Written by Ted Kinney, Vice President of Research and Development
Last year, we looked ahead at 2025 workplace trends and saw a workplace reshaped by accessibility, skills-first practices, AI, and reimagined work structures. Those shifts are still unfolding and very much present in the conversations I have with Talogy clients on a daily basis, but 2026 workplace trends are already signaling more advances in these areas and the pace is increasing with each passing day.
Hiring practices and talent assessments are included in those advancements and play a major role in embedding fairness, creating healthy and effective work environments while preparing people for a world where collaboration between humans and AI is the new normal that we lean into and learn how best to use it.
As we look ahead to what will happen in 2026, we see some overlap with the trends of last year, but also some strategic shifts in the workforce. While some familiar topics remain on the list, those evolve to a degree and are joined by some newcomers based on changing priorities from organizations and their employees.
5 workplace trends for 2026
1. AI curiosity and collaboration take center stage
Perhaps the most future-defining workplace trend for 2026 is the need to measure how people work with AI. As AI becomes a legitimate teammate – drafting content, analyzing data, guiding customer interactions – success depends not just on technical skills, but on human–AI collaboration skills.
We are beginning to see assessments for AI literacy, ethical judgment, trust calibration, and adaptability in hybrid human–machine teams. In 2026, using AI when taking assessments will increase and organizations will realize that this behavior is not necessarily ‘cheating,’ but can reflect resourcefulness unless instructed otherwise. As such, we will see new and creative ways to address this challenge. These approaches will range from honesty contracts to solutions that reduce the efficacy of AI-assisted assessment completion to strategies that embrace or encourage the use of generative AI. Innovative assessments will incorporate the use of AI by candidates into the test content and evaluate the outputs of those human-AI collaborations.
It’s still important to find candidates who work hard, have high attention to detail, and a positive attitude. These are the stable, job-related characteristics we measure today that will remain relevant in the future. What is changing are job designs and as we shift towards AI-human collaboration, these new job designs will demand embracing AI. In addition to our time-tested and job-related attributes, we will need to evaluate who in our candidate pools will thrive in a world of AI-human collaboration as we bring new people into our organizations.
This means we will continue to assess these same predictive traits, but potentially in different combinations and interpret them in different ways. How we measure these qualities may change, how we combine the attributes may change, how we label them with competencies may change, but the underlying DNA of people will not change. Ultimately the future of work will require us to redefine our measurements to capture these timeless human abilities while embracing revolutionary new developments like AI collaboration and utilization.
2. Skills-based hiring expands and evolves
Skills-based hiring was the buzz of 2025 and in 2026, this workplace trend matures into something more dynamic. Rather than focusing strictly on the skill foundations – attributes that provide the building blocks for skills – we will start to see innovations related to capturing the demonstration of skill. Innovative solutions that capture unique, scenario-based data and actual job performance behaviors – leveraging AI-assisted processes to determine proficiency based on an actual demonstration of the skill by the participant – will start to emerge in 2026 as one of the top trends in the workplace. The current skills-based assessments provide a good sign of who has a skill, while new methods will start to lean in a bit more by capturing samples of behavior that demonstrate the skill. Skills measurement based on samples of behavior, often collected and evaluated through AI-based tools, will become a new area of assessment development.
This approach can be less obtrusive yet yield more actionable information, allowing organizations to better identify where their skills gaps lie. As these systems become more readily available, workplace trends could see much more powerful approaches to capturing the ‘skills pulse’ of an organization and making the skills-based transformation a more central part of the organizational strategy in 2026. These types of skills demonstration measures will unlock an organization’s ability to use skills for employee development, identifying high potentials, career pathing, and succession planning.
3. Assessment accessibility gets an upgrade
Psychometric assessments continue to be the mainstay predictors of on-the-job success as we move forward into 2026. As such, a more robust approach that includes embedding fairness within the very being of these tests is required. Trends in the workplace for 2026 have accessibility moving beyond making assessments mobile-friendly or compliant with disability standards and pushing towards a design that flexes to the individual. Participant-driven experiences will become the go-to standard for innovative accessible solutions. Voice-enabled interfaces, neuro-inclusive task variants, culturally adaptive scenarios, and customizable pacing options are becoming frequently discussed standards for building inclusive assessments to reach all people.
