Scott Nunn, facilities engineer at Novo Nordisk and incoming board chair at the Triangle East Chamber of Commerce was one of the featured speakers at the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce's 2025 Education and Workforce Conference on Skills. More than 260 people attended the event.
According to Stuart Andreason, executive director of programs at Burning Glass Institute, skills are what determines the future readiness of a workforce. Technologies will continue to intersect existing job roles, shifting the skills needed to succeed in those roles.
Andreason says that 37% of the skills of an average job have changed over the last five years. Today, new power skills drive our labor market and, increasingly, digital skills are required for high mobility jobs. For a region to succeed in the war for talent, they must identify these power skills and invest in training and reskilling around those.
While much has been made about the role generative AI and the proliferation of AI will have on our job market, Andreason says that the trends remain the same, AI is just accelerating the pace of change. Despite a focus on potential disruption in roles from AI – meaning job loss – the adoption of similar innovation has not always ended in fewer jobs.
For example, Microsoft Excel was released in the 1980s and people thought analysts would become irrelevant. Instead, the opposite happened, it unlocked a huge amount of data demand and today most companies employ data specialists.
To read more visit the NC Chamber website.
