Are companies truly prepared for the future of work? The Hays HR Report 2025 suggests otherwise. While businesses prioritize upskilling, they often overlook reskilling—the key to keeping pace with rapidly changing job demands. German companies have plans to future-proof their workforce in 2025, but in most cases, budgets remain unchanged. This raises a critical question: How will they get their teams ready for what’s ahead?
Climate change, digitalization and, last but not least, artificial intelligence are calling existing business models into question and demanding new skills. Job profiles and job requirements are changing, making skilling strategies relevant for developing employees and thus retaining them in a targeted way. The Hays HR Report 2025 “Fit for the future of work? – The importance of future skills for companies and how to achieve them” examines how companies are using training measures to position themselves for the future.
Alexander Heise
“Re-skilling and upskilling mean higher financial costs and greater management responsibility. Many are still reluctant to do so and are sticking to what has been tried and tested. Companies now need good and long-term qualification strategies for employees in order to master the upcoming transformations and to survive in the global competition,” says Alexander Heise, Hays CEO Germany and CEMEA.
Reskilling is not a high priority
In the face of massive transformation processes, learning new skills is becoming increasingly important in order to offer employees career prospects and ensure the competitiveness of companies. However, the Hays HR Report 2025 clearly shows that in many cases there is still a lack of experience in this area.
Reskilling is only considered to be important in the workplace by 36 percent of respondents. Senior management (47 percent) and HR (46 percent) see a higher level of importance. However, only 27 percent of employees are involved in reskilling measures.
The main objectives of reskilling measures are to adapt to new areas of work (49 percent) and to increase professional (46 percent) skills. The focus here is on IT (28 percent), followed by production (25 percent), sales and customer service, and finance (22 percent each). The public sector (19 percent) has the fewest employees involved in reskilling measures.
Nevertheless, 64 percent of companies plan retraining strategically. 33 percent supplement this with ad hoc measures, while 24 percent react only to acute needs. The main drivers for reskilling measures are the emergence of new areas of work (49 percent) and new demands on professional skills (46 percent).
Reskilling is a major challenge for managers
Envato/jacoblund
When it comes to introducing reskilling, managers are particularly concerned about the high time commitment for employees (46 percent), the high financial cost (35 percent) and resistance from employees (33 percent).
For employees, however, retraining is often associated with fears and feelings of being under pressure. 45 percent of employees are particularly concerned about not being able to meet the new or additional requirements or, more generally, about changing their work tasks.
For managers, this results in new tasks and requires emotional skills to reduce these fears and insecurities, build trust and empower teams. Purely technical training does not meet the current reality of work. However, only 12 percent mention training in social skills as their top priority. The greatest need for further training is seen in digital (32 percent), job-specific (28 percent) and technological (26 percent) skills.
Significance of the forms of training
Upskilling refers to traditional, often career-oriented training that expands existing knowledge in the same field of activity, such as training in IT applications.
Reskilling is the retraining of employees to acquire new skills in order to take on different tasks and activities at the same level of qualification, for example retraining from translator to online editor.
Deskilling occurs as a result of technological or organizational changes, as a consequence of which employees’ previous skills are taken over by digitization or automation and they themselves perform lower-skilled tasks.
Upskilling is well established
Envato/KostiantynVoitenko
48 percent of the managers surveyed say that upskilling is highly valued in the company, in contrast to reskilling (36 percent) and deskilling (14 percent). It is striking that managers from the HR department and company management attach particularly high importance to upskilling (61 percent and 57 percent, respectively). The assessment of the importance increases with the size of the company.
In contrast to reskilling (27 percent), 46 percent of employees are included in upskilling measures, particularly (56 percent) in smaller companies with fewer than 500 employees. The main aim of upskilling measures is to increase professional (58 percent) and digital (57 percent) skills. The focus is on training in IT (39 percent), management or business development (30 percent), and research and development (27 percent).
Upskilling measures are strategically anchored in human resources planning in 69 percent of the companies surveyed. In 32 percent of the companies, further training and education is also provided in parallel with acute demand, while 19 percent use upskilling measures exclusively on an ad hoc basis.
Little investment in requalification: budgets stagnate
Despite international transformations and economic challenges that upskilling and reskilling measures can help address, respondents do not expect budgets for these measures to increase in the coming years. Despite the crisis, 39 and 41 percent, respectively, expect the budget for the respective measures to remain the same. Only 26 and 21 percent, respectively, believe that the budget for upskilling or reskilling will increase, while 17 and 15 percent, respectively, even assume that the budget will decrease.
The expected budget development does not match the assessments of the importance of upskilling and reskilling. This is a gap that can increasingly jeopardize the future viability of companies.
“Under high economic pressure, companies are increasingly resorting to proven learning formats and classic training in their own field of activity. But change requires new interdisciplinary skills, especially resilience and emotional strength. These are essential for dealing with uncertainty, promoting trust and strengthening teams. Purely professional further training is not enough here, as it does not meet the requirements of the modern working world,” says Prof. Dr. Jutta Rump from IBE, assessing the results of the Hays HR Report 2025.
About the Hays HR Report 2025
The survey of 975 employees with and without management responsibility provides a breakdown of the extent to which companies use upskilling, reskilling and deskilling measures and the challenges these pose for employees and managers. The Hays HR Report 2025 was compiled in collaboration with the Institute for Employment and Employability (IBE).
