The Executive Skills Boards Are Hiring For in 2026

Boards do not appoint against a list of the year’s most talked-about skills. They appoint against a written specification, prepared before any candidate is considered, describing a gap the board has identified in itself or in its management team. The Financial Reporting Council instructs UK nomination committees to prepare exactly that document, and 80% of S&P 500 boards now publish the grid it is drawn from, against 38% five years earlier.

That reframes the question. It is not what executive skills you should have in 2026. It is which named gap you are the answer to, and what evidence you can put behind the claim.

The distinction matters because what boards say they need and what they appoint on are not the same thing. In the 12 months in which the category declared AI literacy essential at the top of the house, 6% of newly appointed Fortune 500 directors had ever held a chief technology, chief information, chief data or chief AI officer role, while 74% of seats went to people who already sat on a public board. Only 13% of directors say their board lacks appropriate AI skills. Meanwhile 85% of chief executives say every functional leader must become a technology expert in their own domain, and only 11% of talent leaders say their executives are well prepared for the AI transition.

Read those figures together and they say one thing. AI literacy does not win an appointment. Its absence loses one.

Every figure below carries its publisher, its sample and its date, including where the data is older than the year on its cover.

Last reviewed 8 August 2026.

What executive skills are boards hiring for in 2026?

The most useful answer comes from BDO’s 2025 board survey of more than 200 public company directors, the only source located that separates what directors want in the boardroom from what they want in the executive team. Those are different lists, and most coverage of this subject collapses them into one.

Source: BDO USA, 2025 BDO Board Survey. BDO does not disclose its fielding dates, which is a limitation worth carrying with the figures; results were circulated from autumn 2025 and summarised on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance on 28 December 2025.

If you run a business rather than sit on a board, the first column is your column. Operational transformation and change management leads it at 44%, ahead of technology and innovation at 38%. Directors want the technologist in the boardroom and the operator running the company, and they say so plainly when asked about the two populations separately.

The table also shows what is not being asked for. No capability describable as AI literacy appears on either list under its own name. What a separate 44% of directors did say is that they plan to seek external assistance on technology, which is a purchasing decision rather than a hiring one.

The specification is written before anyone is considered

The mechanism behind those percentages is public, and it is absent from every page currently ranking for this question.

The Financial Reporting Council’s Guidance on Board Effectiveness, supporting the UK Corporate Governance Code 2024, tells the nomination committee to “evaluate the skills, experience and knowledge on the board, and the future challenges affecting the business, and prepare a description of the role and capabilities required”. It then names the instrument: “The creation of a board skills matrix is one tool that is useful to examine the current skills, knowledge, experience and capabilities of the board, and any gaps in skills or competencies.” Published 29 January 2024 and last updated 3 June 2026.

Two things follow. The capability description exists before the candidate does, since Provision 17 puts the nomination committee in charge of appointments and of succession to both the board and senior management, so a committee working to it is filling a named gap rather than hiring the best available executive. And the grid that gap sits in is usually published: Spencer Stuart’s 2025 U.S. Board Index, released 8 October 2025 from the proxy statements of 488 S&P 500 companies filed between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025, found 80% of those boards disclosing a director skills matrix, more than double the 38% recorded in 2020.

The consequence is unglamorous and specific. Read the matrix before you write anything. It names the capabilities the board has decided it needs and often shows which are thinly covered. The question you are answering is not whether you are a strong executive, but which cell you are the evidence for.

What boards appointed on in 2025, against what they said they needed

Stated intent and revealed preference pointed in opposite directions last year, and the size of the gap is the most interesting thing available on this subject.

Heidrick & Struggles published its 2026 Board Monitor US on 11 March 2026, covering Fortune 500 appointments made during 2025: 383 seats across the 53% of companies that appointed anyone at all.

