The world of work has changed dramatically, as has the workforce, and the workplace. While not a new concept – given all the talk about the future of and the need to reimagine work going for many years now – I think it is safe to say that it will likely remain in a constant state of evolution. As such, people and their work will need to keep pace with the speed of technology, business, customers, leaders, initiatives, and the multitude of other disruptions. This is not about transformation anymore. It is about thinking in new and different ways that will allow us to absorb change and evolve – with speed, scale, and the insights necessary to do so. The skills discussion has heated up dramatically over the last few years – and rightly so as skills and capabilities are central for this kind of agility and new work models.
The pressure on organizations to be agile and innovative has never been more top of mind. I had the opportunity to study the notion of skills-based organizations (SBOs) — and the technology landscape that supports them – in my former role at Deloitte. Deloitte defines SBOs as a new operating model for work and the workforce. Instead of fixed, static jobs, SBOs place a dynamic landscape of skills and human capabilities that can be agilely deployed to WORK as it continuously evolves.
At Oracle, we believe being skills-driven is critical to unlocking the performance and potential of the workforce and leads to better business and talent decisions for all stakeholders including HR, managers, and individuals.
Think about it…
- Workers need certain skills to be able to complete work aligned with their role, project, outcomes, and growth.
- Managers review people based on how proficient they are at the skills needed for that job and to help support, coach, develop, and celebrate outcomes and continuous growth.
- HR/Talent helps access, support, train, retain, and reward talent based on the skills needed for workers, managers, and the organization to be successful.
Workers traditionally self-identified around their job titles, often unsure themselves about — orhow to articulate to others — what they were capable of, finding new opportunities, and continuously learning and growing. The same is true for the managers of people and teams. But, managers and leaders must go beyond jobs to achieve enterprise needs as they try to solve for the agility, growth, attrition, attraction, strategy, risk, engagement, productivity, ESG, innovation, and more to do this. And of course, HR traditionally used jobs also as the heart of their talent advisory, decisions, and actions. In the face of new challenges, such as workforce architecture, DEIB, culture, , job architecture, worker experience, recognition, rewards, and succession planning, they need a “skills central” to help support all of this.
We can extrapolate this across virtually every talent process in the organization, but you get the idea. Skills are important because they level the playing field – using them to underpin talent workflows creates an equitable approach to hiring, promotion and development. This means you can focus on the skills someone has developed, not their title, school, when they graduated, or where they come from or worked in the past. Given the increasing shorter half-life of skills, organizations are having to focus on skills AND capabilities, not previous job titles or even years of experience. It is important to remember, as we talk about being skills-driven, it should be how to identify, understand, plan for, leverage, develop and reward them — and ideally how to maximize their impact for EVERY STAKEHOLDER– the organization, the HR team, managers and most definitely for employees. As Josh Bersin has put it, “Who we hire, how we pay, who we promote and how we organize our companies are ALL built on the fundamental building blocks of skills.”
Now that you know why skills matter at a high level, let’s bring it down to the basic concerns organizations have around skills – the detection, management and utilization of skills.
Organizations are or should be asking questions like these that are focused on being able to fulfill the talent needs of the organization:
- How do we know what skills we need now? For the future?
- Where do we have skills gaps?
- How can we ensure an always current view of skills and capabilities?
And this should go far beyond recruiting to worker agility, succession planning,, and more.
What if we could…
- Detect, standardize and recommend skills for employees?
- Have a centralized place to view and manage skills and development?
- Provide personalized, AI-driven resources to help employees grow?
- Enrich talent processes via AI-powered skills suggestions?
- Effectively manage all talent across the workforce ecosystem?
These are big questions and a strategy and good partnership(s) can help to:
- Realize the goals of making personalized recommendations for growth to all stakeholders automatically.
- Deliver a centralized place to view, develop, and manage skills.
- Maintain an up-to-date inventory you can leverage to make strategic talent decisions.
By having a full and complete understanding of the skills in your organization , you can effectively balance and manage both the supply and demand of skills in your organization.
Where and how does an organization start to think about putting skills and capabilities to work across the enterprise to drive key business and talent decisions?