Winning with Skills: Building a Future-Ready Organization

Introduction

Skills are a hot topic this year, as many organizations are now focusing on developing strategies around them. I find this interesting because companies have historically focused on skills for hiring and training. In fact, I cannot recall a time I’ve met or spoken with a hiring manager who was not focused solely on candidates' skills and experience before making a hiring decision. I believe the excitement around skills strategies really stems from HR evolving into a stronger strategic function in organizations, similar to the digital transformations that occurred in marketing divisions over the last 10+ years. Human resources teams have better access to new tools and technologies to acquire, manage, enrich, and leverage skills data to enhance people processes and fuel desired organizational outcomes. It’s the ability to better link skills to organizational goals through technology that is truly exciting, and I think this shift to better data and technologies enables HR to play an even more critical role in driving organizational success. So, let’s explore how human capital management practitioners—specifically, people analytics teams—can develop effective strategies and take sequential steps to lead the charge.

Navigating the Reality: Challenges for Organizations with Low Investment in Skills

If you listen to podcasts, attend conferences, and participate with expert panels—you’ll likely hear about how to get started down the skills strategy path from larger companies with potentially bigger budgets and investments in talent intelligence, AI, and skills data. This may not always be the case, but it tends to be my experience when seeking out additional perspectives on skill-based HCM strategies. Replicating the strategies and the ability to invest large sums in the same technologies as top companies can often differ from reality for many organizations. It reminds me of trying to find ways to relax and learning that buying or building a yacht and taking it out in a bay will help. I would love that, but the fact is some of us will have budgets for fishing boats, some have budgets for paddleboards, some will use floaties, and others are chillin’ on the shore with a beer watching the folks on the yachts.?We have to remember that we're all at the bay together, and that is most important. If you are on an HR team with a tight budget, that will shape what you can do, and you may have to get a little creative. If you’re part of an HR team with bigger budgets and investments in skills, you can implement more advanced solutions. Whichever situation you’re in is perfectly fine and you have to do the best with what you have. It’s all about achieving quick wins, one step at a time. Focus on what you have the ability to control and be as resourceful as possible to find creative and innovative solutions to address the skills challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for your company.

Strategic Foundation:? Alignment with Goals

So, where do we start? First, learn the strategic direction of your organization and the overall goals. Workforce skills and subsequent workforce capabilities will be a substantial part of your organization’s foundation to reaching those goals. After understanding your goals, identify and conduct an analysis on the specific jobs and tasks needed to achieve them. This process involves gathering information from organizational leadership and functional leadership about the responsibilities, duties, required skills, ‘nice-to-have’ skills, and qualifications for specific positions. Please note these aren’t just the hard technical skills, but also include softer skills like communication, leadership, mental agility, and more. The analysis can result in an executive level presentation, a database that lists each role and duties and skills needed (rows and grids style), and perhaps a written report to be shared with leadership teams. Make sure you have a foundational data layer that is structured and organized clearly!

Skills Inventory: Assessing Your Current Capabilities

Once you’ve identified future needs, assess your current skills. Cataloguing the skills you have today is critical, and you may discover you need to gather skills data from your current active employees.? Ideally you can acquire this information and document it in a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) like Workday or something else, assuming you have this technology available to you. It’s certainly helpful! Additionally, there are some valuable third party talent platforms like HireEZ and talent data sources like TalentNeuron that scrape tons of websites to catalogue both worker skills (via social profiles) and job descriptions posted in the marketplace. If you have an opportunity to partner with a talent intelligence platform or 3rd party data provider, there can be many benefits.?These tools can help enrich your internal skills data, provide skills insights into the marketplace, and you can even learn about the skills in the job postings of your top competitors. Insights into the jobs and skills your top competitors are recruiting for may even help your organization understand the competition’s strategic direction. Though I doubt this specific example would happen...imagine seeing a movie theatre posting a new position looking for somebody with experience launching a streaming service. That would be quite an insight into their strategic direction!

