Skills are not this difficult

Skills, skills, skills. They are everywhere. The narrative surrounding this topic continues unabated and if anything, grows LOUDER. Amplified by governments and NGOs, lobbyists and think tanks who try to understand what the future looks like and how we prepare for that. Monitised by vendors, me included, as we attempt to solve challenges for organisations and institutions around the globe using Skills as a force for transformation. Demanded by individuals who are the very people who stand to benefit the most.?

Our appetite is undeniable. We look almost ravenous for skills to help unleash a tidal wave of increased performance and productivity. A wave that will kickstart flat economies and drive innovation to solve the critical issues we face on this planet. Yet I do not see that appetite being sated. Not at all. In reality, progress is slow. Why??

I have been thinking about this for a while and have landed on two main reasons.? There will be others, but from my experience speaking with enterprise buyers as well as market leading vendors Confusion and Complexity are where the challenges persist the most.??

Let’s start with Confusion. Firstly, I confess that I have directly contributed to the state of uncertainty that exists in the skills market right now. And this is one of the reasons I can make this claim. Confusion is being created by vendors. As a result, buyers cannot think, they cannot strategise. They look for answers but do not find them. The outcome of that. Nothing. Inertia. Worse still, buyers decide they can’t make skills work for them and focus efforts elsewhere.??

?As a species we mostly prefer certainty to confusion. We prefer order to anarchy. My experience during events season this Spring leads me to believe that certainty and clarity are hard to find right now. Walk the floor at any large HR Tech event and you will get a sense of a market bazaar with vendors screaming SKILLS, AUTOMATION and AI until your senses feel assaulted and you need to go outside for a break. This is not helpful for buyers. I am also at an age where I am happy to be cynical. That cynicism makes me believe there is a lot of BS being pushed.??

The HR leaders I know are crying out for clarity not BS. Does this system integrate skills data, including proficiencies, with our HCM? Can we bring our own skills taxonomy with us, and will we have full reporting and analytics capabilities if we do that? These are Yes/No answers. Yet many buyers can’t get an answer. Or is it on the roadmap. Or worse still it was on roadmap but is now back on the product backlog. Result. Angry clients.??

What Buyers need is to know specifics around tech capabilities, dependencies, integrations & interoperability as well as surety on roadmap delivery.??

I was with a TA leader last week who is challenging his vendors for not delivering what they said they would, and they just want to talk about the new bells and whistles they are building.? He wants to solve the business problems he originally procured the technology for before considering shiny new things. This simply adds risk, it does not mitigate it.??

-- We need to make sure we have the capabilities and capacity to get value from what was already procured before we unwrap this year’s shiny new toy --?

Now, indulge me if you will in a little role-play. Imagine you are the CPO, CHRO or whomever is the most senior HR leader at your organisaiton. You have a leader in position across each of your key HR functions in TA, TM, L&D, SWP etc. Each has skills as a key priority over the next year, two years, ten years, whatever. Each also has a technology strategy they own and are accountable for. As the CPO, part of your role is to provide oversight and to question and challenge technology vendors selected and budgets spent. Some are business critical systems that make sure people are paid the correct amount on time and others drive the employee experience and ensure everyone is seen and heard.??

What is now playing out is HR functions battling each other on the basis their Learning system has the biggest skills taxonomy, or their Talent Management solution is powered by a new AI Skills Ontology. The outside narrative is playing out internally. Confusion is leading to fragmented eco-systems and a busted UX. We all know that if the UX is poor and employees vote with their feet then skills will wash up on the shore. We will have failed to grasp the opportunity. If we get that integrated UX right and people come back to whichever system to do whatever it is they need then bingo, we all win.??

People get to manage their own careers, develop skills, see adjacent roles or elect to be a mentor. Whatever is important to them. Organisations get to generate a proprietary data set with high quality skills data as a key component. A data set they trust and can confidently make strategic planning decisions with that allows HR to deliver against the business strategy. That is why we are here, right, to play a part in executing the company's strategy? Maybe not in all cases.??

Competition is important. I know that. Markets are driven by it and the innovation it creates is hugely valuable. However, if vendors do not reduce confusion and provide the clarity buyers are screaming for then churn will increase, and transformations will be unsuccessful. We will lose.??

-- Vendors will experience increased churn and enterprises will not deliver successful transformations if buyers cannot plan with confidence and surety --?

With each function battling for positioning in the overall system architecture there is undoubtedly a level of Complexity that exists, and this is no different for Skills Infrastructure and Architecture. It is complex, of course, but our role as vendors is always to reduce that complexity. I have met very pragmatic leaders who have made huge tradeoffs in the sophistication of their wider skills and talent solutions because it works. Is it perfect? No. Is the UX clunky? Maybe. Is the skills data structure consistent? Oh yes indeed it is. It works. It is all from one vendor and they are accepting of the limitations.??

I have also met a lot more HR leaders who have pursued an eco-system approach and are now bogged down with confusion and internal battles. Where complexity exists, they crave simplicity. Do they wish they had pursued the “one system to rule them all” approach? Maybe, and they still could. Where would that leave vendors battling for customers in a market with persisting headwinds if that trend continues???

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-- This article is not to beat us vendors with a stick. It is to say the opportunities to reduce confusion and complexity whilst maintaining healthy and useful competition are ahead --?

Another HR leader I spent time with last week commented that she believed “we make skills more complex than they need to be” and she is right. Anyone that knows me will have heard me say that technology is not the solution. It is a key part of it for sure, but it is not a silver bullet for any transformation. This is never more relevant than skills.??

A long-term strategy for skills needs to be agnostic of the technology that enables it. Taxonomies need to be business specific and not defined by your tech vendors.? By that I mean using data from a multitude of sources and building something that is proprietary to your organisation. One that can support initiatives across the candidate and employee lifecycle. Avoid having one taxonomy for hiring and another for onboarding and then another for learning. It won’t work. It will be too complex. You will keep banging your heads together across HR functions and progress will be painfully slow. You will need to map taxonomies which is a heavy, heavy lift, ridiculously complex, and impacts interoperability even more.??

I am starting to think that in reality your business specific taxonomy can be built and managed in Excel and then updated into various systems at an agreed cadence as part of your skills governance. Not very exciting is it, using excel, however this ubiquitous tool provides the autonomy needed to truly be tech agnostic and have the freedom and options to develop an ecosystem that will deliver the experiences you want for everyone in your organisation. You are decoupled from technology dependencies. Do I expect people to use excel? Of course not, not in many instances anyway, but I suggest is as an indication of how we can simplify, use the tools already available to us and stop being distracted by the shiny new things??

At the end of the day skills are about people. Our colleagues, our friends and our children all being able to utlise their skills and capabilities and unlock their true potential. That is how we generate value. Value for the individual, value for the organisation and value for society. People are straightforward. Provide us with consistent experiences whether we are looking at future opportunities in a talent marketplace, applying for a job on LinkedIn, coaching someone or developing our own skills to try and win that promotion. The scenario is largely irrelevant. What is hugely relevant is that we will no longer tolerate what came before. Expectations have increased and it is on us, all of us vendors in the skills space, to meet those expectations. We will not do that by continually confusing and adding complexity to the story. To the contrary, we need to focus on clarity and simplicity.

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Thank you for reading.??