This up-and-coming workplace trend is about more than accommodation – it’s recognition that fairness and inclusion aren’t just about removing barriers but about designing for differences from the start. At Talogy, we really take this to heart and with every solution we build, we think about these concepts on day one of the development process. We ask ourselves the question, “How can we make the candidate experience work best for each applicant without compromising validity or rigor?” Designing assessments that properly measure candidate capabilities while accounting for their individual differences goes beyond trends in the workplace. Put simply, it’s the right thing to do.
4. Organizations take a team-based approach to understanding performance dynamics
Organizations are realizing that value isn’t created by individuals alone – it’s created in teams and networks. In 2026, workplace trends regarding assessments and hiring in general are catching up. Expect to see growth in tools that evaluate team-level constructs like group decision-making quality, collaboration, and psychological safety. Think about it: Can you really perform to your best if you don’t feel comfortable voicing your true opinions among your work teams? This has a huge impact on how a team interacts and ultimately performs. So how do we evaluate these non-negotiables when it comes to team effectiveness to ensure diversity of thought can flourish?
One place to start is by using digital role-plays, anonymized peer assessments, and even organizational network analysis (ONA) methods to understand how people contribute to collective outcomes. These approaches can help organizations better develop talent and effective teams by helping them understand informal relationships, identify key influencers, and improve team performance and efficiencies. As data becomes more readily available and methods for this work become more well understood, we will see these approaches leveraged more in 2026.
5. Experiential workforce takes hold
Work is about more than a paycheck these days – it’s about employee well-being and the experience that the organization provides in a way that is mutually beneficial. Therefore, trends in the workplace in 2026 will begin to merge the things that were successful from decades past to create a collaborative, productive workforce of the future.
To do this, you need to combine the talent intelligence of the 80s, the insights of the 90s, the analytics from the early 2000s, and the big data from the 2010s and roll it into the workplace of the future – a workplace that pulls from what worked well in the past and looks to combine it with methodologies of tomorrow. This data is about more than personality assessment results that drive selection decisions – it’s about leveraging people analytics to generate powerful and far-reaching insights that allow organizations and employees to reach their full potential.
Workplace trends in 2026 acknowledge that it’s time to put aside that one-size-fits-all approach and recognize that employees are all unique and bring their own perspectives and preferences to their roles. You have a multigenerational workforce with varied preferences on culture, values, and working arrangements. The organizations that properly infuse these diverse viewpoints with the data they’ve collected will be the ones who thrive long past 2026 and blaze the trail for future decades. It’s about creating an experiential workforce that is intentionally curious, gives employees a ‘why’ for their work, and is profitable not only financially but also in helping their people grow.
Shaping the future of work with 2026 workplace trends
Workplace trends in 2026 are no longer about sorting candidates into yes or no categories. Hiring is becoming a strategic design function that embeds fairness, adapts to skills in real time, extends beyond individuals to teams, and prepares us for a world where human–AI collaboration is an everyday reality.
The organizations that succeed will be those that see assessments not as a gatekeeper, but as a growth enabler — a way to design for differences, unlock potential, and future-proof their talent strategies. The challenge for these upcoming workplace trends isn’t whether you choose to adopt them – it’s how quickly you can integrate them into your own talent strategy before the next wave arrives.
About the author: Ted Kinney, PhD is the VP of Research and Development for Talogy. An Industrial/Organizational psychologist, Dr. Kinney leads a team of assessment scientists in the creation and ongoing research into the most efficient, inclusive, and effective assessment methodologies and tools. He is a trusted advisor to many international companies across all industries. He has particular expertise in technology-enabled assessment solutions and is proud to be a scientist-practitioner of I/O psychology, with a constant eye towards paradigm-shifting innovation.
