Why We Can’t Solve the Skills Challenge with Tech (Oops Did I Think That Out Loud #30)

The concept of this article has been in the making since early 2023. If we can take a moment and travel back in time, you will remember when skills technology was all the rage at HR conferences, and the industry spoke about skills as if it was the final piece of the HR and Future of Work jigsaw.

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I remember feeling uneasy about the ideas presented and letting tech lead the conversation on solving the skills challenge then, and it has taken me a whole year to figure out why.

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I am not sure if we truly understand the problem statement(s) of what we want to solve and why skills tech could be the solution.

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Let me try to break this down:

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Skills is an Ambiguous Concept

What does skills mean? How do you measure it? You get at least seven different answers if you ask that question to ten people. Do all skills have to be demonstrable? Who has the authority to assess if a skill is sufficient or superior? How do we know skills are not biased based on context or demographic traits? When was the last time skills were discussed as a categorical input/output data category in conversations outside of HR and Talent? Are all skills transferrable? Who/what determines transferability?

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I have many more questions regarding the fundamental concept of skills in the human context. I believe tackling the skills conversation with technology is like explaining the idea of a circle to a toddler as πr2. They’ll remember the formula if you make them repeat it long enough, but it doesn’t tell them what a “circle” means or what it looks like.

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Until we define what skills are and what they look like in practice and day-to-day work, we’ll keep seeing the gap between what skills tech can do and what the HR industry is willing to buy into en masse.

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English is Not the Most Descriptive Language

Think about what good verbal communication skills mean to you. Now check that with the person sitting next to you or the one you’re currently virtually pinging. I bet the characteristics you assign to good verbal communication skills may not be the same as those they assign. For a language that gets as particular as defenestration, English is also oddly ambiguous when describing skillsets.

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Most of the time, this isn’t a problem, and we work around it by adding more descriptors or making up our own words (yes, I do that; English is my third spoken language, and I need to make it work). But when you ask a whole industry of people to come together and agree on what good verbal communication skills mean, I think that’s when we get into trouble. Who has the ultimate authority to define what words should be used to describe a concept?

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This is why the skills conversation to date has been very much an organization-centric topic, where independent organizations use skills tech and their descriptors to categorize and identify talent in the organization or talent they seek.

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This is completely fine until we start thinking about the broader implications. Internal mobility is great, but sometimes talent must come from external sources. So how does one translate what Company A defines as an excellent communication skill to what Company B might consider great communication skills?

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Symptoms in a Skills-Driven Problem Can be Solved by Other Means

This may be an unpopular opinion, and as much as I love skills tech, I need to look at this problem objectively. If we look at some of the pain points, we believe HR can solve with skills tech most of the time they’re around:

• Hire better
• Promote better
• Retain better

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Let me present a slightly different view on this (not right or wrong, just different):

• Hire better = Set different targets for your talent acquisition teams or RPOs and have them solve this.
• Promote better = If the organization is meeting its internal promo targets and can hire externally for roles that it cannot fill internally, what’s the incentive to adopt skills?
• Retain better = The importance of retention usually depends on the supply and demand in the labor market. In a market where supply is at or above demand and retention can be achieved through last-minute retention bonuses and other means, are skills critical in this path?

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Don’t get me wrong, I applaud those tackling the skills challenge head-on and have already created solutions to address their organizational skills challenges. I am making this point because skills tech providers are looking to sell a permanent solution into an industry that is used to temporary band-aid solutions that solve symptoms (primarily due to historical underfunding and necessity). So, before skills tech can take off, I think some industry vision/mindset rewiring may be needed.

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Putting all three items together, I can now say that I felt uneasy about this a year ago because, first, we are looking to address a series of loosely defined problems with a set of incredibly defined solutions. Skills tech is sold on the promise of “if you do A, B, and C in this order, you will address challenges 1, 2, and 3.” Second, we are selling a solution to a series of symptoms that can be band-aided over by other “simpler”/more familiar solutions.

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So, I don’t think we can solve the skills problem with tech because the industry has yet to align, understand, and articulate the actual problem(s) they are looking to solve.

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The skills tech solutions I have seen are some of the most well-thought-out and beautifully developed products in the HR tech industry. But for skills tech to take off, we need to take a step back and bring the HR industry along in understanding what skills are in the first place and why they are essential.

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What do you think about this? ?