A Quick Review of Skills-based Talent Journeys
There’s been a lot of talk recently about ‘skills + tasks.’ It’s an important topic, so let’s break it down.
First, let’s be clear about something. Not all journeys need to start with skills-based work design. Sometimes people seem to imply there’s only one true way to go about a skills journey. They are usually selling something.
Skills are data – a special kind of HR data that is strategically linked to several different areas of your business. Skills are linked to People, Jobs, Work Tasks, and Workforce Planning.
- Skills + People link to Employee Profiles, Skill Assessments, and L&D Upskilling programs
- Skills + Jobs links to Job Architecture, Org Design, Career Mobility, and Leader Development
- Skills + Work Tasks links to Resource Management, Work Design and Talent Marketplaces
- Skills + Workforce Planning links to Recruiting, Compensation, and Business Capability
As we’ve said before, a skills-based talent journey starts with your business drivers and tends to proceed from your starting point up or down the talent value chain.
St. Charles Skills-based Talent Value Chain
If you are redesigning your work tasks due to AI-enablement or talent scarcity, you will probably start your journey with skills-based work design. If you are using a talent marketplace to manage business disruption or improve staffing, you will probably begin with skills-based resource management. If you face recruitment challenges and labor market shortages, you will probably start with skills-based recruitment. You will probably begin with skills-based workforce planning if you need to develop new business capabilities to enter or quickly capture a new market opportunity. You may start with skills-based job design if you need to update your job architecture, standardize job requirements, map similar job descriptions due to a recent merger, etc.
Any of these is a fine place to start. Each starting point has its pros and cons, benefits, and challenges. In fact, many of our larger clients have several of these issues happening simultaneously in various parts of the organization. And that is fine, too. It just takes a bit of governance and coordination to ensure that when these separate efforts develop, they do so with a common language and set of guardrails to ultimately share skills information across the enterprise.
Remember,
- Not all journeys will result in complete transformations; some will remain localized to one area of the talent value chain.
- Not all journeys will proceed across the entire enterprise; some will remain targeted at particular business lines or divisions where they are needed most.
- Not all journeys will proceed to the most advanced maturity level; some will remain pragmatic and value-added.
There is nothing wrong with employing skills-based talent solutions that are localized, pragmatic, and limited and still achieve real business value.
Now, let’s talk about ‘Skills + Jobs’ first Journeys
Many journeys will require linking skills with the job architecture, and we will highlight some of them below. Some of these may leverage formal job architectures; others may not. Linking skills to jobs is important because it provides context to help you scope your skills taxonomy. Skills-based job design is near the center of our Skills-based Value Chain, making it both a keystone for achieving broad skills-based transformation and one of the more complicated and confusing topics to cover. It links operationally driven skills-based processes like work design and resource management and talent-driven processes like workforce management and career development. Updating the job architecture and associated job descriptions with skills and skill definitions in the skills taxonomy will help to support employee self-development, staffing, recruiting, and workforce planning efforts.
‘Skills + Jobs’ First Journeys – Operational Efficiency
1. New Service Delivery Models
A company wishes to improve efficiency in current operations through a combination of automation, centralization, offshoring, and standardization to keep costs competitive. This often requires dramatic changes to workforce models and job architecture as processes and job responsibilities are redesigned.
These journeys often span the entire talent value chain but may remain limited to the business unit or function affected by the transformation. An example might be a call center transformation, where specific inquiries will be processed at a new service delivery center located offshore. The smaller, legacy onshore workforce will be left to handle only those calls that have been escalated to them. They may need upskilling to handle these new responsibilities. Standing up the new offshore center may require jobs to be designed, skills assigned, career paths mapped out, job descriptions posted for recruiting to pursue, and onboarding to be delivered.
2. Integrating Operations – Mergers and Acquisitions
Due to an acquisition or merger, a company has two sets of job architecture and organizational structures that must be integrated. Job descriptions and career ladders from the two companies need to be aligned. If it is an acquisition, the acquired job descriptions and career levels may be aligned with the parent company. In a merger, the two may be aligned to a new third structure that combines the two. Or the new company might operate as a subsidiary and maintain its existing structure while its jobs are mapped or equated to some existing paradigm that allows for combined operational reporting and analyses. Skills is a natural place to start analyzing jobs to identify which jobs employ a substantially similar set of skills across the two organizations. If job tasks and responsibilities are redefined, the skill difference between old and new jobs can be highlighted for upskilling to close gaps.
3. Integrating Operations – Jurisdictional Differences
Some organizations that operate globally have to contend with different regulatory bodies that define the requirements of jobs differently. It may be that the job licensing requirements, required skills, and descriptions of similar jobs for specific engineering disciplines or accounting roles differ from one country to another. In trying to create an enterprise where people are trained similarly or can move across jurisdictions more efficiently, it may be necessary to identify the overlap and differences of skills across jurisdictions, upskilling programs to level skills across the enterprise, or to determine equitable pay scales and career options.
4. Integrating Operations – Large and Small Operating Units
Many large organizations have larger offices in some cities or markets and smaller offices in other cities or markets. In such cases, where each office’s overall tasks and responsibilities are similar, the offices with more employees may be able to design jobs with more specialization. In contrast, smaller offices require employees to operate with broader or more generalized skills. In creating common talent structures that try to create equitable opportunities across regional boundaries and the ability to move resources across locations more fluidly, it may be necessary to assess the skills possessed by each group to identify cross-training or upskilling opportunities or align pay scales or career advancement options.
‘Skills + Jobs’ First Journeys – Organization Design
5. Job Architecture Design
Several job architecture-driven skills initiatives may start with a job-to-skills mapping exercise. One of the most common ones we encounter is an organization implementing or upgrading a new HCM system that requires porting its job/career architecture to a new system or, for the first time, employing skills-enabled job descriptions to facilitate training or resource management via a talent marketplace.