• Only 6% of newly appointed directors had previously served as a chief technology officer, chief information officer, chief data officer or chief AI officer
• 74% of seats went to people with prior public board experience, the second-highest share since tracking began in 2011
• 45% of appointments went to audit or finance committees
• Average board tenure stood at 7.7 years, the average gap between appointments at 2.3 years

Set that beside the table above. Directors rank technology and innovation as the capability most needed on the board, at 42%. Only 6% of the people they appointed had ever run a technology function. Both facts are accurate, and the tension between them is the honest headline of the year.

The second pattern is that fewer people are getting in and more of them have been in before. Spencer Stuart recorded 374 new independent directors across the S&P 500, down 8% and the lowest since 2016, with only 50% of boards appointing anyone at all, down from 58%. First-time directors were 31% of the incoming class. The United Kingdom shows the narrowing more sharply: of 147 new non-executive directors appointed across the 150 largest premium-listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, 21% were first-time directors, against 44% in 2022. The door to a first board seat has closed by half in three years.

None of this supports the story the category tells about new skills bringing in new faces. Boards under pressure appoint people whose judgement has been observed in a boardroom, and buy specialist capability separately.

Why AI literacy does not win an appointment, and why its absence loses one

This needs stating precisely, because getting it wrong in either direction produces bad advice.

As an appointment criterion at board level, the evidence is thin. Only 6% of new Fortune 500 directors were technology chiefs, and just 13% of directors think AI skills are what their board is missing. ISS-Corporate, analysing 2025 corporate disclosure in an article published 25 May 2026, found 22% of S&P 500 companies disclosing board oversight of AI and concluded that “the lion’s share of both S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies have no directors with clearly disclosed artificial intelligence skills”. Spencer Stuart’s UK index records what boards do instead: AI and cyber security “demand urgent board attention, yet most boards are seeking counsel on these issues from external advisors and upskilling themselves”. They are buying the expertise, not appointing it.

As an expectation placed on sitting executives, the evidence is strong. IBM’s Institute for Business Value, with Oxford Economics, surveyed 2,000 chief executives and senior leaders across 33 geographies and 21 industries between February and April 2026 and reported that 85% say all functional leaders must become technology experts in their domain. IBM sells AI services, which is worth holding in view; what makes the finding usable is that it is stated as domain expertise rather than technical specialism, and that independent sources point the same way. McKinsey’s The State of Organizations 2026, from more than 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries and 16 industries fielded between June and September 2025, reports 88% of leaders deploying AI, 86% saying their organisation was not prepared to integrate it into day-to-day operations, and one in six reporting no clear senior owner of AI anywhere in the business. Korn Ferry, surveying 1,674 global talent leaders on 28 October 2025, found only 11% saying their executives are well prepared.

One note on the McKinsey figures, since this guide asks its readers to check sources. The report’s own page could not be retrieved when this piece was written. The numbers come from independent write-ups agreeing on sample and on every figure used here, and are attributed on that basis rather than on a direct reading of the primary.

Put the two halves together and the position is clear. No board will appoint you because you are comfortable with AI. A great many will decline to appoint an executive who cannot describe what the technology does to the economics of the function they run. That is what an expectation is, as distinct from a criterion. On this evidence it earns little credit when present and is hard to recover from when absent. The requirement is domain expertise, not technical specialism: Lightcast, analysing more than 1.3 billion job postings in July 2025, found 51% of postings requiring AI skills sitting outside IT and computer science occupations.

Worth noting what talent leaders put above AI. Korn Ferry found 73% naming critical thinking as their first priority, with AI-related skills fifth.

The three capabilities, and what the evidence actually supports

Organisational design, cross-functional fluency and AI literacy are the three capabilities most often named for 2026. Each is real. They are not equally well evidenced, and they do not operate at the same level: AI literacy, as set out above, is an expectation rather than a criterion, and the other two are what boards specify and appoint against.

Organisational design: the best evidenced of the three

This is the one to lead with, and the one most often described in the vaguest terms. Directors put operational transformation and change management first among the capabilities they need on management teams, at 44%. McKinsey’s executives say two-thirds of their organisations are overly complex and inefficient, that 72% are unprepared to execute on transformation outcomes, and that nearly 40% name redefining process flows as the biggest source of improvement available over the next one to two years. Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, published 4 March 2026 from more than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries, reports seven in 10 saying their primary competitive strategy for the next three years is to be fast and nimble.

