The Reskilling Promise Is Easier to Make Than to Keep

The bank doing two hard things at once

Lloyds is closing more than 240 branches across 2026 and 2027. The same fortnight the closure list firmed up, the group was busy talking about something else entirely — a thousand AI roles in the making, close to 300 tech hires already in train, an internal AI Academy that's logged hundreds of thousands of course completions since January.

Two stories. One workforce.

Most of the coverage treats the closures as a property story — high streets thinning, footfall down, another bank quietly leaving another town. That's real, and it matters enormously to the customers losing their branch. But there's a second story sitting underneath it, and it's the one that should hold a leader's attention. This isn't simply a bank shrinking. It's a bank attempting the two hardest things a workforce can be asked to do at once — letting go of one capability while urgently building another — and hoping the seam between them holds.

I spent five and a half years as a People Director inside a fast-growing London AI consultancy, which means I've stood on the building side of that seam. It looks very different from there than it does on the slide.

The reskilling story everyone wants to be true

The official version is tidy. Branches close because customers have moved to apps. The savings fund the future. And the people? Reskilled — the academy, the apprenticeships, the new AI roles. Nobody left behind, just redeployed into the era that's arriving.

It's a good story. Parts of it are genuinely true. But sit with the shape of it for a moment.

The roles being cut are branch roles — counter staff, local advisers, people whose work is face-to-face and rooted in a place. The roles being built are data scientists, AI engineers, responsible-AI specialists. The distance between those two things is not a training course. It's a career.

That's the gap I'd want any leader to name out loud before they stand up and say we're reskilling our people. Reskilling into what, exactly. For whom. On what timeline.

The gap between the academy and the branch

I worked on a restructure once where the deck said redeployment and the slide had a confident number on it. The leadership team believed the reskilling story — and they weren't being cynical. They'd genuinely funded the platform. Hundreds of courses, real budget, a proper programme.

But when you looked at who actually moved into the new roles, it was the people who were already halfway there. The analyst who could code a little. The manager who'd come up through a data team. The people furthest from the new work — the ones the story was supposedly about — mostly took the package and left.

The academy was real. It just reached the people who needed it least.

That's not an argument against reskilling. Reskilling works. It simply doesn't work evenly — and the leaders who get caught out are the ones who let the headline figure stand in for the distribution. A number like hundreds of thousands of courses completed tells you about activity. It doesn't tell you whether the person whose branch closes in March has a realistic bridge to anything at all.

The cost of that gap rarely shows up in the quarter you announce the change. It shows up later — in the institutional memory that walks out the door, in the customers who noticed their adviser was gone, in the new AI function that's brilliant on paper and quietly short of anyone who remembers how the business actually runs.

What honesty costs, and what it buys

So what do you actually do, if you're the one running a transformation like this — AI coming in, headcount shifting, a reskilling promise already on the table?

Start by being honest with yourself about which roles genuinely bridge. Some do. A branch manager who's run a P&L and held a team together has transferable judgment that's worth more than most people credit. A data-science role, though, is not six weeks of e-learning away from a counter role — and saying so plainly, and kindly, is more respectful than pretending otherwise and letting someone discover it the hard way.

Then fund the reskilling that's real and stop overselling the part that isn't. A smaller, honest programme that actually moves people will beat a glossy academy that mostly certifies the already-able. The first one changes lives. The second one mostly reassures the leadership team.

And sequence it. This is the part I've got wrong myself — announced the change before the bridge existed, then spent the following weeks watching good people make rational decisions to leave while the "support" was still being built. If you're going to make a reskilling promise, the scaffolding has to be standing when you make it, not scheduled for next quarter.

Three questions worth asking before the announcement goes out, not after:

• Of the people losing their roles, what proportion can realistically reach a role we're actually hiring for — and have we tested that against names, not averages?
• Is the reskilling on offer available now, to them, or is it a programme that mainly serves people already closer to the new work?
• If the honest answer is "most of these people won't bridge," are we treating their exit with the seriousness it deserves — or hiding it behind the headline about new jobs?

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The promise is easier to make than to keep

The Lloyds picture isn't a scandal. It's an unusually honest snapshot of what the Human + AI era asks of an organisation — to build and to let go in the same breath, and to tell the truth about which people the building actually reaches.

The reskilling promise isn't wrong. It's just far easier to make than to keep, and the keeping of it is where senior judgment earns its keep. The leaders who come out of this era with their credibility intact will be the ones who refused to let a big training number do the emotional work that an honest conversation should have done.

If you're somewhere in the middle of a change like this — standing one thing up while winding another down, and trying to keep the people side honest while you do it — an outside read can be worth more than it costs. A first conversation is just that: a conversation.

Need some help?

That's the work I do at Encourager — fractional HR direction and workforce-transformation support for founders, PE-backed businesses and SME leaders working through exactly this kind of change. You can reach out to me on steve@encourager.co.uk.