Skill Gaps Are Widening in 2026 — Here's Why HR Leaders Are Turning to Certifications
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- 5 min read
Skill Gaps Are Widening in 2026
If you work in HR or L&D anywhere in Asia Pacific right now, you already feel it: skill gaps in 2026 are widening between the skills your people have and the skills your business needs, even as AI tools promise to close that gap. New global research confirms what many leaders have been sensing on the ground for the past year.
According to CompTIA's newly released Workforce and Learning Trends 2026 report, a survey of 1,049 HR and L&D professionals conducted in April 2026, skill-building has officially moved from a nice-to-have into a board-level priority. The numbers are striking, and so are the implications for how organizations plan their training budgets, evaluate candidates, and measure return on learning investment for the rest of the year.
The Headline Number: 83% Now Call Skills a Top Priority
A net 83% of HR professionals and IT leaders surveyed said their organization places a very high or moderately high priority on closing skill gaps. That is not a minor shift in sentiment. It reflects a structural change in how companies think about talent: skills are no longer treated as a department-level concern handled quietly by HR. They are now a company-wide growth lever, discussed in the same conversations as revenue targets and digital transformation roadmaps.
Larger companies are leading the charge. The report found that organizations with bigger headcounts are more likely to rank skill-building as a very high priority, simply because the payoff from upskilling scales faster across a bigger workforce. For mid-sized and growing companies across the Philippines, Singapore, and the wider region, this is a useful signal: the competitive advantage of acting early on skills development compounds as the organization grows.
AI Is a Major Driver, But It's Not Acting Alone
It would be easy to assume AI is the single cause of today's skill gaps. The data tells a more nuanced story. While AI is accelerating the pace of change, a notable share of organizations say skill gaps are driven by a mix of AI and other technology shifts working together, not AI in isolation.
This matters for how training budgets get allocated. A narrow focus on AI literacy alone risks leaving teams under-equipped for the broader wave of digital transformation happening alongside it, from cloud migration to data infrastructure to cybersecurity readiness. The report also found that 62% of HR professionals and IT leaders expect AI training budgets specifically to increase over the next year, which tracks with what we're seeing across our own event communities in hrX and dataAIX circles.
Foundational AI skills for the broader workforce ranked as the top AI training need overall, ahead of more advanced or specialized applications. In other words, before companies chase AI agents and automation, most are still working to get the basics right across their teams. That mirrors conversations we've heard repeatedly at our own hrX Manila events, where HR directors consistently say AI fluency, not AI mastery, is this year's first checkpoint.
Productivity, Retention, and Engagement Are All on the Line
Productivity remains the single biggest motivator behind workforce development efforts, ranking first across nearly every company size segment except small businesses. But the report uncovers a more layered picture beneath that headline. HR professionals lean toward using skill development as a tool for engagement and retention, while IT leaders are more focused on connecting training directly to organizational goals.
Burnout, anxiety, and limited promotion pathways were cited as the leading drivers of low performance and flight risk, with burnout topping the list at 52%. Interestingly, HR professionals reported higher concern about burnout than IT leaders did, even though tech roles are often assumed to carry the heavier stress load. The takeaway for leadership teams: a well-structured development program is not just a skills fix, it is also a retention strategy. The report found that the large majority of organizations expect skill development to meaningfully improve employee morale and engagement.
Why Only 1 in 3 Companies Have a Real Upskilling Program
Here's the uncomfortable part of the data. Despite all the enthusiasm around skills-based talent strategies, only 34% of companies report having a formal, organization-wide program for upskilling or reskilling current employees. Most of the activity to date has gone into skills-based hiring rather than developing the people already on the team.
Even fewer organizations are customizing that training. Skill assessments, the most basic step toward personalized learning paths, are used by just over half of companies overall, and the rate drops among the very largest enterprises, where the sheer scale of the workforce makes individual assessment harder to execute. Cost remains the top-cited barrier for HR professionals, while IT leaders are more worried about proving ROI and avoiding outdated curricula.
Certifications Are Becoming the Proof Point Leaders Trust
This is where the report's findings get especially relevant for anyone building a learning strategy this year. A full 97% of respondents said certifications play an important role in validating workforce training programs, and 59% now rate this validation step as very important, up from 56% in last year's edition of the same study.
Certifications solve a specific problem: they give managers a fast, credible way to confirm that training actually produced the intended skill, rather than just attendance. Half of respondents pointed to alignment with specific job roles as the top benefit certifications bring to candidate evaluation, which is consistent with the broader shift away from degree requirements as the default proxy for capability.
This shift toward verifiable, role-aligned credentials is exactly the conversation playing out at our own retailX Singapore 2026 sessions on talent strategy, where retail and e-commerce leaders are asking the same question CompTIA's data answers: how do we know the training worked? Certifications are emerging as one of the clearest answers available right now.
What This Means for HR and L&D Teams in Asia Pacific
Budget conversations are shifting. If your organization hasn't yet built a dedicated line item for AI and digital skills training, the data suggests most of your peers already have, or are about to.
Foundational AI training beats advanced training, for now. Get the basics right across the whole workforce before investing heavily in specialized or agentic AI skill-building.
Retention strategy and learning strategy are merging. Framing upskilling purely as a productivity play misses half the value; engagement and morale gains are just as real.
Assessment is the missing step. Before scaling any training program, build in a simple skill assessment step. It is the single most common form of customization among companies that do this well.
Certifications are worth the investment. With 97% of HR and IT leaders affirming their value, certifications are quickly becoming the default way to prove a training dollar was well spent.
Bringing the Conversation to the Region
These themes, AI-driven skill gaps, certification-backed training ROI, and the productivity-retention balance, are exactly what we unpack at Rockbird Media's regional leadership conferences. If your team is building out its 2026 learning roadmap, our upcoming hrX kuala lumpur sessions bring together CHROs, HR directors, and IT leaders tackling this exact gap between skill demand and workforce readiness, with case studies from across the region's fastest-growing industries.
Closing the Skills Gap Starts With the Right Room
Join HR directors, CHROs, and IT leaders from across Asia Pacific at hrX and L&DX to benchmark your workforce strategy against the region's fastest-growing companies.
References
CompTIA. "Workforce and Learning Trends 2026." CompTIA Research, 2026.
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