A 47-year-old finance director sat across from me last month and said something that stuck.
“Adrian, I’ve been using Claude for my Financial Analysis for the past year and a half… I’m so reliant on it that I’ve almost forgotten how to do it manually!”
I was both amused and worried at the same time, because whilst everyone was debating whether AI will replace jobs, almost nobody was talking about what it’s doing to our skills underlying those jobs, right now, while we’re still employed.
This bothers the Medical Professional a great deal, where a surgeon’s skills are paramount – and a recent study conducted by a Medical Journal highlighted 3 ways AI can damage our Skills Currency – and I find it instructive as it affects our own careers as well. Here they are:
1. De-skilling: When Your Skill Is Forgotten Due To Lack Of Practice
I can show you how you’ve already been deskilled by technology. Try it.
- Mentally calculate what a 15% discount off a pack of coffee beans costing $8.50 without using a calculator
- Recall what your best friend or boss’s mobile number is without referring to your handphone
- Tell me what are the 3 key meetings you have scheduled for next Thursday, without checking your Outlook Calendar app.
I confess, I can’t do all three … the part of my brain that used to do that went out of fashion about 6 years ago.
We used to build financial models by hand, tab by tab, line by line, and you understood every assumption baked into it… but now, the AI builds it in 50 seconds and you review the output instead of building the logic yourself.
I know of an LinkedIn ‘Influencer’ who shared with me that after 12 months of having AI generate her weekly posts, she’s forgotten how to ideate and write her thoughts manually!
De-skilling happens to people who already had the skill but lost it. It’s reversible if caught early, but it only gets worse if ignored – and it’s sad to see a good skill atrophy.
2. Never-skilling: When Your Skill Is Never Built At All
This one’s newer, and honestly more dangerous because it hits the people with the least power to notice: the Juniors.
When the World-wide-web was ‘invented’ in 1994, I was a young undergrad who learnt how to manually code in HTML with a TEXT EDITOR! With the introduction of WYSIWYG Editors, nobody needed to code anymore – just drag and drop! Today, few web-designers can read html code.
Anthropic ran a study earlier this year with junior software engineers. Half used an AI assistant to learn a new tool, half coded by hand. Everyone got quizzed on the concepts straight after. The AI group averaged 50%. The hand-coding group averaged 67%, nearly two letter grades ahead.
Fresh graduates who never learnt from ‘First Principles’ and rely too heavily on technology to do the heavy lifting for them will miss out on fundamental skills – that would put them at a disadvantage in the long run – using technology as a crutch rather than an edge.
A Mentor once told me, “Struggle isn’t the enemy…it’s where the skill gets honed.”
3. Mis-skilling: When You Over-rely On AI… Wrongly
This is the one that should worry you most, by golly, because you might not even see it coming!
Mis-skilling is when someone accepts an AI’s error without checking it, and files that wrong answer away as fact. They’re not rusty nor ignorant… They’re either too lazy to double check, or have such implicit trust in the AI that they surrendered all logic to it.
A hiring manager I coach used AI to screen resumes and draft rejection reasoning for months. After a while, he started believing his AI’s decisions so much that he never questioned the decisions his AI was making. He was rejecting real candidates without checking until his boss questioned one of ‘his’ decisions and he could not justify it… That’s mis-skilling.
When you lose faith in your own decisions and believe whatever slop your AI is spitting out, I’m afraid you are exposing yourself to making mistakes you cannot legitimately defend.
What This Means For Your Career Currencies
Skill Currency has always had an expiry date. What’s changed is that it can now expire in three different ways at once, and two of them don’t feel like anything is wrong until someone tests you.
So here’s the question I’d ask yourself this week. Where in your work have you stopped doing the first draft yourself? That’s where to look first, because that’s where the erosion, or the gap, or the false confidence is most likely building, whether you’ve noticed it or not.
I’d genuinely like to know: which of the three worries you most for your own career, or your team’s?
#CareerAgility #FutureOfWork #AIAndWork #ExecutiveCareers #SkillCurrency
