or “Why?”; it’s “How?”

Not long before the conference, we had addressed that question by surveying the best practices being used by reskilling pioneers — and in our HBR article “Reskilling in the Age of AI,” we described what we learned. The article generated a great deal of interest, which made us wonder about a new question: To what extent have regular employers begun to adopt those practices?

To answer that question, we recently surveyed chief human resource officers from approximately 1,200 organizations in the U.S., along with business leaders from around 200. What we learned from them was good news: Reskilling is on track to becoming mainstream. Fifty-six percent of survey respondents reported that their organization is now actively implementing reskilling initiatives, often in conjunction with the hiring of fresh talent from the external labor market and other skill-sourcing strategies. And 82% of these adopters described themselves as keen to continue.

Not surprisingly, the respondents reported encountering major challenges and made clear to us that they still have plenty of work to do. In this article, drawing on what we’ve learned from our survey, we’ll review how firms are managing the five paradigm shifts introduced in our previous article. Informed by additional research we’ve conducted since that article, we’ll add a sixth shift: the measurement and evaluation of the impact of these initiatives, which is essential for the implementation of reskilling investments. But the data also have also revealed possible bottlenecks and significant areas for further progress. In this article, we’ll briefly discuss each of our now-six paradigms and lay out key questions that you should be asking yourself when designing and running reskilling programs.