The hidden employability debt created by technology, processes and ways of working that no longer evolve
There is a particular type of professional I regularly meet in my work. They have done almost everything we traditionally consider right.
They joined a solid company. They stayed loyal. They performed. They took on responsibility. They developed considerable expertise. They earn a good salary, enjoy good benefits and sometimes work for a prestigious organization.
Then, after 10, 15 or 20 years, something changes. A restructuring. New management. A redundancy. Or simply the desire to do something else. And suddenly, an uncomfortable reality emerges:
They have a great deal of experience, but part of that experience has gradually lost its value on the external market.
They have not stopped working. They have not stopped performing. They have not become less competent. Their professional environment simply stopped evolving at the same pace as the market.
While their organization accumulated technological, methodological and organizational debt, they accumulated something else: Employability Debt.
When 20 years of experience no longer mean 20 years of market-relevant experience
I have seen this particularly among experienced professionals in finance and accounting. Imagine someone who has spent many years working for a major Swiss corporation.
The company is solid. The salary is good. The benefits are attractive. Training is available. The employee is respected and has no obvious reason to leave. But look more closely at how the work is actually performed.
The systems are old. Many processes remain manual. Reporting has barely evolved. Data still moves largely through spreadsheets. Modern ERP capabilities are absent or underused. Automation remains limited and AI has barely entered day-to-day workflows.
Inside that organization, this person may be extremely competent — perhaps even indispensable.
Then they enter the external labour market. And the reference point changes.
Elsewhere, professionals doing similar jobs may have spent years working with modern ERP environments, analytics, collaborative systems, automation, structured project methodologies and, increasingly, AI-enabled workflows.
Our candidate may have 20 years of experience. But another question has to be asked:
How much of those 20 years still represents experience the market values today?
That is employability debt. And it can accumulate almost without being noticed.
The trap: professional obsolescence can be comfortable
When a company is in serious trouble, the warning signs are usually visible. When you are badly paid or working in a toxic environment, you generally know it. Professional obsolescence is much more discreet.
It can even be extremely comfortable.
Your salary arrives every month. You know the organization. You understand how decisions are really made. You know the informal processes. You know where the information is and who to call when something goes wrong.
Every year, your institutional knowledge increases and you become more valuable inside that ecosystem. But internal value and external market value are not necessarily the same thing.
That is the trap: You can become increasingly indispensable to your employer while becoming progressively less employable to everyone else.
And sometimes you only discover it when you need to leave.
This is much bigger than technology
It would be too easy to reduce employability debt to outdated IT. It can take several forms.
- There is technology debt: obsolete systems, fragmented tools, manual interfaces and endless workarounds.
- There is process debt: duplicated tasks, unnecessary approvals, undocumented procedures and spreadsheets that have become unofficial information systems.
- There is methodological debt: weak project discipline, poor documentation, limited continuous improvement and insufficient use of data.
- There is collaboration debt: silos, information belonging to individuals rather than the organization and limited exposure to cross-functional ways of working.
- And there is behavioural and cultural debt.
Professional norms evolve too. Expectations around leadership, communication, confidentiality, collaboration, accountability and management behaviour have changed substantially.
Spending 15 or 20 years in a relatively closed environment can lead people to normalize practices that other organizations abandoned years ago.
Employability is therefore not simply about knowing the latest tools. The real question is whether your entire professional operating system has continued to evolve.
When Excel becomes the symptom
I recently encountered an organization where significant parts of the business were still coordinated mainly through spreadsheets. Excel was not the problem. The problem was everything that was missing around it.
Limited shared systems. Limited workflow management. Limited project methodology. Limited collaborative planning. Limited traceability. Information was organized around people rather than processes.
Over time, employees risk receiving too little exposure to practices that have become standard elsewhere.
- Buying new software does not automatically solve that problem.
- Installing Teams does not create collaboration.
- Installing an ERP does not create process discipline.
- Giving every employee an AI assistant does not create an AI-enabled organization.
Technology enables new behaviours. It does not automatically create them.
AI is now accelerating the gap
This phenomenon existed long before generative AI. But AI is accelerating it considerably.
Recent work by the OECD and ILO points in the same direction: the ability to work with AI, apply critical judgement, collaborate, adapt and use digital tools effectively is becoming increasingly relevant across a growing number of occupations.
Now imagine two professionals doing essentially the same job today.
Over the next three years, one learns to use AI to research information, analyse data, automate repetitive tasks, produce documents, create workflows and rethink processes.
The other continues working much as before because their organization provides neither the tools, the framework nor the opportunity to experiment.
Three years later, the difference between them will not simply be knowledge of a particular technology. They will have developed different ways of working. And potentially very different value on the labour market.
