Preparing the Organization for Skills & Jobs in Constant Flux

Co-authored with Andrea Hough, Lisa Stornaielo, and Josephine Holmboe 

Most of us have read the headlines about how artificial intelligence will displace and automate jobs, but are we prepared to identify the future skills needed as our organizations transform before our eyes?  

In Mercer’s Talent Trends 2018 survey, 26% of executives indicated that they expect significant disruption to happen in their industry over the next two years. Another 43% said that they expect moderate disruption. Added to this, World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report estimates that 54% of workers will need reskilling and upskilling by 2022.

All of this represents a call to action for HR Leaders to move beyond talking about the future of skills at the 30,000-foot level and get specific fast!   

We need to approach this business problem with a business mindset. If a competitor starts to take away market share, a business leader will develop an aggressive plan to get it back. As HR leaders we need to recognize that lack of insight and preparedness around the future skills needed to succeed in the marketplace is a threat to the success of our organizations, the health of our society, and the continued engagement of our employees. So we asked our member companies of the Future Workplace Network, a consortium of FORTUNE 500 heads of HR, Learning and Talent, how they are approaching the future of skills in their organizations and what possible actions can be taken to assume a leadership role on this important issue.

Our solution was a Future of Skills Hackathon conducted by the Fidelity team of Andrea, Lisa, and Josephine, along with 50 members of the Future Workplace Network. Our members were challenged to fall in love with a problem, and seek to discover needs, both latent and expressed, in solving our team challenge:  

How do we migrate our talent practices from experience-based to skills-based in a world where roles of the future are dynamic and constantly changing?

We used a design thinking process to examine new ways of looking at this problem, ask questions of ourselves and our business stakeholders, and propose action steps we could discuss back in our respective organizations. Overall, our goal was to move beyond talking about this at a generic level and to see the world through the eyes of the accelerated pace of change we are experiencing in our jobs.

The Hackathon took participants through a series of design thinking exercises to get everyone thinking creatively about how to re-imagine what is needed to prepare for the future of skills.

Here are our three learning points:

1. Design with the User in Mind

In our discussion we identified various segments of users and posed questions to address with them:

Employees: What skills do I need to thrive in the future of work? What skills will future proof me to ensure my continued employment?

Business Leaders: What skills do we need to support our business strategies and the accelerated pace of change within our organizations, and what are our plans to build or acquire these skills?  

HR, Talent & Learning Professionals: As HR and Learning professionals how do we shift our traditional training mindset and develop and curate learning in micro bursts, and developed in multiple modalities from face-to-face, online self-paced, online semi-synchronous (with a firm start and ending date), virtual reality, and augmented reality. We need to develop learning that is as diverse as our learner population!

Traditional Higher Education Partners: What types of higher education partnerships we develop and how can we create an entirely different type of partnership with accredited institutions of higher education?

New Re-Skilling Partners: Are we doing enough to explore alliances with new re-skilling partners such as General Assembly, Code School, FullStack Academy, Flat Iron School, LRNG, community based education, and Guild Education.  

2. Create Principles to Guide Your Future Skills Strategy

We discussed the following three principles:     

Life-Long Learning is a Shared Employer/Employee Partnership: We must communicate that building a culture of life-long learning in our organizations is a shared responsibility. So rather than point fingers at who should be driving this effort, it’s important we recognize that all of us must be accountable. This accountability includes our employees, our business leaders, our key stakeholders, and, importantly, our HR leaders who need to see their role as managing the talent supply chain and ensuring the organization has an inventory of the key skills they need to meet today's business strategies as well as tomorrow's.

Life-Long Learning is Part of the Company Culture: We need to nurture a culture of life-long learners with an ability for all employees to see a path forward in developing and broadening their skills. To succeed in the new world of work—whether it’s the increased usage of artificial intelligence or growing importance of uniquely human skills—we must re-define education beyond a diploma, to include a portfolio of skills acquired at every point in the employee's life cycle. This will require our leaders to adopt a growth mindset with their team members reinforcing the importance of life-long learning.

Life-Long Learning is an Employee Benefit: We need to be future focused and see a workplace where a company's commitment to upskilling will be a required employee benefit, just like 401(k) or health care plan. In a world where the shelf life of knowledge is now less than five years, we need to use life-long learning as a vehicle to win the war for talent. The employer value proposition needs to be more than Come for Our Culture. Rather it needs to be: Come for Our Culture and Your Continued Career Growth. Prospective employees need to clearly understand how an organization will invest in them to stay relevant and employable in the new world of work.

3. Use an Empathy Map to Understand Internal Roadblocks, Gains, and a Path Forward with Engaging Business Leaders    

The Fidelity team shared a powerful model of an Empathy Map (see below) to kick start our thinking in what really matters as we plan for the future of skills. Overall, the gains of business alignment, increased engagement, and speed in addressing skills gaps were the key drivers in developing a future skills strategy. But internal roadblocks are a reality, often they include a focus on today's skills rather than future skills. As one participant aptly shared, ''On average, about 10% of the skills identified as needed by business leaders, are ones we see as future-focused skills." However, the way to embark on a future skills strategy is for HR leaders to develop a communications strategy where we educate business leaders on the range of new skills emerging in their domain—be it manufacturing, accounting or engineering—and create a shared vision for taking action now!

4. Plan For Constant Change  

As HR leaders it will be increasingly important for us to accept the new rules of working where the pace of change has never been this fast and will never be this slow again! This means we must give people time to adapt and prepare for new organizational designs of work, while recognizing individual needs. This is going to start with building a new employer/employee partnership where companies invest in on-going employee development and employees have a clear line of sight into the skills needed for the future.

Finally, as with any new business initiative, creating a strategy for future skills will be a team sport. It will require alignment and buy in across multiple functional areas to co-create the specific skills needed in critical job roles in engineering, manufacturing, and marketing. Regardless of your industry, creating a strategy for future skills at the domain level is what is needed to thrive in the future of work.

We believe now is the time to start your journey!

Jeanne Meister is Founding Partner, Future Workplace and Co-Host of Future Workplace Network, a consortium of HR, Talent and Learning leaders exploring how to prepare for the future workforce and workplace. Jeanne is also a faculty member of Using AI 4 HR To Enhance Employee Experience, a five week online course highlighting over 12 video case studies of how HR leaders are transforming all aspects of the employee life cycle with artificial intelligence. Read Jeanne's past articles on Forbes.