What can your people actually do?

There is a surprisingly basic question that many large organisations still struggle to answer.

What can the people who work here actually do?

Not what their job descriptions say. Not what sits in the HR system. Not what they were hired to do three years ago. What can they do now, what have they learned, and where else could those abilities be useful?

Catalina Schveninger has spent much of her career close to that problem.

Across roles at Vodafone, FutureLearn and DataCamp, and now as a fractional Chief People Officer, advisor and investor, she has worked on learning, organisational capability and workforce change at moments when companies were trying to understand what they already had before deciding what they needed next.

She calls the current version of this problem the skills visibility gap.

For years, companies could live with a fairly incomplete picture of their workforce. Roles were stable enough, career paths predictable enough, and managers knew enough about their teams for the system to keep moving.

AI makes that much harder to sustain.

Work is being broken apart into tasks. Some of those tasks can be automated. Others become more valuable. Entire roles can change without disappearing. Yet many organisations are trying to plan for this with data that still describes people mainly through job titles.

Catalina sees that as a strategic risk.

There is also a more uncomfortable side to the enthusiasm around skills.

The idea of a “skills-based organisation” has become attractive partly because it promises to loosen the grip of traditional career structures. In theory, people should be able to move based on what they can contribute rather than whether they have held the right title, followed the expected path or know the right people.

Catalina is wary of assuming that a new system will automatically be a fairer one.

If companies dismantle job-based structures without examining how skills are recognised, who gets access to learning, and whose potential is visible in the first place, they may simply replace one opaque hierarchy with another.

That is one of the conversations she wants to have at FAIR Barcelona.

Her perspective comes partly from her time at Vodafone, where she helped shape a skills-based learning culture before “skills” became one of the dominant themes in HR. The work taught her that learning infrastructure reveals more about a company than the courses it offers.

“The ambition and the budget tell you everything about the learning culture. They also reveal what the organisation believes people are capable of becoming.

That question becomes sharper with AI. Catalina does not see AI readiness as mainly a technical exercise. For many employees, the more difficult adjustment is personal. Tasks that once signalled expertise may disappear or become much easier. People are being asked to learn new tools while also reconsidering what gives them value at work.

Companies tend to treat this as implementation. Catalina thinks they are underestimating the scale of the change.

For her, becoming genuinely skills-based is therefore much larger than an HR initiative. It affects how work is organised, how talent moves, where companies invest and how leaders decide what their workforce might become.

And it raises a question that technology cannot settle for them: when organisations gain a much clearer picture of what people can do, what will they choose to do with that knowledge?

Catalina Schveninger joins us at FAIR Barcelona on 1 October 2026.

👉🏼 Book your seat and catch Catalina for both our skills-dedicated panel and the hands-on practice lab session.

www.faircultures.com/fairbarcelona