The Reason to Invest in Reskilling: How Workforce Education Supports Businesses & People
Approximately 11 million US workers are in declining occupations and may need to move into new jobs, according to recent data from McKinsey. Yet only one in seven has a direct pathway into growing work, with about 85% of growing jobs requiring a credential or certification. Most companies already pay for a reskilling and upskilling benefit that could close the gap. For the frontline people who need it most, it rarely works.
I have spent two decades inside organizations watching the same pattern. We invest in the people who are already ahead, call it an employee engagement program, and wonder why the rest of the workforce stays stuck. In an economy that AI is rewriting in real time, that is no longer a gap in workplace culture. It is a business risk and a human one.
Bijal Shah sees it more clearly than almost anyone. She is CEO of Guild, which helps employers such as Walgreens, Chipotle, Disney and Target upskill, reskill and redeploy their workforces. Her conviction is personal. Her mother, a data entry analyst, lost her job to automation in the early 1990s and spent nearly 30 years at a doctor’s front desk. “She knew every medical code,” Bijal told me. “She also was capable of so much more.”
Learning cannot stop at graduation
Most of us were raised on a simple model. You learn until you finish school and then you work. As I put it in our conversation,
For a big chunk of the world, learning seems to stop after school and then you work.”
That model was always fragile, but today it’s broken. The World Economic Forum research expects roughly 40% of the core skills workers rely on to change within five years. If you are not continuously learning, it is very hard to hold on to your job, let alone grow in it. Losing a job does not only hit a paycheck, it truly hits your identity, health and relationships at home.
There is a second reason to keep learning, and it has nothing to do with careers. Our brains respond to learning the way our bodies respond to strength training. The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia linked roughly 45% of dementia cases to 14 modifiable risk factors, and less education is one of them. Pushing the brain to learn something new is one of the best investments we can make in our own health span.
The real barrier for most adults is not ability. It is belief. Somewhere along the way we decide that learning belongs to the young. Bijal named the trap precisely:
You think you’re not capable of learning things as you get older or that the barrier to entry or the hurdle is too high.”
The hurdle is mostly in our heads. Every time someone clears it, as she put it, it “shows how resilient the human spirit is.”
I believe access to that kind of learning should be a right for everyone. To a large extent, it should be an obligation for every company that employs people. And the good news is, it’s not just the right thing for people, it’s the right thing for business.
Why education benefits must be built for the workers who need it most
Most large employers already offer an education benefit, usually referred to as tuition reimbursement. That said, its design quietly filters out the people it should serve the most or isn’t connected to real opportunities for career mobility.
In tuition reimbursement models, the employee has to pay first, often thousands of dollars, then waits months to be repaid. That works if you have savings, rising pay and a life that does not get in the way. According to the Federal Reserve’s latest survey of household finances, only 63% of American adults would cover a $400 emergency expense with cash. More than a third could not. What about the person who needs to front a semester of tuition?
Bijal’s verdict is blunt: education programs that require an employee to pay out-of-pocket “disproportionately benefit those who could probably already access education themselves and actually discriminates against those who probably need it the most.”
Guild’s answer is a model where the worker pays nothing out- of- pocket, the employer pays as learners succeed, and learning institutions gain motivated students who finish. Every party wins.
It is a benefit built for adaptability, the capacity to grow, rather than for the people who were already growing.
How reskilling and upskilling pay for themselves
The business case is stronger than most CFOs assume. Bijal’s team starts every engagement with a single question: what business problem are you trying to solve? Only then do they design the programs. Some employers offer five tightly targeted pathways into critical roles. Others offer hundreds, because they want people to learn even if they eventually transition to other roles outside of the business .
In healthcare, the problem is usually twofold. Hospitals cannot keep the nurses they have and cannot find enough new ones. One health system Guild works with built visible pathways from entry-level roles into nursing. As a result, employee retention rose, reliance on contract labor fell, and the system saved $100 million.
