Layoff headlines keep landing, but the reskilling numbers behind them tell a different story about what companies are actually choosing to do with the workers they keep.

KPMG’s Adaptability Pulse survey of 1,120 executives, published this year, found that only 5% of organizations report having no reskilling plans in place, even as public attention stays fixed on cuts. A third of leaders in the same survey named a lack of critical talent, not a surplus of it, as the barrier standing between their company and the adaptability it needs. “Adaptability is less constrained by ambition and more about how you master the internal challenges: a proliferation of competing priorities and slow decision-making,” said Atif Zaim, Deputy Chair and U.S. Managing Principal at KPMG LLP.

The gap between the layoff narrative and the reskilling data matters for board conversations. Executives are not choosing between cutting and reskilling as opposites; the survey suggests most are doing a version of both, which makes broad “companies are cutting” or “companies are reskilling” framing equally incomplete on its own. HRTech has previously reported on employers training workers for today’s AI tools rather than the jobs AI is about to create, and Zaim’s framing points at the same issue from a different angle: the constraint is not appetite for reskilling, it is organizational speed.

The original insight the survey data supports is that “slow decision-making” is now doing as much damage to workforce adaptability as any skills shortage. A company can have a reskilling budget and a genuine intent to redeploy talent and still lose the race if competing priorities keep the program from launching before the skill gap it was meant to close has already cost the business a contract or a client. The KPMG data argues the constraint the CFO should worry about is not whether to fund retraining, but whether the organization can move fast enough to make it count. HRTech’s recent reporting on spans widening faster than manager support points at a related speed problem, one layer down from the adaptability question KPMG measured.

Source: KPMG LLP