Bridging the Gap: Creating a Skills Matrix

Next, create a skills matrix that links the individual skills and team strengths today to the skills identified in the job analysis that are required for the future. The purpose of this assessment is to identify gaps that need to be filled, much like recognizing which positions require additional depth on a fantasy football team (I'm a fantasy football nut). Once you’ve established a clear understanding of your skills landscape from the assessment, dig deeper into the current competencies levels of the highest priority skills. Competency levels are important as they are based on employee's actual abilities rather than formal titles and skills keywords that pop in the database. Learning competency levels can be quite a process of its own, but it is well worth the time investment. Consider leveraging performance conversation data around key projects, 360-degree manager and peer feedback, or assessment scores and certifications on specific trainings. This is especially important when assessing the skills of managers and leadership teams. I recently read Sloan Review survey results from 2020 that highlighted how 82% of respondents believed company leaders must be digitally educated, but fewer than 10% agreed their organization had leaders with the needed skills to perform well in a digital economy. This is obviously just one source, and I probably have self-selection bias to make a point here, but it’s still an interesting insight nonetheless that supports how skills development is not merely for individual contributors, but also for company leadership. Even Tiger Woods has a coach.

Collaboration is Key: People Analytics to Lead the Charge!

Involve people analytics, talent acquisition, learning development, business leaders, and communications teams in the process. Their expertise is valuable to ensure the execution of the strategy is successful.? People analytics is critical to help oversee and manage the process of mapping for the skills to the future state of the business and provide insights to identify employee segments that need upskilling, segments that need reskilling, and specific roles that may need to be recruited externally. People analytics teams are also extremely well-versed in proper data management practices, so it's important to leverage their capabilities to ensure the skills data is managed ethically and responsibly. Additionally, people analytics can help develop the analyses and the necessary predictive models to forecast the future state of the skills strategy and how well the organization is linking skills to the organizational outcomes. In the event the people analytics team is lean, there are plenty of pre-built models and workforce planning solutions to consider using. ?

Learning Culture: Driving Continuous Improvement

The Learning & Development team will help support the training and development of employees and can help foster a broader culture of learning agility. In addition to traditional training methods, it’s crucial to leverage diverse learning modalities. Not every training opportunity should be short video content clips.? While videos may be effective in some instances, the real learning magic happens in job shadowing, cross-functional projects where learnings are applied, and mentorship programs to provide employees with hands-on experience. These approaches enrich skill development and foster collaboration among teams, which help people learn from one another and build stronger relationships. It’s a win win.

Transparency & Communication: Aligning Leadership and Teams

Partnering with business leaders and having a top-notch communication plan is essential. Across all employees and leadership teams, we must inspire cultures that value learning agility and enterprise-wide mindsets. Being an agile learner is essential because the market changes so fast and so dramatically, we must be flexible and learn quickly to apply new learnings in our workplaces to stay ahead of the competition. Marketing departments have embraced significant agile learning styles in the last 10-years as they have gone through digital transformations and faced constant pressure to show incremental ROI to their C-Suite. Similarly, HR teams and other areas of the business must emphasize the importance of being agile learners and show how we can move our businesses forward in these fast-moving times.? Employees’ will be the driving force behind the strategy to achieve the outcomes, and it’s important the strategy includes a strong communication plan for collective buy-in and alignment on the broader vision.

AI-Driven Insights: Tailored Learning & Skills Sourcing

Finally, pending your budget and capabilities, enable your people analytics leaders to leverage artificial intelligence to identify additional skills gaps and enable personalized learning paths in partnership with the L&D team. AI can support the evaluation of employee performance and suggest tailored training resources, and can further assist in creating individualized development plans, ensuring that each employee receives the support they need to excel. In fact, I’m sure AI could create the learning content itself and organizations could begin testing AI generated curriculum.? Additionally, talent acquisition will be highly involved to support the internal mobility of key talent into new roles, as well as recruiting external talent for important skills gaps. The talent acquisition teams can also leverage AI and talent intelligence tools to source and identify top talent with critical skills. While LinkedIn is a top platform for recruiting, there are hundreds of other sites to use and contact high quality candidates that must be considered, and AI can help sift through troves of talent.

Final Thoughts: The Path to Excellence

As you navigate the journey toward building a skills-centered organization, remember that it’s not just about identifying top talent; it’s about crafting a cohesive team that works well together. Leverage your people analytics team to the fullest potential to drive this data-informed strategy, while simultaneously fostering a culture of learning, collaboration, and recognizing achievements. Building a skills-centered organization is a strategic endeavor that requires careful planning and execution. By conducting a skills inventory, shifting focus from titles to capabilities, and embracing diverse learning modalities, you can assemble a winning team that drives organizational performance.

There are many ways to develop strategic skills-based initiatives, and this overview presents just one approach with several considerations.? If you want to discuss this further or share your experiences, please comment and let’s connect. The more experiences we can share, the better these approaches can be. Thank you.