Read as a set, those figures describe a narrow demand: leaders who have taken a complicated organisation and made it simpler, and who can show what that did to cost, speed or risk. That is not a philosophy of organisation. It is a decision with a before and an after, which is what a CV can carry and most do not.

Cross-functional fluency: strong in the UK, thin elsewhere

The best figure available is British, and it should be labelled as British rather than presented as a global fact. Of the 147 new non-executive directors appointed across the UK’s 150 largest premium-listed companies in Spencer Stuart’s December 2025 review period, 51% came from a different industry to the company they joined, against 38% the year before, and 54% had profit and loss experience.

A single-year move from 38% to 51% is large, and one year is one year. What can be said is that in the UK large-cap market, industry adjacency is now a minority condition for a new non-executive appointment while profit and loss accountability is a majority one. Boards are not looking for people who have done exactly this before, but for people whose judgement has been tested against a balance sheet.

What the World Economic Forum data actually says, and how old it is

Almost every article on this subject gestures at the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report. Very few quote it, and several attribute their figures to an edition that does not exist.

There is no Future of Jobs Report 2026. The series has five editions: 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2025. The current one was published on 7 January 2025 on fieldwork carried out during 2024, surveying more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. The Forum’s January 2026 Davos output was scenario and white-paper work, not the survey series. So the most recent Future of Jobs data is 19 months old and rests on fieldwork from the year before that. It remains the best survey of its kind, and it is not a description of this year. Used accurately, it says three things worth knowing.

The rate of expected skills disruption is falling, not rising. Employers expect 39% of existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated by 2030. In the 2023 edition the figure was 44%. Copy asserting that skills are changing faster than ever is contradicted by the source it would cite, and the assertion is common on pages that link to the report without quoting it.

Fastest-growing is not the same as most essential. The fastest-growing skills to 2030 run: AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, technological literacy, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, curiosity and lifelong learning, leadership and social influence, talent management, analytical thinking, environmental stewardship. The core skills list is headed by a different entry, since “analytical thinking remains the top core skill for employers, with seven out of 10 companies considering it as essential”. Emotional intelligence does not appear on the fastest-growing list at all, though it is regularly attributed there.

The most quotable table in the report is the one nobody quotes. Of every 100 workers between 2025 and 2030: 41 will not require significant training, 29 will be upskilled in their current role, 19 will be reskilled and redeployed, and 11 will need training and will not receive it. If you run a function, those 11 are yours.

Has skills-based hiring replaced pedigree at executive level?

Nobody has measured it at this level. The one rigorous measurement that exists covers a different population and found much less than the phrase suggests: the Burning Glass Institute and the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work examined 11,300 roles at large firms between 2014 and 2023 and found that removing degree requirements produced a net 0.14 percentage points of incremental hiring, fewer than one in 700 new hires. The authors’ own summary: “simply dropping stated requirements seldom opens jobs to those who don’t have a college degree.”

That study measures volume hiring. No equivalent study at executive level was found, and this guide will not put a number on something nobody has counted. What can be said is narrower and still useful. The credential is already a minority condition at the top, since 57% of sitting large-cap chief executives hold no MBA on a population of 677 tracked by Crist|Kolder Associates, a figure set in context in our guide to how to become a C-level executive. Boards recruit against published capability gaps rather than against credentials, which is what the skills matrix and the FRC’s guidance describe. And retained search does not screen credentials from an application pile at all. On the AESC’s own description of the profession, firms identify a slate of candidates and assess them by competency-based interviewing, 360 degree referencing and due diligence.

So pedigree has not been abolished, and 74% of Fortune 500 seats going to people who had already sat on a board is a reminder of how far it travels. What has changed is what it has to be attached to. A qualification is not evidence of a capability. It is evidence of a course.

