Talent debt

Talent debt accrues the same way that technical debt does. But the difference with talent debt is that the skill half-life is shrinking substantially. Back in the day, you could go and get a job as a Java engineer and work for 20 years doing Java programming and be okay. But now what we're seeing is that the pace of change is going so fast that the half-life of how long those skills stay relevant is shrinking substantially.

What you get is this skill compression, which then forms into talent debt. A lot of companies are experiencing it now where all of a sudden this race into AI, they look at what they have on the bench and say, "Oh my goodness, we've got nothing even close to what we have to do here."

They have two options then. One is either try to reskill who you have already. Upsides are that you get to keep the strong domain knowledge of the individuals within your team, understand strong system knowledge, and it's good to invest in your people.

The flip side is to try to hire it out. It's faster, but you don't have the domain knowledge, you have ramp time, and you have the the risk of putting the wrong butt in the wrong seat. All of that compounds into this concept of talent debt, which is very similar to technical debt.