Skills Curious? Here are a few things to consider
Why Skills?
Many modern HR organizations are considering or have already begun transitioning to skills-based talent management. This shift presents truly promising opportunities, but skills aren’t a new concept so what do we mean when we say "skills?" We asked ChatGPT and got the following answer: Skills refer to the abilities, expertise, and proficiencies that an individual possesses and can apply to perform tasks and achieve goals effectively. Said differently, skills are data about people.
Skills are the currency of the future of work; jobs are changing faster than before. Using a skills-based framework can enable organizations to:
Hire Faster - Find the best candidate for a job faster in a competitive talent market by analyzing the skills associated with open jobs and matching them with the skills and experience of internal and external candidates.
Retrain - Studies have shown that it is much cheaper and more accessible for an organization to retrain than to hire for skills, "it's not a hire to grow game. It's a reskill to grow game "(Bersin). Skills can be the language used to analyze employee performance data and find areas where more training and development may be needed.
Redeploy - Skills can be used to match talent to alternative career paths, unlocking organizational agility to where a skill is needed the most.
Retain – It’s not a secret, most people want to advance in their careers and keep learning, skills-based talent management strategies can give workers transparency and agency to manage their careers through putting data in their hands, provide suggested training and experiences needed to achieve a new goal.
How does a skills framework change HR?
More than ever, HR must step up and get real about the change that is happening. The role of HR is changing from coach/ talent strategy/ operations to strategy/ work redesign/ digital leadership. HR needs to look at its own readiness to lead the organization into the unknown and start using skills as a common language that can be shared not just within HR but across the business, with finance and other partners.
How to prep for the shift to skills:
Use HR as the use case: study how AI (or other external influence such as a technology implementation) shifts how your team works, find emerging skills, complete a gap analysis against current skills and define a plan to close the gaps.
Leverage skills technology (realistically): Today's HCMs (SAP, Oracle, Workday etc.) were not built to solve the skills problem, they can offer a "skills lake" which will not get you there, nor will an off-the-shelf skills taxonomy sold to you by a skills tech vendor. Instead, we recommend using machine learning technology to help build your skills taxonomy by identifying your organization's skills inputs and outputs, connecting your existing data sources to create a current state map, and continuously analyze how skills are shifting based on training, hiring, and redeployment.
Technology alone cannot get you there. You also need to create organizational agility through a new way of working. To achieve outcomes such as faster hiring, upskilling, and internal mobility, your HR teams need to build agility muscles. This includes shifting to a product or agile operating model where cross-functional teams work in outcome-based sprints to solve big problems. Use design thinking not just to understand the end customers but also to drive culture and adoption of a new way of working.
Start small and scale; have a use case sponsored by the business, i.e., a genuine business needs to solve and work on small test cases that can lead to larger rollouts. One example focused on front-line operations workers whose jobs are being disrupted by AI. By using machine learning to match an employee's skills to potential new career paths and adding in suggested learning and open jobs to apply to, we can create more transparency and give these workers agency over their careers. This pilot could easily be expanded to other areas of the business.
A few concluding thoughts:
Transitioning to a Skills-based organization is a tall order; most companies are closer to being "skills-curious" than “skills-based” today.
Moving to a skills-based workforce design is not just another tech implementation. This shift requires different working methods and a heavy investment in change management for HR, Employees, and Senior Leadership.
Skills is a new way of looking at workforce data- a clean data strategy and tech strategy are needed to derive value from the shift.
Find a willing customer and start small
Want to learn more about successfully building and implementing a skills strategy for your organization? Contact us!