What Professional Services Leaders Are Talking About
The dominant tension in professional services right now isn't about growth strategy or market expansion—it's about people readiness. Leaders are wrestling with a stark reality: it takes two years to get a new engineer or scientist fully productive, college graduates arrive without the "power skills" needed for client work, and competitors are poaching talent the moment firms finish training them. Meanwhile, Technology factor scores just jumped +0.73 points, the largest shift this period, as AI investments accelerate faster than workforce development programs can keep pace.
Priorities & Pain Points
New and rising priorities center on workforce acceleration. Leaders are laser-focused on getting new scientists and engineers job-ready quickly—ideally cutting that two-year ramp time to six months or a year. Teaching both technical and "power skills" (resilience, professional accountability, adaptability) to new grads has become urgent, as has investing heavily in AI technology for engineering tools. Providing clear career paths within firms is now a retention imperative.
The pain is acute and specific: college doesn't adequately prepare students for real-world engineering. New graduates can pass exams but struggle with practical application and lack the professional behaviors that client-facing work demands. The two-year productivity gap is crushing utilization metrics—chargeability and billability are the top success measures firms track. Adding insult to injury, competitors routinely poach these Langan-trained engineers after 3-5 years, precisely when the investment starts paying off. Employees also get bored doing the same project types repeatedly, creating internal retention risk.
Notably, Operations scores dropped -0.50 points this period, the steepest decline, suggesting execution challenges are intensifying even as strategic priorities clarify.
Buying Signals & Red Flags
Strong buying signals emerge when leaders recognize their core business model depends entirely on people skills—making workforce readiness directly tied to the bottom line. The two-year ramp-up pain point is creating urgency to accelerate onboarding and training. There's explicit acknowledgment that college degrees teach exam passing, not practical engineering or power skills, signaling need for internal training solutions. The 3-5 year poaching problem is driving investment in career pathing and development programs. Rapid tech shifts, particularly AI, are forcing investments in new capabilities and employees with learning agility.
Red flags that kill deals: lack of preparedness from college education (this validates the problem but suggests institutional distrust), absence of power skills development in proposed solutions, and any offering that doesn't help employees see a clear career path within the firm. Leaders are allergic to people "wanting to do the same thing indefinitely"—tools or programs that don't enable variety and growth are non-starters.
Language & Jargon Watch
"Power skills" has emerged as the preferred term—not soft skills—for resilience, accountability, and professional comportment. Leaders are speaking in hard metrics: utilization, chargeability, billability. The phrase "up and running" (as in "within six months") is code for productive and billable.
New decision frameworks dominate the conversation: on-the-job training with buddy systems (peer coaches for intensive first six months), skill-based career pathing (diverse projects to maintain engagement), and learning agility as a hiring criterion (can they adapt to AI and future shifts?).
Emerging metaphors tell the story: "throwing them in the deep end of the pool" describes the learning-by-doing approach with support systems. "College teaches exams, Langan teaches engineering" captures the education gap succinctly. Power words like "critical," "speed," and "bottom line" are rising; negative language centers on "vulnerable," "not prepared," and "did not teach us."
The Shift
The factor movements reveal a strategic realignment: Technology surging (+0.73) while Operations tumbles (-0.50) and Data drops (-0.32) suggests firms are betting on AI and tooling to solve workforce productivity problems, even as day-to-day execution struggles. Growth scores fell -0.28, indicating leaders are trading expansion velocity for internal capability building. Risk awareness is climbing (+0.18), likely reflecting both cybersecurity concerns and the talent poaching threat.
Watch for workforce development vendors and learning platforms to gain traction next period—but only those that deliver measurable reductions in time-to-productivity and explicitly address power skills gaps. The "college failed us" narrative is hardening into a permanent assumption.