The Most Underrated Skill in HR Right Now Isn't a Skill at All

Why curiosity — not competence — will decide who thrives in Industry 5.0

There's a quiet assumption sitting underneath most conversations about AI in the workplace: that the people who'll do well are the ones who are already "good with technology." The early adopters. The ones who don't need convincing.

That assumption is wrong, and it's worth saying so plainly, because it lets a lot of capable HR and IR practitioners off the hook before they've even started. You don't need to be technical to adapt to Industry 5.0. You need to be curious. Those are not the same thing, and mistaking one for the other is exactly why so many good people are watching AI reshape their profession from the sidelines.

Industry 5.0 isn't about the machines. That's the whole point.

Industry 4.0 was a story about automation, machines doing what humans used to do, faster and cheaper. Industry 5.0 is a different story. It's about human and machine working alongside each other, with the human firmly back at the centre, not as an operator of the machine, but as the one who brings judgement, context, ethics, and relationship to work that a machine cannot do alone.

That should be good news for HR and IR practitioners in particular. Our work has always lived in the messy, human, judgement-heavy space, reading a room during a disciplinary hearing, sensing when a policy will land badly before it's even rolled out, holding the line on fairness when the letter of the law and the spirit of it pull in different directions. None of that goes away. If anything, it becomes more valuable, because it's precisely what AI can't replicate.

But here's the catch: that value only gets realised if we actually engage with the tools reshaping the terrain around that work. And engagement starts with curiosity, not comfort.

Why curiosity beats expertise, right now

Expertise is built on what already worked. Curiosity is built on asking what might work next. In a moment where the tools, the case law, and the expectations are all shifting simultaneously, expertise without curiosity calcifies fast. You can be excellent at the HR of five years ago and genuinely struggling with the HR of today, not because you've gotten worse at your job, but because the job has quietly changed shape around you.

Curiosity is what closes that gap. It's the difference between:

• Dismissing an AI drafting tool because "it doesn't understand our context" — versus testing it, noticing exactly where it breaks down, and learning something real about what your context actually requires.

• Waiting for a training session on a new system — versus opening it and poking around for twenty minutes to see what it does.

• Assuming a chatbot can't handle a nuanced grievance conversation — versus asking what would it take for it to handle the first 80% competently, freeing you for the 20% that genuinely needs a human.

None of this requires becoming a technologist. It requires being willing to not know something, on purpose, in public, for a little while — which, if we're honest, is harder for experienced practitioners than it sounds. We've built careers on having the answer. Curiosity asks us to sit in the question a bit longer.

What this looks like in practice

Curiosity isn't a mindset you either have or don't — it's a set of small, repeatable habits. A few worth building into your week:

1. Ask "how would AI approach this?" before you finalise your own answer. Not to replace your judgement, to stress-test it. If you're drafting a disciplinary process, a policy, or a training outline, run your draft past an AI tool first and see what it surfaces. Sometimes it'll be irrelevant. Sometimes it'll catch an angle you hadn't considered. Either way, you've learned something in five minutes that used to cost you an hour.

2. Pick one repetitive task this month and try to automate or accelerate it. Not the whole job, one task. A first-draft letter, a leave calculation, a summary of a long policy document. The goal isn't efficiency for its own sake; it's building a felt sense of where these tools are genuinely useful versus where they fall short. You can't know that from a webinar. You only know it from trying.

3. Ask your discomfort what it's actually telling you. When a new tool or process makes you uneasy, don't just push through it or avoid it, get curious about the unease itself. Is it about job security? Data privacy? A genuine ethical concern about fairness or bias? These are legitimate questions, and HR/IR practitioners are often the only people in the room asking them. That's not resistance to progress, that's exactly the judgement Industry 5.0 needs at the table. Bring it, loudly, instead of quietly opting out.

4. Read one thing outside your usual feed each week. Not another AI hype piece, something adjacent. A POPIA update, a case law development, a piece on how another industry is handling AI-driven decision-making. Cross-pollination is where the sharpest insights usually come from.

5. Teach someone something you just learned. The fastest way to actually retain a new tool or idea is to explain it to a colleague within a week of learning it. It forces you past "I sort of get it" into "I could actually use this."

The real risk isn't AI. It's standing still.

Nobody is going to lose their role to AI outright. But there's a quieter risk that's easy to miss: practitioners who stay curious will keep getting better, faster, more relevant, and the gap between them and everyone else will widen, not suddenly, but steadily, month over month, until one day it's no longer closeable with a weekend course.

The good news is that closing that gap doesn't require a technical degree, a big budget, or permission from anyone. It requires deciding, this week, to be a little more curious than you were last week.

Your call to action

Pick one thing from this article and actually do it before Friday. Not "think about it", do it. Try the AI tool. Automate the task. Read the outside-the-feed article. Ask the uncomfortable question in the meeting instead of after it.

Curiosity compounds. The practitioners who'll shape what HR and IR look like in five years aren't the ones with the most credentials today, they're the ones asking the most questions right now.

Start asking.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific legal guidance on protected disclosures, employment practices, or compliance obligations, consult a qualified labour law practitioner.

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