Yesterday’s skills: a brake on digital transformation
Resistance to change is often presented as a problem of attitude. Some employees are said to be averse to new technologies, too attached to their habits, or simply unwilling to change the way they work. That explanation is far too simple, particularly when a company undertakes a major digital transformation.
The people who express the greatest reservations may in fact be among the most competent employees in the organization. They know the systems in depth, understand their weaknesses, know how to resolve incidents, and sometimes hold certifications earned after several years of training and experience. Their expertise is genuinely valuable to the company and often contributes directly to the stability of its operations.
When leadership contemplates a major technological change, however, it may be calling into question far more than a piece of software or an infrastructure. For some employees, that transformation touches their expertise, their professional standing, their confidence in their own abilities, their career prospects, and sometimes even their sense of job security.
The challenge for leadership then becomes particularly delicate. These specialists hold precisely the knowledge needed to identify the risks associated with a transformation, but their relationship with the existing technologies can also influence their perception of the solutions being considered. A successful digital transformation therefore requires distinguishing real technological risk, the normal risk associated with any transition, and the human concerns that change can naturally provoke.
When expertise also becomes a comfort zone
Becoming a specialist in a technological environment takes time. A professional may have devoted ten or fifteen years to mastering a platform, taken numerous training courses, obtained certifications, taken part in several implementations, and accumulated experience found in no manual. Over time, that expertise gives them an important place in the organization. When a problem arises, they get the call. When a decision has to be made, they are asked for advice. When a new employee arrives, they often become the reference point.
That competence naturally ends up becoming part of their professional identity. So when leadership announces that it is considering replacing a technology they have mastered completely, it is not simply asking them to learn a new tool. It may be calling into question part of what allowed them to become an expert and to build their professional value within the company.
Imagine an organization that has used a Microsoft environment for several years and has employees who are specialized and certified in those technologies. Leadership now wants to evaluate certain open source solutions in order to gain more flexibility, enable certain customizations, reduce some costs, or lessen its dependence on a single vendor. For leadership, this is a strategic decision that deserves to be assessed objectively. For the specialist in the current environment, the situation can be far more personal.
They may legitimately wonder how long it will take them to reach the same level of competence in the new environment, whether their certifications will retain their value, whether the company will recruit new specialists, whether their role will change, and even whether their job will still be needed. The resistance that then appears is not necessarily an irrational rejection of progress. It may stem from a perfectly understandable concern in the face of a transformation that redistributes the value of skills.
When concern speaks the language of expertise
The problem becomes more complex when that concern is expressed through technical arguments. An experienced specialist has enough knowledge to identify a multitude of potential problems in a technology they know less well. They can raise perfectly legitimate questions about security, compatibility, support, integrations, available skills, updates, reliability, continuity of operations, or migration costs.
Each of these risks deserves to be examined. The difficulty is determining how significant they actually are. A human concern about change can, sometimes unconsciously, amplify certain risks associated with the new technology while minimizing those of the current environment. The manager who does not have the same technical depth may then find it very difficult to distinguish a major obstacle from a problem that is perfectly manageable within a well-prepared transition.
Familiar technologies also enjoy a considerable advantage in this kind of comparison. An organization knows the outages, limitations, costs, integration problems, and workarounds of its current environment. Those difficulties have become familiar and the teams know how to manage them. They therefore end up being seen as part of normal operation.
A new technology is assessed through a different lens. Its difficulties are still unknown, skills have to be acquired, and the methods for resolving problems have not yet been mastered. The risk is then of comparing the known and accepted shortcomings of the current environment with all the potential problems of the new one. That comparison can give the status quo an appearance of safety it does not necessarily deserve.
The status quo is also a risky decision
Every technological transformation involves risks, but deciding to change nothing is also a strategic decision with consequences of its own. A company may hold on to a technology that has become too costly, continue to depend excessively on one vendor, maintain inefficient processes, accumulate technical debt, or delay adopting capabilities its competitors are already beginning to benefit from.
In some cases, resistance to change can therefore protect the organization against an immediate risk while gradually increasing a far more significant risk to its development, its competitiveness, and ultimately its long-term viability. That is why a serious analysis should never be limited to asking what risks are associated with the change. It must also measure the risks, costs, and missed opportunities associated with maintaining the current situation.
This distinction becomes particularly important when markets are evolving quickly. A technology that works perfectly today can gradually become a constraint if it limits automation, the integration of new solutions, the use of artificial intelligence, or the company’s ability to change its processes quickly. The fact that a system still works therefore does not necessarily mean it remains the best choice for the future.
Turning existing expertise into a driver of change
Recognizing this tension certainly does not mean that leadership should bypass its internal specialists when preparing a transformation. That would be a major mistake. The people who know the existing environment deeply are often best placed to identify dependencies, critical processes, historical particularities, and risks that an external party could easily underestimate.
Their expertise must therefore be built into the change. How that expertise is called upon, however, can considerably alter the dynamic. Asking a specialist only to identify the problems with a new technology naturally leads them to adopt a defensive posture. Asking them instead to determine the conditions necessary for a successful transition mobilizes the same knowledge in a constructive direction.
The specialist can then help identify the systems that will have to be adapted, the skills to develop, the testing required, the critical processes to protect, the risks to control, and a reasonable period of coexistence between the environments. Their expertise remains essential, but it now serves to build the transformation rather than merely to defend the existing environment.
