To steer you through our findings, we’ve produced a series of summaries that distil the trends into their need-to-know insights. Understand the essentials of each trend with our Trends Overview and gain practical insight into how to tackle this year’s key three trends with our individual Trend Digests.

To dig deep into the trends, read our complete report.

Human Capital Trends Overview

In a boundaryless world, work isn’t defined by jobs, the workplace isn’t a specific place, and many workers aren’t traditional employees. These new fundamentals require organisations and workers to frame the challenge differently, thinking like a researcher in how they approach their business and workforce strategies, treating every new roadblock as an exciting experiment from which they can learn, adapt, and improve. They call on organisations and workers to chart a different path, cocreating their relationship in pursuit of new and evolving purpose, innovation, and reimagination. And they require organisations and workers to design for impact, prioritising human outcomes and approaching strategies from a human lens—for humans and by humans.

Trend Digest: Powering human impact with technology

New workplace technologies are emerging that don’t just augment human workers but actually help them improve their own personal and teaming capabilities - helping humans become better humans and teams become better teams. This is more than just wearables. It’s technology supporting humans in countless ways to foster new behaviors and help workers become better versions of themselves.

Trend Digest: Navigating the end of jobs

Since the dawn of the industrial age, the job has been the defining structure for organising and managing every aspect of work. That approach made sense when business changes occurred slowly, and workers were just pieces in the industrial machine. The solution? A skills-based approach to managing work and workers, delivering business agility and worker autonomy by enabling work to be performed beyond formal job boundaries.

Trend Digest: Advancing the human element of sustainability

Enterprises’ initial efforts to address sustainability issues have been largely driven by public relations or brand defense - with less regard for meaningful outcomes. More recent efforts, such as reducing emissions in operations or manufacturing, are producing real but incremental improvement at the fringes of the business. Now it’s time to take the next step to achieve tangible outcomes by focusing on the human element by operationalising people-enablers in the organisation, planning for the right technical and soft or human skills, making work better for humans, and designing for human sustainability. This is where fundamental and lasting change takes root and outcomes can be achieved.

Explore Human Capital trends from previous years:

2023 Global Human Capital Trends Survey report

2021 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report

2020 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report

2019 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report

2018 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report

2017 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report

2016 Irish Human Capital Trends Survey report