Evidence of impact: how a capability is evidenced rather than asserted

This is the part a reader can act on, and it is a mechanism rather than advice. The chain runs in four steps, and each one is checkable.

1. A named cell. The committee has written a description of the role and capabilities required, drawn from a gap in a matrix that 80% of large-cap US boards publish
2. Dated, quantified evidence. Map to that cell with something specific enough to argue from: a decision, a scale marker, a measurement and a date
3. Assessment. Retained search tests the claim by competency-based interviewing, 360 degree referencing and due diligence
4. Annual review. Spencer Stuart records board evaluations at 99% of S&P 500 companies in its 2025 U.S. Board Index, and disclosed annual evaluations at 99% of the UK’s top 150 premium listings in its 2025 UK Board Index, 39% of those externally facilitated, which Provision 21 requires of the FTSE 350 at least every three years

The last step is the honest argument for evidencing rather than asserting. A claim made at appointment does not stop being examined once you are in the seat.

A worked example

The persona below is constructed. It is not a client, and no client work appears anywhere on this site. She is group operations director of a pan-African financial services group active in 11 countries, and the cell she is the evidence for is operational transformation and change management.

What she wrote first

Responsible for operations across the group’s 11 country businesses. Led a major restructuring programme and delivered significant cost savings while maintaining high standards of customer service. Extensive experience of change management in complex multi-country environments.

That maps to no cell. “Change management in complex environments” is a category rather than a capability, and it does not say what she changed or what changed as a result. “Major”, “significant” and “extensive” carry weight that numbers should carry. No decision is visible anywhere in it, and judgement is what is being assessed.

Three questions rebuild it, and the executive CV guide works them through a different function. What was true when you arrived, and what was at stake? What did you decide that someone else in the seat might not have decided? What was measurably different afterwards, and by when?

What she wrote after

Redesigned the group’s operating model across 11 country businesses and 6,100 people, after a 2023 review found four of the 11 unprofitable at the gross margin line. Chose to consolidate 14 legal entities into five shared-service hubs rather than exit the four markets, on the argument that the licences were the asset and the cost base was the problem. Reduced management layers from nine to six, moved 61% of processing volume onto two platforms, and took the cost-to-income ratio from 63% to 51% over 19 months, with complaint volumes flat through the transition.

That is 92 words against the original 35, and length spent on substance buys the right to be brief everywhere else. A reader now has the size of the estate, the problem, the decision taken, the alternative rejected and why, the mechanism, the measurement and the timing, and a search consultant can argue for her against a named capability without calling her first. The final clause does more work than it looks: complaint volumes holding flat is what separates a restructuring from a good one, and it is what a competency-based interview will probe.

None of it works if the numbers are invented. A figure that cannot be substantiated will surface during referencing and due diligence, at the point where surfacing is most expensive. If you do not have the number, write the mechanism and leave it out.

What the data does not cover: South Africa, the Gulf and wider Africa

The United Kingdom and the United States publish board composition data annually. South Africa does not, and neither does the Gulf or the wider continent.

That is a real gap rather than a search that was not run. There is no published figure for what proportion of new JSE Top 40 directors hold technology backgrounds, no King-based study of skills-matrix disclosure, and no regional equivalent of the Spencer Stuart or Heidrick indices. A firm working across 38 countries would rather say so than import a US percentage and let it stand in for a market it does not describe.

What is current is narrower. PwC South Africa’s 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, published 15 October 2025 across the JSE Top 200, records median total remuneration up 8% for chief executives and 19% for chief financial officers, with non-executive board member fees up 12%; it carries no skills or capability content and should not be stretched into any. On scarcity, Xpatweb’s 2025 Critical Skills Survey of 381 employers, published 28 October 2025, found 84% of large corporations and multinationals reporting difficulty sourcing highly skilled talent, up from 79% in 2024, sharpening in engineering, ICT and the artisan trades. Xpatweb is a work-visa and immigration services firm, so a skills-shortage finding is commercially convenient for it. The detail most relevant here runs against the headline: the same survey records demand for executive leadership roles declining slightly in 2025. Importing a war-for-executive-talent framing into this market would be wrong on the only evidence available.