Another option may be that job titles and descriptions have grown overly complex. Over time, job data across systems tends to get M.U.D.D.L.E.D (Mislabeled, Unstructured, Duplicative, Disorganized, Lacking Consistency, Erroneous, or Dated). There may be a desire to improve talent management functions with more streamlined and reliable data to facilitate talent management processes such as leadership development, succession planning, or DEI objectives. The organization may wish to simplify, consolidate, or standardize job titles and responsibilities. Standardizing or normalizing the data can improve talent operations and clarify employee career paths.
6. Skills-based Organization Design
Some companies find themselves overly decentralized or siloed and seek more adaptable talent structures, allowing talent to flow freely and cross-functionally throughout the organization. Establishing more transparency in employee skills or standardizing the skills associated with certain jobs may be a first step in finding and sharing talent more globally or designing more cross-functional roles.
Alternately, an organization may seek to flatten an organization it feels has developed too many layers between management and operations. Identifying skills related to existing job definitions may be a first step in analyzing where opportunities exist to consolidate levels and create a more streamlined organization.
Some adventurous companies have been exploring the concept of digital twins—virtual organizational structures and process models that simulate changes and forecast their impact before implementation. This innovation can transform organizational design efficiency, significantly improving organizations’ operations.
In all cases, the primary focus of skills-based organization design is to allow for more flexible skill-sharing across the organization.
7. Talent Scarcity Driven Organizational Design Remote or Centralized Work
With talent shortages in many industries and fields, some companies pool scarce resources in centralized organizations to more equitably and judiciously allocate and prioritize resources when and where they are needed most. Skill-based organizations organize resources primarily around the workforce’s skills and how those structures enhance or impede the flow of skills throughout the organization. As such, commonly shared skills may be centralized in a shared service group for global accessibility and standardization (e.g., Printing Services). Alternatively, specific scarce skills may be centralized into Centers of Excellence to allocate them more efficiently (e.g., Training Development, Software Development, etc.). Certain general resources may be pooled within operating areas while more specialized talent is allocated by need. Other organizations are expanding remote work arrangements to help attract or retain critically scarce talent. Targeted upskilling ‘boot camps’ can also help extend the pool of resources with scarce skills.
‘Skills + Jobs’ First Journeys – Career Design/Employee Experience
8. Career Design – Career Mobility and Self-directed Careers
The classic career ladder is hierarchical, with advancement flowing to roles of ever-greater scope of management responsibility. The main shortcoming is that the pyramid grows ever smaller at the top, offering fewer opportunities to advance at each stage. This frequently leads to attrition as employees feel advancement opportunities are easier to find externally than within. A second challenge is focusing on management scope as the primary focus for advancement. This strands many career paths seeking to advance their career through other paths, such as through ever more technical expertise in their profession or craft.
Some companies with significant turnover problems seek to reduce attrition and improve employee experience by improving career mobility through talent marketplaces and skill-based career pathways. It starts by publishing the skills required for each job and each career path (i.e., the job architecture). This empowers employees to transparently see the skill gaps between themselves and their desired career direction; they can pursue highly personalized development pathways with talent development, mentors, and developmental assignments tied to their skill gaps and interests. This ability works for lateral movement and traditional advancement, as employees can seek the skill requirements of any published job their skill interests take them. This allows for more flexible career paths to help attract and retain the best talent and improve the employee value proposition. It also creates global consistency and transparency of roles that make lateral movement more feasible when combined with standard skill definitions. These journeys usually start with a review of career architecture, which then quickly proceeds to review the job architecture and job-skills mapping.
Some Advice on ‘Skills + Jobs’ first Journeys
Pursuing a job/career architecture redesign can be complex due to the number of Talent processes that intersect with it. We generally recommend starting small if possible. Employees have sound Agile development principles by selecting a portion of the organization to pilot the new skills-based job architecture (an MVP). Such a selection should be based on criteria determined by the governance team to indicate the best fit for an initial pilot. Such criteria might include potential benefits, organizational readiness, ease of implementation, etc.
When conducting a job/skills mapping effort, you will likely want to consider the following items. How many skills should a job description contain, in broad terms? Too many skills can become unwieldy and difficult to manage. There is no definitive answer, but a balance must be struck between comprehensive and concise to enable people to understand the job requirements meaningfully. This can include both core/critical and nice-to-have skills.
- Core/Critical Skills: Core abilities indispensable for a role. These skills would generally be considered mandatory for all employees in the role. Remember to keep the list tight; the more skills you add, the fewer candidates you will find. Another way to think about this is what skills are critical on day one.
- Secondary Skills: These skills fundamentally improve performance but can be learned on the job. Knowledge of a proprietary piece of software might be one example. Even though knowledge of your custom inventory management software is necessary to do a job, it may be unlikely that anyone would know that before joining the team.
- Nice-to-Have Skills: Beneficial skills that enhance performance but are not strictly necessary. You do not have to list every soft skill that improves performance, just the most important ones. Putting ‘strong oral and written communication skills’ on every job description often renders it meaningless.
Why Did We Write This Blog?
So, we’ve highlighted over half a dozen skills-based talent journeys where tying skills to jobs will happen first or very early in the process. This is not an exhaustive list, but it highlights some specific examples where this process is critical. We’ll highlight some journeys that start with workforce planning in our next blog post. Remember, there is no right way to pursue a skills-based talent journey. Let your business drivers be your guide. Stay focused on what adds the most value. Remember, you can keep it simple, pragmatic, and focused on tangible outcomes. Not every journey must end by “transforming your entire talent operating model.”