Many employers believe their existing staff can be retrained for AI-related roles, but external hiring remains more common than redeploying current employees. That gap matters for workers weighing who should pay for the AI skills companies say they need.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
A Careerminds survey found that 92% of HR professionals and 88% of people managers believed employees in their organisations could be reskilled for AI-related roles. Yet 51% of HR professionals and 47% of managers said their organisations were hiring externally for those roles, compared with 42% in each group who reported redeploying existing staff.
The survey covered 595 US HR professionals and 547 people managers at organisations with at least 500 employees. It was conducted in May 2026. ZDNET also cites the Careerminds report’s finding that limited visibility into employees’ skills is a barrier to reskilling, reported by 43% of HR professionals and 34% of managers.
Why it matters
The figures suggest that confidence in workers’ ability to adapt does not automatically translate into a route for them to do so. If employers cannot identify the skills they already have, “we’ll retrain people” risks remaining a pleasant sentence in a workforce strategy.
The Careerminds report also cites separate research from The Josh Bersin Company estimating that external hiring can cost three to five times more than filling comparable roles internally and take up to 20 days longer on average. That is a reported comparison, not a guarantee for every job or employer.
Our read
The useful question is not simply whether workers can learn AI skills. The survey points to the awkward middle step: employers must recognise what people can already do and make internal moves possible. If a company says it believes in reskilling but keeps looking outside, the next question is whether the obstacle is a genuine skills gap or a failure to see the talent already on the payroll.
What to watch
- Whether employers make internal AI-related vacancies and required skills more visible to current staff.
- Whether future surveys find more redeployment as organisations adopt AI.
- Whether the reported cost and time advantages of internal hiring hold across different roles and industries.
Discussion spark: If employers believe existing staff can be retrained for AI roles, should they have to show they considered internal candidates before hiring externally?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (5 November 2026, 18:44 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.