Don’t modernize yesterday’s organization
Some organizations are now realizing that they have accumulated years of technological and process debt. They launch major transformation programmes. Processes are mapped. Systems are evaluated. Budgets are committed. Three years later, they may successfully implement what they probably should have had five years earlier.
Meanwhile, AI and automation have moved the possibilities forward again. Catching up therefore cannot be the only objective.
- Before digitizing an old process, ask whether that process should still exist.
- Before automating twelve steps, ask whether twelve steps are still necessary.
And most importantly:
If we created this department today from scratch, using the technologies now available, would we still design it this way?
Sometimes the right strategy is not to reproduce every stage we missed.
It is to skip some of them. That does not mean chasing every new technological trend. Organizations need stability, governance, cybersecurity, data protection, interoperability and return on investment. But there is a fundamental difference between technological stability and professional stagnation.
The objective should be continuous professional relevance.
Companies have a responsibility too
Organizations talk extensively about employee development. But they usually measure it against their own internal needs.
- Can this person perform their current role?
- Have they completed their training?
- Can they take on more responsibility?
I would add another question:
If this employee entered the external labour market tomorrow, would the professional experience we are giving them today still have value?
When a company employs someone for 15 years, it does not simply benefit from 15 years of work. It also helps create 15 years of professional experience. And the quality of that experience matters.
Of course, individuals remain responsible for their own careers.
They need to stay curious. Observe the market. Understand how their profession is evolving. Continue learning. Look beyond their own organization. But telling employees to take ownership of their employability while keeping them 40 hours a week inside outdated systems and practices is not a credible talent strategy.
Employability is a shared responsibility.
Training is not enough
An organization can provide hundreds of courses and still create employability debt. An employee can complete 50 hours of training and return every Monday morning to exactly the same working environment.
Because the real learning environment is the work itself.
- What tools are employees actually using?
- What methodologies are they practising?
- Are they working cross-functionally?
- How much of their work remains manual?
- What are they learning to automate?
- Are they developing AI literacy?
- Are they learning to challenge a process rather than simply execute it?
That is the real professional development curriculum.
Give people permission to experiment
Organizations should create controlled environments where employees can experiment with modern tools and AI on real business problems.
- Give people access to the technology.
- Train them.
- Establish clear rules around confidentiality, personal data, cybersecurity and intellectual property.
Then ask a simple question:
What part of your work should disappear? Not your job. Your work.
- Which repetitive task could be automated?
- Which spreadsheet could become a workflow?
- Which meeting no longer creates sufficient value?
- Which analysis could AI accelerate?
- Which process still exists simply because nobody has challenged it?
Experiment. Measure. Scale what creates value. Stop what does not.
That is not technological anarchy.
It is managed experimentation.
Should we measure Employability Debt?
We measure engagement, performance, turnover, training and competencies. Perhaps we should also measure:
the distance between our internal professional environment and the external market.
For each major professional population, organizations should periodically ask:
- What technologies is the market now using?
- What methodologies?
- What AI capabilities?
- What collaboration practices?
- What professional standards?
- What has changed in this profession during the last three years?
- And how much exposure are our people actually getting to those changes?
Then comes the most uncomfortable question:
If we had to restructure this department tomorrow, how many of our employees could realistically find an equivalent position elsewhere within six months?
The answer would tell us a great deal about the quality of the professional environment we have created.
Every professional should perform the same audit
We should all regularly ask ourselves: Am I good at my job?
And immediately afterwards: Is the job I am doing today keeping me good at my profession?
Those are two very different questions.
You can be indispensable internally while gradually losing relevance externally. You can possess extraordinary institutional knowledge while your market value declines. That is why career management cannot begin on the day you lose your job.
By then, employability debt may already have been accumulating for years.
Don’t automate yesterday. Redesign tomorrow
Nobody knows exactly what our jobs will look like five years from now. That is precisely why employees need opportunities to learn today. The organizations that interest me most are not necessarily those claiming to have the perfect AI strategy.
They are those giving their people controlled access to technology, training them, establishing sensible rules and allowing them to experiment with real work.
The risk may no longer simply be allowing employees to experiment.
The risk is also preventing them from learning while the rest of their profession moves forward.
Leadership should therefore ask two questions:
Are we giving our employees good jobs today?
And, more importantly:
Are the jobs we are giving them today preparing them for tomorrow?
Companies can replace technology.
- They can migrate data.
- They can redesign processes.
- They can buy another ERP.
Employees have something considerably more difficult to replace:
Time.
And when an organization spends ten years standing still, it may unknowingly hold back ten years of somebody else’s career as well.
