How skills-first hiring is changing the workforce

By Gary Anders

According to the world Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, workers on average can expect around 40 per cent of their existing skill sets will either be transformed or become outdated over the next five years.

Driving this will be rapid technological advances, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), as well as ongoing geo-economic fragmentation (the unwinding of existing trade and investment structures), economic uncertainty, demographic shifts, evolving social trends and climate change.

Eighty-five per cent of the over 1000 employers surveyed, representing millions of workers, said they plan to prioritise upskilling their workforce by 2030.  Forty per cent noted they aim to reduce staff as their skills become less relevant, while half plan to transition workers from declining to growing roles.

The report explicitly identifies accountants and auditors, along with bookkeepers and payroll clerks, among the fastest declining job roles between now and 2030.

Skills-based frameworks

It is against this somewhat bleak backdrop that governments and employers are recognising that the need to equip workers with future-ready skills is critical.

In a research paper published earlier this year, Singapore’s Centre for Skills-First Practices (CSFP) notes that “human capital development and future-skilling have come to the fore on the policy agenda”.

“Often, however, issues such as a skills mismatch of the economically active and enterprises’ disinterest to transform their businesses pose challenges to advancing these policy objectives,” says CSFP director Edwin Tan. “For the most part, stakeholders have begun to realise that more needs to be done to close the gap between the supply and demand of skills for the economy.”

Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and other countries across the Asia-Pacific region are actively taking steps to facilitate the upskilling of workers at all levels by working with employers, professional bodies, educators and training providers.

This includes implementing skills-based employment frameworks that place a much greater emphasis on workers’ verified skills — what people can actually do and how they apply their capabilities in real workplace settings — over university degrees and other credentials.

When it comes to skills-based workplace policies, some countries are further down the track than others.

Singapore has invested heavily into skills development over time. SkillsFuture Singapore, the national agency under Singapore’s Ministry of Education that stewards the country’s lifetime learning and workforce skills ecosystem, celebrated 10 years of operation in 2025.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in collaboration with Singapore’s CSFP, last year launched the Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index. The index measures the readiness and adoption of skills-first practices in 30 countries, assessing the depth of their education and training systems, their talent-recognition processes, and their foundational structures to support skills-first approaches.

 

"While apprenticeships and trades remain vital, we are also focused on supporting upskilling across a wide range of sectors, including professional, technical and digital fields. As automation and AI reshape jobs, New Zealanders need to be able to keep learning, adapt and move into new and higher-value opportunities."

 

Australia scores very highly, ranking equal first with Sweden overall as having prioritised skills as the core currency for articulating, developing and recognising capabilities across the labour market.

Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) is currently developing the National Skills Taxonomy, which will replace the Australian Skills Classification as an evidence-based framework providing a common language to describe, recognise and transfer skills across education, training and employment in Australia.

The end goal is to create a digital record, similar to a “skills passport”, whereby workers’ acquired skills can be digitally recorded so they can be easily referenced by individuals and current or future employers.

“In Australia we have gone through a very extensive process to redevelop a definition of skill that is broad and inclusive,” says JSA deputy commissioner, Megan Lilly.

JSA is working from the premise that skills are dynamic. “They grow and change, and they also regrettably degrade,” she says. “They are human-centred, so you can have cognitive skills, interpersonal skills, creative skills, analytical skills, technical skills and psychomotor skills.

“If you actually look at what is required in the modern labour market, you need to bring all those skills into work. Just being technically proficient is rarely enough today.

Even for someone that might have a very technical job, they still have to interact with other people, problem-solve, adapt their skills and think through issues.”

New Zealand’s focus on skills-based policy has translated into making major changes to decentralise its vocational education and training system.

“We have moved away from a highly centralised model because it simply could not respond to what was happening on the ground in different regions and industries,” says New Zealand’s Minister for Tertiary Education, the Honourable Penny Simmonds.

“While apprenticeships and trades remain vital, we are also focused on supporting upskilling across a wide range of sectors, including professional, technical and digital fields. As automation and AI reshape jobs, New Zealanders need to be able to keep learning, adapt, and move into new and higher-value opportunities.”