Common questions

What executive skills are boards hiring for in 2026?

For management teams, directors name operational transformation and change management first at 44%, then technology and innovation at 38% and international experience at 30%. For the board itself the order changes: technology and innovation at 42%, cybersecurity at 35%, industry experience at 34%. Those figures come from BDO USA’s 2025 survey of more than 200 public company directors. What boards appoint on differs from what they specify: of 383 Fortune 500 seats filled during 2025, 74% went to people who had already served on a public board.

Do boards appoint directors for AI expertise?

Largely not. Only 6% of directors newly appointed to Fortune 500 boards during 2025 had ever served as a chief technology, information, data or AI officer, and only 13% of directors say their board lacks appropriate AI skills. ISS-Corporate found that the lion’s share of S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies disclose no director with AI skills at all, and UK boards report taking external counsel and upskilling themselves instead. AI literacy is an expectation placed on sitting executives rather than a criterion boards appoint against: 85% of chief executives in IBM’s 2026 study say all functional leaders must become technology experts in their domain.

What is a board skills matrix, and why does it matter to a candidate?

It is a grid setting out the skills, knowledge, experience and capabilities a board has decided it needs, and where the gaps are. The Financial Reporting Council instructs nomination committees to use one and to “prepare a description of the role and capabilities required” before recruiting. It matters because 80% of S&P 500 boards now publish theirs, against 38% in 2020, so the specification is readable before any conversation begins. The question is which named cell you are the evidence for, not whether you are a strong executive in general.

Is there a World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2026?

No. The series has five editions, published in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2025. The current one was published on 7 January 2025 on fieldwork conducted during 2024, covering more than 1,000 employers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. Any figure attributed to a 2026 edition is misattributed. Its headline finding is that employers expect 39% of existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated by 2030, down from 44% in the 2023 edition rather than up.

Where this leaves you

The specification exists, it is written before you are considered, and in the largest markets it is published. That is better news than the alternative, because a named gap can be answered and a general sense of what boards want in 2026 cannot.

• Read the matrix before you write anything. Write to a cell, not to a category
• Lead with the organisational decision, not the technology. Operational transformation is what directors put first for management teams, and it is most often described in language too general to argue from
• Treat AI literacy as a floor. Be able to say what the technology does to the economics of the function you run

Where this is the work in front of you, our Executive Positioning Strategy builds the case against a specific target and a specific capability gap, and the Executive Role Suitability Report is the diagnostic where the question is which seats you are the answer to. Where the target is a board seat, the Board Pack and the Board & Leadership engagement are scoped by consultation, because a governance case is built against a specific matrix. Every executive engagement is human-written and delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite™.

Write to [email protected] to arrange a confidential consultation, or review the executive engagements and what each includes.

Further reading: the executive CV guide for the board section of a CV, how to become a C-level executive for the route data behind the seats themselves, and executive biography vs CV summary for the document a published board profile requires.

About this guide

Published by the Executive Insights desk at Elite Executive Career Solutions, formerly Elite CV. The firm was established in December 2016 and has been trading since February 2017. Across nine years of practice it has positioned more than 10,000 professionals in 38 countries across five continents, covering 1,154 distinct role titles across 26 primary profession families. Every executive engagement is human-written and is delivered through the Executive Career Positioning Suite.

Client identities are never disclosed. Work is attributed by role, sector and country only, and no client document appears anywhere on this site. The persona and both worked statements above are constructed. Every figure on this page carries its publisher, its sample and its date in the source list below, including where the data is older than the year on its cover. Where no evidence exists, as on skills-based hiring at executive level and on board composition outside the UK and US, the guide says so rather than supplying a number.

