Since 2023, TR2050 has held panel discussions with senior reward leaders in Zurich, London, Dubai, Stockholm and Boston: six conversations across three continents on how reward is changing. This article is part of a series drawing those discussions together by theme. Here, we look at skills-based pay, and why the conversation is shifting from pricing individual skills to rewarding the ability to adapt.
Skills was one of the areas where TR2050’s reconvened Zurich panel saw genuine movement in 2026. Marc Glaeser, Head of HR for the Specialised Modalities Platform division at Lonza, described a fair amount of investment now going into understanding the skills organisations have and the skills they need, driven partly by the fact that skills are becoming obsolete faster than they used to. The more interesting shift, though, was in the framing.
Uwe Kilian, Vice President of Compensation, Benefits, Performance and Labour Relations at Essity, put it this way: “skills are changing so fast that we are starting to think about how do we deal with change adaptability, and that in itself is the skill actually that the companies are looking for and compensating for”.
Raluca Ciliacu-Hetzer, Senior Vice President for HR and Global Total Rewards at Barry Callebaut Group, offered the practical version of the same idea: rather than trying to price every skill, identify the core capabilities your organisation needs in its current phase, accept that they may become commodities within a few years, and flex the framework around them while they matter.
Olaf Lang, Global Head of Reward at Swiss Re, supplied the realism that keeps the discussion grounded, noting that linking pay to skills is “almost a topic since I joined the industry some 30 years ago” and that traction has stayed limited for a reason: “whatever we do, we want to avoid to add complexity to the already complicated reward system”.
If that sounds like a retreat from the full vision of skills-based pay, the earlier panels in this series explain why it is actually the sensible landing point. In Boston in 2024, Billy Schultz, Global Vice President of Total Rewards at Mars, reminded the room that paying for skills is an old concept enjoying a renewed focus, and pressed the question underneath it all: what is the problem we’re trying to solve?
Manjit Gill, Senior Vice President of Global Total Rewards at Otis Worldwide, argued for selectivity: for genuinely critical skills with tangible return, a premium makes sense, not across the board.
The Dubai panel, that same year, surfaced the two obstacles any more ambitious version runs into. Fermin Diez, total rewards expert and adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore, pointed to the contradiction of hiring people for their skills and then paying them by comparatio, “the recruiting people do it one way, and then the compensation people do it a completely other way, this has to end”, and to the fact that the market data needed to price a skill barely exists. Mariia Lytvyn, former Global Head of Total Rewards at GFG Alliance, showed what can work right now: horizontal growth, where people increase their pay within the same role as they acquire skills, “you learn, you get paid, you stretch your ranges”.
Ashok Pillai, former Senior Vice President of Reward and Wellbeing at BP, told the London panel in 2024 that with skills-based pay the devil is the detail of making it work sustainably, and so far that has been the story of the whole topic.
The idea is not going away, the gig workforce alone guarantees that, but the version taking hold is selective and adaptive rather than wholesale, and it is moving towards rewarding the ability to change as much as any individual skill.