Extending work spans in aging Asia: An essential guide to workforce planning
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Will I still be relevant for future work?
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How do I adapt and stay competitive?
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How will compensation and rewards evolve to better suit my needs for a longer, more dynamic work span?
Build meaning and longer work spans with a skills-powered framework
Redesign work to match skills, AI, and longer work spans
Work redesign means breaking jobs into their core tasks and matching each task to the skills needed to do them well. This ensures that roles are clearer, and options are flexible to enable employees to remain productive longer. This also allows flexibility for older employees by modularizing roles, enabling fractional or phased work arrangements, and allowing tasks and hours to be adjusted to better match changing capacities and life needs.
Organizations can start with these three steps:
- Deconstructing jobs: Break down jobs into component tasks or projects to understand the work’s nature, purpose, delivery, and who performs it.
- Redeploying tasks: Analyze tasks to determine which can be automated or handled through alternative arrangements like gig work, internal talent marketplaces, outsourcing, or shared services.
- Reconstructing work: Strategically reorganize work by creating new jobs and workflows that optimize available talent and work options.
Pilot in a focused area where change will matter most. Run small internal mobility tests, try task redeployment, and track outcomes such as productivity, time to fill, and employee engagement. In the age of AI, redesigning work also means planning for human-AI teaming: Move routine, high-volume tasks to automation and design roles so that talent can focus on critical thinking, relationships, and oversight.
Work redesign creates agility, but it is not enough on its own. To manage a skills-powered workforce at scale, organizations need to include structural changes to performance management, career development, and compensation programs.
A skills-powered workforce: Three ways to measure value and increase employee engagement
When people contribute skills across teams and contexts, they want recognition and fair assessment supported by current data. Mercer’s 2025/26 Skills Snapshot Survey shows that 76% of organizations in Asia are already bringing skills into performance management. However, nearly half still lack a consistent proficiency scale, which makes it hard to compare capabilities fairly across teams or individuals. Where organizations measure proficiency, a five-level scale is the most common.
To make performance management truly skills-based, use centralized skills data, analytics, and AI within an integrated HR technology stack. Real-time insights can shed light on skills gaps and strengths. The result is continuous performance feedback that is evidence-led and development-focused that links to career moves and rewards.
With performance management aligned to skills mastery, the next step is to translate assessments into clear career pathways. According to Global Talent Trends 2026, employees in Asia now rank not having the right skills for available jobs as their top concern about the future of work, up from seventh place in 2024. This makes it vital for organizations to have access to continuous, accurate skills intelligence so they can promote transparent skills pathways, redeploy talent, and prioritize learning investment needed for both upward progression and lateral moves.
Promoting internal mobility lets people apply and broaden their skills in new roles, while modular learning and mentoring create personalized development journeys. Centralizing skills intelligence and using analytics to pinpoint gaps and prioritize learning investments builds a culture of continuous development, keeping employees engaged and better prepared for changing business demands.
By linking compensation and rewards to skills, organizations motivate employees to upgrade or develop new capabilities. This approach encourages continuous learning and development, aligns rewards with business priorities, and helps close critical skill gaps.
While the benefits of directly linking compensation to skills are known, only 27% of organizations currently have a pay-for-skills program in place, based on the 2025/2026 Skills Snapshot Survey. This gap highlights the struggles companies have with effectively integrating skills into rewards and compensation strategies.
Start a pay-for-skills program with these five steps:
- Define and standardize skills: Build a clear, consistent skills taxonomy that covers both technical and soft skills relevant to your business.
- Assess and validate skills: Use objective assessments, manager evaluations, and self-assessments to measure your employees’ skill levels. Combine multiple data points to create a reliable picture of skills mastery.
- Link skills to compensation frameworks: Establish pay bands or salary ranges based on skill proficiency levels and define how skills progression translates into pay increases, bonuses, or promotions.
- Integrate with performance and career development: Embed skills data into performance management helps employees understand how developing specific skills can lead to rewards and advancement
- Leverage technology and analytics: Use centralized skills data platforms and analytics tools to track skill development, identify gaps and monitor the impact of pay-for-skills programs to make informed decisions and continue program improvement.