Sources

Board composition and specification

• Heidrick & Struggles, 2026 Board Monitor US, published 11 March 2026. Fortune 500 board appointments during 2025; 383 seats filled across the 53% of companies that appointed anyone
• Spencer Stuart, 2025 U.S. Board Index, released 8 October 2025. Universe of 488 S&P 500 companies, DEF 14A proxy statements filed 1 May 2024 to 30 April 2025. Also the source for skills-matrix disclosure at 80% against 38% in 2020, for new independent director counts, and for board evaluations at 99% of S&P 500 companies. Summarised by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 3 November 2025
• Spencer Stuart, 2025 UK Board Index, published December 2025. The 150 largest premium-listed companies on the London Stock Exchange by market value at 30 April 2025; 147 new non-executive directors. Also the source for cross-industry appointment at 51%, for first-time directors at 21%, and for annual board evaluation disclosed by 99% of that population with 39% externally facilitated
• BDO USA, 2025 BDO Board Survey, more than 200 public company board directors. Fielding dates not disclosed by the publisher. Summary, 28 December 2025
• Financial Reporting Council, Guidance on Board Effectiveness supporting the UK Corporate Governance Code 2024. Published 29 January 2024, page last updated 3 June 2026. Provisions 17 and 21 of the Code
• ISS-Corporate, Artificial Intelligence and Governance, published 25 May 2026, analysing 2025 corporate disclosure

Executive expectations and AI readiness

• IBM Institute for Business Value with Oxford Economics, CEO Study, released 4 May 2026. Sample of 2,000 chief executives and senior leaders, 33 geographies, 21 industries, fielded February to April 2026. IBM sells AI services, noted on the page
• McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2026. More than 10,000 senior executives, 15 countries, 16 industries, fielded June to September 2025. Figures here are taken from independent write-ups agreeing on sample and on every figure used; the primary was not retrievable at the time of writing, and the page says so
• Korn Ferry, Talent Acquisition Trends 2026, published 28 October 2025. Sample of 1,674 global talent leaders and 230 Korn Ferry experts
• Deloitte with Oxford Economics, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends, published 4 March 2026. More than 9,000 business and HR leaders across 89 countries
• Lightcast, Beyond the Buzz, published 23 July 2025. More than 1.3 billion job postings. Source for 51% of postings requiring AI skills sitting outside IT and computer science occupations. The 28% figure is a posting-level comparison, as stated on the page

Skills demand and skills-based hiring

• World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025, published 7 January 2025 on 2024 fieldwork. More than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. Skills outlook chapter. The series page lists five editions and no 2026 edition
• Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice, published February 2024. Data covering 11,300 roles at large firms, 2014 to 2023
• Crist|Kolder Associates, Volatility Report. Population of 677 large-cap companies, of whose sitting chief executives 57% hold no MBA
• AESC (Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants), Executive Search as a Profession. Source for competency-based interviewing, 360 degree referencing and due diligence. Undated on the page. Cited to an archived copy taken 8 September 2025, because AESC has since removed the page and the original address returns a 404

South Africa

• PwC South Africa, 2025 Directors Remuneration and Trends Report, published 15 October 2025. JSE Top 200
• Xpatweb, 2025 Critical Skills Survey, published 28 October 2025, 381 employers, reported by Polity. Xpatweb is a work-visa and immigration services firm, noted on the page

Consulted and not used

• Any figure attributed to a “World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2026”. No such edition exists
• A 56% AI wage premium, which circulates widely and is not traceable to the Lightcast research. The published figure is 28%, at posting level
• A figure of 76% of organisations having a chief AI officer in 2026, up from 26% in 2025. A 50-point single-year movement is a definitional change rather than an adoption curve, and the publisher sells AI
• LinkedIn’s skills-first research. Undated on its page, derived from a membership figure placing it around 2023, and containing no senior or executive data
• Any percentage for skills-based hiring at executive level. None exists
• Searches for South African, Gulf and pan-African board composition data comparable to the Spencer Stuart and Heidrick indices. None located. The negative result is stated on the page