Brandon Hall Group™ announced the launch of its 2026 State of Skills study, a comprehensive research survey designed to examine how modern enterprises define, track, and act on employee capabilities. The benchmark study explores how human resources and corporate business leaders are constructing the skills frameworks required to support rapidly shifting workforce demands.
The baseline study investigates an operational bottleneck at the center of modern workforce planning: whether corporate organizations truly understand their current internal skills inventory, accurately forecast future capability requirements, and clearly assign ownership for closing the resulting talent gaps.
The research comes at a critical time for corporate talent development. International companies are increasingly being asked to address talent shortages in the areas of artificial intelligence, understanding machine learning, data analysis, changing a company, and making decisions at a higher level. Despite such demands to the business side, countless large-scale organizations run without a skills strategy responsible person or a consistent setup that would make possible to visualize capabilities across the organization. The investigation will trace the entire development process of skills deployment, highlighting architectural infrastructure, data silos, and collaboration gaps between HR and Learning & Development (L&D) departments that are stopping Companies to accomplish future operational goals.
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“Skills have moved from being an HR initiative to becoming a business imperative. Organizations are making significant investments in AI, workforce planning, and talent development, yet many still lack a shared understanding of the skills they have today and the capabilities they will need tomorrow. This research reflects our commitment to helping leaders make better workforce decisions with evidence, not assumptions,” said Mike Cooke, CEO of Brandon Hall Group™.
Mapping Organizational Ownership and Tracking Infrastructure
The comprehensive survey analyzes the strategic friction points that occur when skills data is locked inside separate operational departments. By evaluating how distinct corporate divisions manage talent pipelines, the study provides a diagnostic overview of organizational readiness.
The main topic areas of the 2026 state of skills study are:
Strategic Ownership and Governance: Figuring out who among HR, L&D IT Talent Acquisition, and individual business units has the primary ownership, responsibility, and governance of the skills strategy at a very fundamental level.
Collaboration Velocity: The idea is to quantify how often, how smoothly, and where the collaboration goes haywire during the planning process of L&D teams and the corporate HR leaders.
Data Currency and Systems: This refers to checking what software tools are used to gather employee capability data plus the restrictions on making the data available.
Executive Visibility and Impact: The investigation is to see how much the top management is overseeing the skills planning and how the success of skills planning is measured.
Benchmarking Collaborative Strategies for Workforce Agility
Basing the study on the current real-life practices by participants from diverse market segments will result in the identification of a practical set of best practices. This set will enable an enterprise to go beyond just reacting to talent needs to developing and implementing a strategy that supports its operational agility for the long term.
“Every organization we speak with says skills are a priority, yet very few can clearly identify who owns the strategy or whether their data is reliable enough to support workforce decisions,” said Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group™. “This study will provide HR and L&D leaders with practical insights into where skills strategies are succeeding, where collaboration is breaking down, and what organizations can do to build a workforce that can adapt as business needs evolve.”
The study is officially open for data collection and accessible to corporate HR professionals, L&D directors, talent development strategists, and workforce planners. All qualified participants who complete the survey will receive exclusive access to the aggregated research results and benchmarking reports. Interested human capital leaders can participate in the data collection process by visiting Brandon Hall Group’s designated digital research portal.