This approach also preserves a very important part of the organization’s intellectual capital. An experienced specialist often has knowledge of processes, users, data, and operational realities that goes well beyond the technology they specialized in. When they learn a new environment, that knowledge does not disappear. On the contrary, it can allow them to quickly become far more relevant than a new specialist who has fully mastered the technology but does not yet know the company.
Evolving skills before they become a problem
Training then becomes a strategic component of the transformation. When an organization waits until the new technology has been chosen and the migration is imminent before training its employees, it naturally increases uncertainty and resistance. Employees may feel that the change is being imposed on them and that they now have to rapidly catch up with a shift decided without them.
A more gradual approach creates a different dynamic. Employees can explore the technologies under consideration, take part in pilot projects, compare different solutions, and develop new skills while their current expertise remains fully useful. The transformation then also becomes an opportunity for professional development.
A Microsoft specialist can develop Linux and open source skills while retaining the value of their current experience. A system administrator can deepen their cloud expertise. An analyst can learn to integrate artificial intelligence into their working methods. A cybersecurity professional can develop skills in post-quantum cryptography. The transformation of the company and that of individual skills can thus advance together.
This approach is particularly important because the most durable skill is no longer necessarily absolute mastery of one particular technology. In an environment where platforms, artificial intelligence models, architectures, and cybersecurity methods evolve rapidly, the ability to learn and to transfer knowledge from one environment to another takes on growing value.
Artificial intelligence considerably amplifies the phenomenon
Artificial intelligence makes this issue even more important because it now affects functions well beyond IT teams. Analysts, accountants, programmers, marketing professionals, lawyers, engineers, managers, and customer service representatives are already seeing parts of their work change.
Some tasks that previously required a great deal of time or particular expertise can be accelerated or partly automated. At the same time, new skills become necessary: knowing how to validate results, structure knowledge, govern data, supervise agents, determine permissions, and understand the risks associated with using these systems.
For the employee, the question therefore goes well beyond using a new tool. They want to understand what their place in the organization will be once that tool can perform part of what they used to do. A company that responds solely by presenting productivity gains leaves a fundamental human question unanswered.
A transformation strategy must therefore explain how roles will evolve, which skills will become more important, and how employees will be able to take part in that evolution. Training and support then cease to be peripheral change-management activities. They become investments in the organization’s future capability.
The quality of the decision depends on the diversity of perspectives
A major transformation should not be assessed solely by the specialists of the existing environment, because a bias in favor of the status quo can naturally appear. Nor should it be decided solely by consultants, vendors, or advocates enthusiastic about a new technology, who might underestimate the complexity of the operational environment.
The quality of the decision comes from the constructive confrontation of several perspectives. Internal teams know the systems and their history. Users understand the processes. Leadership knows the strategic objectives. Finance leaders assess the economic constraints. Cybersecurity specialists analyze the risks. External experts can bring complementary knowledge, experience from other environments, and a view less influenced by the organization’s historical technology choices.
The objective is to bring these perspectives together in order to distinguish real risks, transition constraints, and the resistance provoked by uncertainty. This collaboration also helps prevent external experts from being seen as an additional threat. Their role should be to strengthen the existing teams, broaden their analytical capacity, and pass on the knowledge the organization needs to subsequently maintain and evolve its new environment itself.
Support does, however, have its limits
An organization must give its employees a reasonable opportunity to learn, to understand the changes, and to evolve their skills. This responsibility is essential, particularly when the transformation profoundly changes working methods or the technologies used.
That responsibility, however, runs in both directions. Employees must also accept that their professional skills evolve. Technologies change, markets change, customer expectations change, and cybersecurity threats evolve. Expertise that is extremely valuable today can gradually lose its relevance if it remains frozen in place.
When training, support, and opportunities to grow are available and the refusal to change remains systematic, individual resistance can end up creating a collective risk. A company cannot indefinitely forgo a transformation necessary to its development or its long-term viability in order to fully preserve the methods and skills that supported its past.
This is probably one of the most difficult paradoxes of digital transformation: the skills that contributed to an organization’s success for ten or fifteen years can end up slowing its preparation for the years ahead if they are treated as immutable.
Resistance to technological change does not necessarily stem from a lack of willingness. It can appear precisely where the organization has the most expertise. A professional who has devoted years to mastering a technology has good reason to want to understand what a transformation will mean for their responsibilities, their skills, and their future.
A successful transformation must recognize this reality and allow internal specialists to take part in building the new environment. It must give them the opportunity to develop their skills, value the knowledge they already hold, and create the conditions needed for their expertise to evolve with the organization. It must also give executives the means to distinguish real technological risks from the normal concerns provoked by the unknown, while assessing with equal rigor the consequences of change and those of the status quo.
At Quantum Beyond, this dimension is an integral part of our approach to organizational and technological transformation. Our experts work alongside the teams in place in order to bring complementary skills, an outside perspective, and an analytical capacity that strengthen the knowledge already present in the company. A lasting transformation must allow technologies, processes, governance, and human skills to evolve together.
A company cannot sustain its transformation by leaving its employees behind. Neither can it protect its future by maintaining indefinitely the technologies and skills of the past.
The real challenge consists in turning acquired expertise into a capacity for learning, so that the people who helped build today’s organization can also take full part in building tomorrow’s.