Over the past couple of years, there's been a lot of talk about skills-based organizations and skills-based talent management. With it has come a lot of hype, confusion, and a fair amount of skepticism. Such is the typical cycle with any new business solution. Some will be early adopters, and others will wait and see. Some have expressed concern over what is often described as a broad, transformative set of changes and whether so much change is necessary or survivable.

Skills-based talent journeys do not need to involve a massive overhaul of one’s entire HR operating model.

They can, but they don’t have to. This is because skills-based talent is not just a single strategy but a collection of talent strategies that revolve around a common theme. They leverage skills data to maximize the efficiency and adaptability of talent practices. As such, skills-based transformations are fundamentally data-driven business transformations.
 

This is helpful because much is known about conducting data-driven transformations from other business areas. As is often the case, talent transformations tend to lag behind forward-facing operating areas, so data-driven talent transformations have only started to gain traction more recently as tools to manage skills data have matured.

Skills are a special kind of data. Most data swimming around one’s IT system falls into two primary camps: business data and HR data. Business data lives in business systems and centers around a company’s products and customers. HR data lives in talent systems and is all about a company’s employees (potential employees, people who act like employees, etc.). Skills data is unique because it is one of the few pieces of data that live in both worlds.

At the individual level, skills data describes something about the employee and what they can do – so it’s HR data. However, at an aggregate level, skills data defines what products and services a company can provide and sell. It represents business capability. Taken further, in a service-oriented business, such as professional services, technology, healthcare, etc., skills are the product. It's literally what one bills for.

The essential advantage is that skills data provides the enterprise with a more comprehensive understanding of its workforce’s capability and gaps - and more granular and flexible options for sourcing, developing, and moving talent throughout the organization. Fundamentally, skills data transforms HR data from an exercise in head counting to an exercise in capability mapping, which enables not just operational efficiency but top-line speed to market as well.

Skills-based Talent Journeys Don’t Have to Require the Massive Overhaul Many Fear
There is no single correct way to go about a skills journey. Skills data is strategically linked to several areas of one’s business. Skills are linked to People, Jobs, Work Tasks, and Workforce Planning.

• Skills + People link to Employee Profiles, Skill Assessments, and L&D Upskilling programs
• Skills + Jobs links to Job Architecture, Org Design, Career Mobility, and Leader Development
• Skills + Work Tasks links to Resource Management, Work Design and Talent Marketplaces
• Skills + Workforce Planning links to Recruiting, Compensation, and Business Capability

A skills-based talent journey starts with one’s business drivers and tends to proceed from that point up or down the talent value chain.

Skills-based Talent Value Chain

If one is redesigning one’s work tasks due to AI-enablement or talent scarcity, one will probably start one's journey with skills-based work design. If they are using a talent marketplace to manage business disruption or improve staffing efficiency, they will probably begin with skills-based resource management. If they face recruitment challenges and labor market shortages, they will probably start with skills-based recruitment.

If they need to develop new business capabilities to enter or quickly capture a new market opportunity, they will probably start with skills-based workforce planning. They may begin with skills-based job design if they need to update their job architecture, standardize job requirements, map similar job descriptions due to a recent merger, etc.

However,

• Not all journeys will result in complete transformations; some will remain localized to one area of the talent value chain.
• Not all journeys will proceed across the entire enterprise; some will remain targeted at particular business lines or divisions where they are needed most.
• Not all journeys will proceed to the most advanced maturity level; some will remain pragmatic and value-added.

There is nothing wrong with employing skills-based talent solutions that are localized, pragmatic, and limited and still achieve real business value.

So, What Could a Company Do with Comprehensive Skills Data?

It turns out quite a lot.

For example, if an organization had comprehensive skills data across its enterprise, it could:

Skills + People

• Target learning for each employee based on individual skills gaps, interests, or performance reviews - rather than large group training or career milestone training. In other words, they could chart a development pathway between any two points in the organization, not just to the next promotion.
• Standardize performance levels for each critical skill with standardized assessment and certification definitions.

Skills + Work Tasks

• Better search for open staffing needs by finding skill matches or near matches - allowing staffing decisions on a more granular level surrounding particular skill sets. It also provides a greater breadth of employee search by allowing near matches combined with JIT upskilling/onboarding.
• More flexibly respond to fluctuations in business demand by leveraging talent marketplaces combined with targeted upskilling to rapidly find and move people to areas of greater demand.

Skills + Jobs

• Empower employees with more autonomy in managing their careers by allowing them to proactively look up skills gaps required for advancement, lateral movement, or based on their own interests and seeking opportunities to close those gaps through training, internal assignments, mentors, or communities tagged with those skills.
• Use skills data to inform organizational design decisions to more flexibly house, allocate, distribute, and support employees with critical or scarce skills. In other words, decrease organizational silos by making skills and capabilities more transparent.

Skills + Workforce Planning

• Dramatically expand the base of potential candidates for recruiting efforts by searching for skills applicants have or have the potential to learn rather than just on the degrees, job titles, and bespoke experiences they possess. This has the added benefit of diversifying the talent pool by granting access to historically underrepresented groups.
• Gather a picture of enterprise capability and gaps to enable workforce planning efforts through enterprise reporting enabled by standard skills definitions and a comprehensive skills data set. One can also use data mining to identify critical trends and patterns in skills data tied to business lines, outcomes, advancement, departures, DEI information, or other business data.

Any of these is a fine place to start. Each starting point has its pros and cons, benefits, and challenges. In fact, many companies pursue several of these journeys simultaneously in various parts of their organization. And that is fine, too. It just takes a bit of governance and coordination to ensure that when these separate efforts develop, they do so with a common language and set of guardrails so they can ultimately share skills information across the enterprise.

Author Bio

Craig Friedman is Sr. Talent Advisor and Skills Practice Leader at St. Charles Consulting Group. He has 30 years of experience as a human capital and talent advisor, executive, and entrepreneur. He specializes in skills-based talent strategies, learning operating models, change management, and performance consulting. As Senior Talent Strategist and Skills Practice Leader at St. Charles Consulting Group, Craig partners with CHROs and CLOs to align global talent strategies, supporting Fortune 500 companies and four of the five largest professional services firms. Previously, Craig spent 15 years at Deloitte, leading talent development for the U.S. Tax practice and earning several national and international learning awards. His background includes launching two eLearning start-ups and earning two U.S. patents for innovations in online education.

Error: No such template "/CustomCode/topleader/category"!