When a colleague sent me an article from The HR Director last week, one question grabbed my attention: “Who owns skills and why does it matter?” It’s a question that should be keeping every management support professional awake at night, yet it rarely makes it onto our radar.

The World Economic Forum estimates that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Let that sink in. Nearly half of what you’re good at today may become significantly less valuable by 2030.

I’ve witnessed this first-hand throughout my career. When I started as an executive assistant in the late 1990s, shorthand and diary management skills were prized assets. Today, they’re either obsolete or automated.

What saved me wasn’t just adapting to new tools, but fundamentally rethinking what skills actually mattered.

The uncomfortable truth about skills ownership

The HR article suggests that skills ownership is shared, by leadership, L&D teams, managers and ultimately employees. That’s a nice, diplomatic answer. The truth is less comfortable.

In executive support, nobody will hand you a skills development roadmap. Your executive isn’t lying awake wondering how to future-proof your skillset. The L&D team is focused on leadership development and technical training. And let’s be honest, many of us support professionals don’t have proper managers who take developmental responsibility for us.

When I worked at a financial services firm during the 2008 crisis, our entire admin team was told to “upskill or be made redundant.” No guidance on which skills to develop. No training budget. Just a sink-or-swim ultimatum.

I watched talented colleagues with decades of experience struggle because they’d been so focused on serving others that they’d forgotten to evolve themselves.

The reality? You own your skills. You alone.

What skills actually matter now

The skills landscape for executive support has shifted dramatically. I recently mentored a C-suite EA who was panicking about her executive’s new AI assistant. “Should I learn how to prompt it better?” she asked. Wrong question entirely.

Her value doesn’t lie in being a better AI prompt engineer than her boss. It lies in skills that AI can’t replicate:

1. Systems integration intelligence: Understanding how information, decisions, and relationships flow through an organisation, and identifying where there are blockages or inefficiencies.
2. Contextual judgment: Knowing when face-to-face interaction is critical and when remote work is more effective, not just for your executive but for entire teams.
3. Network cultivation: Building and maintaining relationships across departmental, hierarchical and geographical boundaries to solve problems when formal channels fail.
4. Change navigation: Helping others adapt to new ways of working without making them feel inadequate or left behind.

When I transitioned from executive assistant to content strategist, I realised that the most valuable skill I’d developed wasn’t writing or editing. It was understanding how information needs to be structured to support decision-making. That skill transferred across roles, industries, and technologies.

The skills tragedy in our profession

During a workshop activity for senior EAs last year, I asked participants to list skills they’d developed in the past three years. Almost everyone listed software skills: Teams, Asana, various AI tools.

When I asked what skills they believed would be most valuable in five years, they struggled. This is the tragedy of our profession: we’re often too busy supporting others’ strategic work to think strategically about our development.

One EA finally said: “My company just spent £20,000 on an AI transcription and summarisation tool. I used to take detailed notes and create action summaries. Now I don’t know what I’m expected to do in those meetings.”

I asked what she was doing instead. “Nothing specific yet,” she replied. “I just sit there.”

This is precisely the skills ownership gap the HR Director article highlights. Her organisation hasn’t considered how her role needs to evolve. And she hasn’t proactively redefined it.

Taking radical ownership of your development

If we accept that 44% of our skills will be disrupted, sitting back and hoping for the best isn’t an option. Here’s what I’ve learned works:

First, stop thinking in terms of tasks and start thinking in terms of problems. When I worked as an EA to a much in-demand CEO, I stopped defining myself as “the person who manages the diary” and started seeing myself as “the person who solves time allocation problems.”

This simple reframing made me proactive about developing skills in decision-making frameworks and priority management.

Second, look for transferable capabilities, not role-specific skills. When I left my publishing role to join a tech startup, I thought I’d be starting from scratch. But what my new employer valued wasn’t my industry knowledge. It was identifying patterns across seemingly unrelated information sources.

Keep a complexity journal of your strategic contributions

Third, create your development metrics. Don’t wait for your annual review. One EA I know keeps a “complexity journal” where she tracks problems she’s solved that no one explicitly asked her to address. Over two years, she’s built an impressive portfolio of strategic contributions that’s led to a newly created operations role.

Fourth, build a personal board of advisors. When I felt my skills stagnating at a previous role, I contacted three former colleagues in different industries and asked them to be my informal mentors. Our quarterly calls force me to articulate what I’m learning and where I’m stuck.

Similarly, my friend Christine became a mentor when I moved to the UK in 1995. Christine is a former EA with many years of training and public speaking experience. She encouraged me to start speaking and training too, which led me to design a full-day training programme that was promoted by Reed Training.

The truth about the future

The future doesn’t belong to those who can perform tasks efficiently. It belongs to those who can navigate complexity effectively.

The executive assistant who masters the latest AI tool will still be replaced by a better tool next year. But the one who understands how to integrate technologies, bridge communication gaps and solve novel problems will always be invaluable.

At this point, I recommend that you join an EA network or management assistant association. I’ve long been very active in International Management Assistants (the one that used to be called EAPS and then became EUMA). But many other organisations provide skills training and have their finger on the pulse of changing needs.

Don’t be too busy serving others to serve your development

I won’t end this with a feel-good platitude about embracing change. The reality is that many in our profession will struggle in the coming years.

The skills disruption won’t be gentle or fair. Some of the most dedicated, hardworking support professionals will find their capabilities devalued. Not because they didn’t care enough, but because they were too busy serving others to serve their development.

Don’t let that be you. Your skills are your responsibility. Your development is your project. And in a decade that’s shaping up to be defined by uncertainty and disruption, your ability to evolve your capabilities might be your only job security.