Forget Skills. Can Your People Unlearn Who They Are?

For the first time in history, disruption isn’t coming for the factory floor.

It’s coming for the office tower.

And L&D is either going to lead the revolution, or be buried by it.

We have spent years mastering the art of closing skill gaps.

Competency models. Capability academies. Learning pathways.

Skill gaps feel solvable.

Skills can be taught, tested, certified.

But what if the real threat isn’t just a skill gap?

What if it’s an identity gap?

For most of the 20th century, work, especially white-collar work, offered stability.

Titles were clear.

Career paths were linear.

Hierarchies were predictable.

You could reasonably expect that if you worked hard, honed your craft, and stayed the course, you would climb the ladder, analyst to manager to director to VP.

But that ladder is crumbling.

Today, AI is dismantling the predictable logic of work.

Generative models can produce reports, write code, build marketing plans, and automate tasks that once demanded years of expertise.

The consulting advice you used to bill $300 an hour for? AI can draft it in seconds.

The financial analysis that took a team a week to complete? Automated in minutes.

The learning curriculum that once needed a full design team?

Prompted and produced by a junior employee with the right tools.

This is not just automation nibbling at the edges.

This is foundational disruption, unravelling what “knowledge work” even means.

And it is happening across functions.

Marketing is becoming AI-driven, with data science baked in.

HR is being redefined by people analytics and algorithmic decision-making.

Finance is moving toward real-time, AI-augmented forecasting.

Legal research, once a junior lawyer’s rite of passage, can now be AI-accelerated.

McKinsey estimates that 60 to 70 percent of current work activities could be automated by 2030 with current technology, much of it in the so-called safe haven of white-collar work.

It is not just tasks that are changing.

It is the architecture of work itself; how it is divided, assigned, valued, and rewarded.

And that shakes the very foundations of professional identity.

Because while skills can be upgraded...Identities?

Identities are much harder to rewrite.

The Threat We Might Be Overlooking

We define ourselves by what we do.

“I’m a project manager.”

“I’m a marketing director.”

“I’m an L&D professional.”

These aren’t just roles. They’re identities.

Deeply ingrained.

Carefully constructed.

In cognitive psychology, this phenomenon is known as identity foreclosure, a concept first developed by James Marcia.

It occurs when individuals prematurely commit to a self-definition without exploring alternatives, locking themselves into narrow paths.

And in a world where AI is dismantling tasks, blurring roles, and rewiring workflows, these rigid professional identities are starting to show cracks.

But it goes deeper than just titles.

It is the entire history people have built around their titles.

The promotions earned.

The awards displayed.

The expertise carefully cultivated over years.

The reputation secured in a certain domain.

When you ask someone to pivot, you are not just asking them to learn new skills.

You are asking them to risk losing the narrative that gave meaning to their careers and, often, their sense of self.

It is not just technical obsolescence.

It is existential threat.

And we have seen this kind of resistance before.

When the coal industry collapsed, retraining programs offered miners new skills in solar energy, technology, even customer service. Many refused.

Not because they could not learn.

Because being a coal miner was not just a job.

It was an identity.

A source of pride, belonging, and status.

To step into a new role meant stepping away from the core of who they believed they were.

The real barrier was not skill.

It was identity.

In the not-too-distant future, knowledge workers such as marketers, project managers, lawyers, and data analysts could face a similar collapse.

The work is changing faster than professional identities can adapt.

And if we ignore this identity gap, even the best reskilling strategies will fall short.

Why Identity May Be the Real Bottleneck

Let’s be honest.

Reskilling programs can teach someone a new technical skill.

But if their identity is still tied to an obsolete role, what good is the skill?

Carol Dweck’s research on mindset shows how tightly identity is linked to performance and change readiness.

People resist learning not because they cannot, but because learning challenges who they think they are.

And AI is accelerating task disruption faster than traditional identities can adapt.

Skills have a short half-life now.

But identities have a long one.

Studies in social and cognitive psychology show that self-concept tends to resist change even when new information is presented, a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance.

When work changes fast but identity changes slowly, you get resistance, burnout, and disengagement.

And that mismatch is becoming a critical and largely unaddressed risk for organizations.

What If Work Isn’t a Ladder Anymore?

Imagine work not as a ladder to climb, but as a Lego set,  a shifting collection of skills and capabilities you constantly reassemble.

No more static titles.

No more fixed career paths. Only dynamic recomposition, again and again.

Already, leading organizations are moving toward skills-based workforce models.

Internal talent marketplaces. Project-based staffing. Agile career moves.

According to Deloitte, 63 percent of organizations are actively transitioning toward skills-based hiring and workforce strategies, shifting away from static job titles toward dynamic, skills-driven approaches.

The shape of work is changing faster than job titles can catch up.

But while work is becoming more fluid, professional identities are still rigid.

The winners will not be the ones clinging to their old Lego castles.

They are ready to dump the bricks on the table, grab new instructions, and build again.

And L&D’s job is no longer just reskilling.

It is helping people grieve their old roles and rebuild new ones, again and again.

The Identity Gap: A Deeper Challenge for L&D

If the future of work is a future of fluidity, what does that mean for L&D?

Maybe the next great challenge isn’t just closing skill gaps.

Maybe it’s preparing people to let go of who they thought they were.

It means shifting our focus:

From training for new roles to preparing people for role reinvention.

From upskilling technical competencies to cultivating identity agility.

From protecting careers to equipping people to rebuild careers, repeatedly.

But how?

This isn’t about adding another module to your learning catalogue.

It’s about reframing what L&D is for.

It could mean creating spaces for professional unlearning, helping employees deconstruct old narratives about who they are and what they do.

It might mean fostering dynamic career mapping, using living documents updated quarterly to reflect emerging skills, interests, and aspirations rather than relying on static resumes.

It could require building psychological safety around reinvention by normalizing the idea that to thrive, you must sometimes dismantle and rebuild your professional identity.

Because if people stay attached to old titles, old successes, and old definitions of self, no amount of reskilling will matter.

A Harder Question: Can We Measure It?

Skills can be assessed.

Certifications can be issued.

But how do you know if someone is becoming identity agile?

We might need to look for new signals:

Role Fluidity: How often are employees transitioning across tasks, projects, and domains?

Identity Renewal Rate: What percentage of employees report a shift in how they define themselves professionally over the past year?

Adaptation Velocity: How quickly do people pivot into new types of work after disruption?

Recomposition Confidence: How ready do employees feel to recombine their skills for new challenges?

Harder to track, yes.

But surely more predictive of resilience than traditional learning metrics.

The Big Shift

The future of work will not be a straight line.

It will be a constant reassembly.

And the companies that win will not just be the ones that close skills gaps the fastest.

They will be the ones that close identity gaps — helping people detach from obsolete roles and reattach to new value-creating opportunities.

If we only focus on skills, we risk fixing symptoms and missing root causes.

If we tackle the identity gap head-on, we might just future-proof not only our organizations but also our people.

Maybe the real challenge isn’t teaching people what to learn.

Maybe it’s teaching them how to become.

And maybe, just maybe, the future of L&D isn’t just about building skills.

It’s about guiding reinvention.

Maybe the real question for L&D is not: How do we close the skills gap fast enough?

Maybe it is: How do we help people cross the harder gap, the gap between who they have been and who they might need to become?

— G