Wharton - Accenture Special Report - January 2026 Skills
AI Accelerating Shift from Role-Based Labor Market to Skills-Based Economy
AI is accelerating the shift from a role-based labor market to a skills-based economy, sharpening the relevance of the gap between what workers signal and what employers actually reward. To bring clarity to this transition, Wharton and Accenture developed the Wharton-Accenture Skills Index (WAsX), a recurring, empirical benchmark designed to measure which skills matter, which do not and how quickly the economy is shifting beneath us.
The implication is clear: Employers, workers and universities continue to operate in a role-based world while the economy has moved to a skills-based system. WAsX makes this misalignment visible and gives leaders a way to act on it. Employers must define the skills that matter most for their human workforce, breaking roles into their underlying tasks and redesign them around human versus AI-augmented capabilities. They also need to align compensation to the real economics of skills by hiring and developing the capabilities that create value while avoiding paying for those they do not need Employees must redefine their experience not as a series of roles but as a portfolio of specific, high-value skills and target those capabilities to the industries where they are most economically valued. Educators (or at least business schools) must consider rebalancing curricula away from generalist and toward job-ready, economically scarce skills that strengthen their graduates’ employability. The bottom line is that skills are replacing job titles as the currency of the labor market. And for the first time, with WAsX, we can measure which skills matter, which do not and how quickly the economy is shifting beneath us.
Read and download the full report here: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2026-Wharton-Accenture-Report-FNL.pdf