That result is not an outlier. Chipotle has seen employees enrolled in its education benefit program experience a 66% lower turnover rate and be promoted approximately 1.4x as often compared to non-participants. On a recent earnings call, Chipotle’s CEO highlighted how the program, “provides debt-free education and greater career mobility for our team memers…Those programs reinforce something fundamental to our culture. Chipotle is a place where people build meaningful long-term careers.” Target has seen a similar business impact. Employees in the retailer’s Dream to Be education benefit program are 5.5x more likely to be promoted into store team lead roles, and participants in store team lead roles demonstrate 46% lower turnover compared to non-participants.
Learning is one of the strongest retention tools you have. Most companies simply never made it reachable.
Build career pathways for the talent you cannot hire
Some of the people you need do not exist on the open market. The US has a shortage of pharmacists and of advanced maintenance technicians who can service robotic manufacturing lines. “You can’t go find those people,” Bijal said. “And so the only option is to build.”
Building them requires a new kind of collaboration. Colleges will not invest in a new program when demand is uncertain or rests on a single employer. When employers aggregate demand, the economics change. Guild brought Walgreens and learning institutions together to design a first-of-its-kind pathway from pharmacy technician to pharmacist, and added math and reading support when the gaps showed up.
I see the same shortages, and the same opportunity, in data centers, in manufacturing and across the skilled trades. Any place where an industry says there are not enough trained people is an invitation to step back and ask how we might solve it together, rather than fight over the same small pool. Skills have become a currency and companies that mint it, instead of competing for it, will own the next decade.
Start with reskilling
Every week brings another headline about AI and layoffs. The WEF found that 41% of employers plan to reduce headcount as AI automates tasks, even as 77% plan to upskill their people. Both can be true in the same company. What matters is the order.
Bijal sees this moment as the next chapter of a much older story.
We are in a new era of automation and agentic workflows, which means that workers will get disrupted”
she told me.
The best way to prepare them is to make sure they have the skills and capabilities to stay adaptable, whether it be for a role at their existing employer or a future one”
Even a company with no attrition problem, planning to shrink or simply not to grow, has a choice. You can let people go into the world with a parachute, or push them out of the plane and let them figure it out. Nobody has ever cut their way to prosperity. The organizations that last grow by growing their people.
The return comes back in ways a spreadsheet misses. Some employers fund nursing pathways despite having no nursing business at all. Their logic: those nurses will thrive in the local economy and come back as customers. Chipotle alumni of its education program still write about the company with gratitude, from general managers to lawyers.
This is not a benefit that splits a fixed pie between shareholders and workers. As I told Bijal, “This is not a split the pie benefit that is truly a grow the pie benefit.” Employees win, communities win, and so do the companies and their shareholders.
What leaders can do on Monday
Bijal invited leaders to start with three moves: get clear on what high performance means, show it rather than tell it, and invest in your people. I would add three practical steps.
- Audit your education benefit by pay band. Start with a simple question: who is actually using the benefit you already pay for? Break utilization down by pay level and role. If most of the people enrolling are salaried managers and almost none are on the front line, the problem is not motivation. It is the design. People living paycheck to paycheck cannot front thousands of dollars and wait months to be repaid. Remove the up-front cost, and you will be surprised how many people step forward.
- Map pathways into your two hardest-to-fill roles. Pick the two roles that keep you up at night, the ones you can never hire for fast enough. Then look inside your own walls. Who is already in your building and could grow into that role with the right training and support? Start from the business problem, design the steps, and make the route visible. People cannot walk a path they cannot see. When they can see it, they stay, they grow, and they fill the roles you thought you had to buy.
- Reskill before you restructure. If you know AI will reshape a function in the next two years, the time to act is now, while those people are still with you. Invest in skills that will travel with them, whether they move into a new role inside your company or into a new chapter somewhere else. This is what I mean by a parachute. Whatever comes next, you will have honored the people who built your business, and they will remember it. So will everyone still working for you.
Underneath all of it is a simple message every employee is waiting to hear. As I mentioned, the most powerful thing a company can say is, “I believe in you enough to truly invest in your future.” It takes moral courage to keep saying it when the pressure is on cost. It is also what businesses were built for: to solve problems, create value and serve the people they touch.
My full conversation with Bijal Shah is on the Flourishing Edge podcast.
Learn more about Bijal Shah on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Bijal Shah. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
