The Progress Curve: Are Your Skills Keeping Pace? with Michelle Froah, ETS

In a world reshaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and accelerating change, the question of how to stay relevant has never felt more urgent. In a recent episode of MRII's Insights and Innovators podcast, Michelle Froah, Chief Global Marketing & Innovation Officer at ETS unpacked the findings of the ETS Human Progress Report and explored what they mean for insights professionals navigating a fast-moving career landscape.

Below are the five most illuminating parts of the podcast, edited for brevity and clarity, offering practical wisdom on durable skills, AI, credentialing, and what it truly means to be a business partner rather than an order-taker.

What are the big highlights from the ETS Human Progress Report?

The report surveyed 18,000 people across 18 countries. Over 60% of employees report fear of becoming obsolete, with Gen Z showing the highest levels of that anxiety. More than 55% of respondents say they have no way to benchmark their skills against peers. Over 85% say they would pursue skill certification because they believe it improves access to better-paying jobs and stronger career trajectories. ETS's mission is to advance the science of measurement, and the report identifies skills benchmarking as a gap that measurement can address.

Can you talk about durable skills, transferability across industries, and FutureNav?

Leadership, cross-functional collaboration and resilience have transferred across every role and industry I've worked in. The leader's job is to identify barriers and remove them so the team can do its work, and to facilitate strategic problem-solving.

That applies in manufacturing as directly as it does in marketing science. FutureNav is an enterprise solution that measures and maps individual skills, both technical and durable, producing what we call skill prints. Talent decision-makers can use aggregated skill print data to assess job fit, identify skill gaps, and build upskilling and reskilling plans across departments, levels, and regions.

How should insights professionals think about AI? Is it a threat?

Whether AI is a threat depends on the mindset. The Human Progress Report found that AI literacy ranks as a top skill for competitiveness in today's job market. More than six in ten employees and a separate sample of a thousand US talent decision-makers both identified it as critical, and both groups noted a gap in the ability to assess it. Organizations need to establish responsible AI guidelines internally and extend those expectations to outside partners. FutureNav's AdaptAI assessment measures AI literacy situationally and provides personalized development pathways tied to proficiency levels.

What are the biggest challenges facing insights professionals today, and how should they adapt to stay relevant?

Insights teams are frequently positioned as order-takers: conduct a study, deliver a readout and leave action planning to the business. Rebranding these teams as Marketing Science signals a different operating model — one where the team starts by understanding the business strategy, forms hypotheses, and designs research around a specific decision.

At MetLife during COVID, we ran a global pulse across 11 countries on a newsroom cadence: ingest data quickly, identify the headline finding, and distribute actionable insights the next day rather than weeks later. A parallel NPS program used drivers analysis to identify the one or two factors that most influenced the overall score, giving business leaders a focused action list. The research function's job is to inform strategy and action plans in real time, in direct partnership with internal stakeholders.

What tips do you have for young professionals on accelerating skill development?

Curiosity, agility, and resilience are skills, and treating them as such is the starting point. Assuming that formal education ends a person's learning puts a ceiling on what they can achieve. Upskilling and reskilling are ongoing. People who are already moving in that direction are resetting the benchmark, which means standing still is falling behind.

Alongside mindset, young professionals need measurement tools that let them demonstrate and benchmark their proficiency. Skill-based hiring reframes a job as a bundle of skills to be demonstrated, which opens career pathways that traditional experience-and-credentials prerequisites close off. With an estimated 60% of today's jobs not existing in their current form in the future, the skillset required will shift, and that requires active, credentialed investment in development.

The Takeaway

Froah's core argument is that technical and durable skills need to be measured, benchmarked and credentialed to be useful in talent decisions. The ETS Human Progress Report highlights widespread gaps in skills benchmarking and rising demand for AI literacy credentials across both sides of the hiring process.

For insights professionals specifically, the shift she describes is structural: from delivering research outputs to partnering on strategy, forming hypotheses before fieldwork, and delivering findings on a timeline that matches the pace of business decisions.

Listen to the Full Episode →