Real-world competencies

Accounting firms, including firms across Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region, are already moving toward skills-based workforce models, driven by automation, regulatory complexity and persistent talent shortages.

CPA Australia’s chief learning and innovation officer, Dr Ash Jones — who is responsible for ensuring all learning and innovation initiatives, including the CPA Program, are future focused — says that learning across the accounting sector is being redesigned around real-world competencies.

“If you talk to accountants at any stage of their career, they will tell you the same thing — it is not just about knowing the rules, it is about applying them in real situations. So, we deliberately design learning around the kinds of decisions accountants make at work.

That means less abstract theory and more focus on judgement, problem-solving and professional confidence.”

Dr Jones says that in the educational context, accounting assessments need to reflect what accountants really do in practice.

“We have moved away from the idea that assessment is about memorising content. Instead, it is about showing how you would use your knowledge in a real scenario. That might mean analysing information, weighing up options or explaining a recommendation, just like you would with a client, a manager or a board.

The intent is to equip learners with the confidence to apply the knowledge they have learned to mirror the way they work.”

Continuing professional development that incorporates the completion of micro-credentials (short, modular courses that certify a specific skill or set of skills that are designed to be work-relevant) will become increasingly important for accountants and finance professionals.

Dr Jones says the CPA Australia learning model supports trust in the CPA designation by mapping learning outcomes and assessments directly to professional competencies. “Employers and stakeholders know that when someone earns or maintains their CPA they have demonstrated real capability, not just completed coursework.

That clarity is incredibly important for the profession, particularly with the fast pace of change.”

Skill mix

Increasingly, some accounting firms are hiring candidates with capabilities outside of the traditional accounting sphere, with expertise in areas such as data analytics, cybersecurity or sustainability reporting.

The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) — of which CPA Australia is a member — last year finalised revisions to its International Education Standards to embed sustainability throughout accountants’ training. These standards apply to all IFAC members.

“When we thought about the sustainability challenge, it was really about how the skills of an accountant need to shift or need to be enhanced to make sure that they can work in this context,” says Bruce Vivian, IFAC’s head of education, member monitoring and development.

“We recognised how important it is for an accountant to be able to work effectively in a multidisciplinary team. And that is something that is particularly unique in the sustainability space, because you may be working with environmental scientists, social experts or labour experts and various different professionals who do not come from our accounting world.

“We also recognised that this is not just reflective of what is needed for sustainability, but a broader trend of how the profession needs to evolve to remain relevant and to be able to move into new areas of service.”

 

"If you talk to accountants at any stage of their career, they will tell you the same thing — it is not just about knowing the rules, it is about applying them in real situations. So, we deliberately designed learning around the kinds of decisions accountants make at work."

 

Last year, IFAC also released Opening Doors: 6 Principles of Best Practice to Increase Access to Accountancy Qualifications, which is intended to guide IFAC members and other professional accountancy organisations in preserving the rigour and integrity of accountancy education while promoting greater inclusivity.

“Opening Doors contains recommendations to really encourage the profession to think about how we can increase access into professional qualifications and education programs, and to essentially get rid of some of the obstacles that prevent people getting in,” Vivian says.

“Qualifications remain important, but when you follow a skills-based approach, it provides opportunity to recognise progress and also acknowledges that there might be different combinations of skills that get you to a similar place.”

While AI and automation stand out as challenges for the accounting profession globally, Vivian says that it is difficult to pin down what they mean for skills development and industry recruitment. “We do not know exactly how AI is going to transform the profession. We have some ideas, but it is very early in the lifecycle of this disruption.”

He says that while technology is reshaping accounting and auditing tasks, the demand for higher-order human skills such as professional judgement, strategic thinking, ethical reasoning, digital literacy and communication will increase.

“Many of the skills that are not what we would call technical skills in our space have a huge amount of applicability in this new world,” he says. “Shift from thinking about skills or competence in terms of what you are able to do today, and instead think about capabilities.”