A Quick Review of Skills-based Talent Journeys
This is the fifth and final blog in our five-part series on skills-based talent journeys. This one focuses on multi-pronged skills journeys. Multi-pronged skills journeys integrate skills strategies at several points across the Skills-Value Chain™ simultaneously, but all strategically linked to support a single business objective. These are more complex journeys to execute, but they can be excellent candidates to drive skills-based talent into an organization as a common goal unites the many initiatives, and this can help create a common language and processes.
Remember, skills are, first and foremost, a special kind of HR data strategically 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. Many complex organizations are responding to various business drivers simultaneously, launching initiatives along several points on the talent value chain. This would be a multi-pronged skills journey. Each separate initiative would tend to proceed to the areas adjacent to it, eventually “meeting” somewhere between the two starting points.
St. Charles Skills-based Talent Value Chain
In the cases highlighted below, the multiple starting points are all linked by a common business challenge, which is advantageous, but not always the case. This is where having a coordinated skills strategy and centralized governance is critical. It is all too easy for these independent skills initiatives to meet, having developed two incompatible skills frameworks, job architecture, or talent systems. Each group must align on some shared assumptions, framework, and communications to respond to their skill needs while having compatible or aligned frameworks when they meet in the middle. Creating a shared skills taxonomy or ontology is often a common element of such multi-pronged skills journeys.
Examples of Multi-pronged Skills Journeys
Business Agility in the Face of Constant/Accelerating Change
A company wishes to develop a comprehensive talent program to keep pace with its market’s accelerating pace of change. IT Departments, R&D departments, technology and telecommunications firms, and other businesses subject to frequent and dramatic change need to make upskilling and reskilling a constant business practice to keep pace with the accelerating pace of change in their market.
- Skills + Workforce Planning: Longer-term strategies, driven by talent intelligence, to source talent (build, buy, borrow, etc.) in emerging skills.
- Skills + Jobs: Creating new groups, teams, or communities of interest that support emerging skills.
- Skills + Tasks: Linking the demand engine to resource management through the talent marketplace and L&D Upskilling to quickly get emerging skills where needed. Also, creating internal opportunities to practice emerging skills with internal gigs.
- Skills + People: Continuous development through on-demand training, communities of interest, targeted feeds, performance support, and other strategies driven by skills sensing to keep current on new functionality and techniques.
Operational Efficiency – Driving Efficiency with New Service Delivery Models
To keep costs competitive, a company wishes to improve efficiency in current operations through a combination of automation, centralization, offshoring, and standardization. This often requires dramatic changes to workforce models and the job architecture as processes and responsibilities are redesigned.
- Skills + Workforce Planning – Planning for opening a new greenfield or offshore division.
- Skills + Jobs – New job descriptions and organizational structures with skills and proficiency levels defined for each.
- Skills + Tasks – Tagging skills required for new automated or standardized workflows or new analyses expected of the legacy workforce.
- Skills + People – New greenfield or offshore groups need rapid onboarding; legacy onshore resources need upskilling.
Operational Efficiency – Improving the Energy Efficiency of Existing Operations
A company wishes to transition to more energy-efficient work practices or those that reduce its carbon footprint. This shift may include new decarbonizing work processes, electrifying fleets, renegotiating power and building contracts, or reevaluating supply chains. Importantly, this transition necessitates the development of new green skills and capabilities and new reporting requirements, highlighting the crucial role of talent management in improving energy efficiency.
- Skills + Workforce Planning: Where new business capability is required, such as shifting all diesel engineers to electrical engineers with the electrification of a transportation fleet.
- Skills + Jobs: If job responsibilities shift to include or exclude new requirements, such as changing energy suppliers, a new automated fleet control center, new climate roles, etc.
- Skills + Tasks: When new work tasks require new skills, such as new processes or reporting requirements, or new manufacturing techniques producing less heat or requiring less energy during production.
- Skills + People – To upskill on new skills and processes to support any of the above. And to level performance standards across the globe.
Capital Asset Efficiency – Improving Maintenance of Aging Assets
A capital-intensive company (e.g., heavy industry, transportation, energy and resources, aerospace and defense, etc.) needs to extend support for aging assets amidst a drain in legacy maintenance personnel and a decreasing supply of young talent to replace them.
Industrial products and heavy industry companies have billions of dollars tied up in significant capital equipment investments on which their operations depend. This equipment is aging in many companies and requires ongoing maintenance from a technical workforce nearing retirement. At the same time, attracting young, skilled workers to maintain the aging equipment is more challenging than ever. Scarce talent must be identified, attracted, sourced, upskilled, shared, and stretched across the organization as nimbly as possible.
- Skills + Workforce Planning – A plan to identify, attract, and source critical skills from the market
- Skills + Jobs – Organization designed to share, triage, or leverage scarce skills across the organization
- Skills + Tasks – Documenting maintenance tasks and skills for knowledge transfer
- Skills + People – Upskilling new people, or cross-training legacy resources, knowledge capture of outbound talent
Why Did We Write This Blog?
Over the past few weeks, we’ve highlighted two dozen skills-based talent journeys. This is not an exhaustive list, but it highlights specific examples of leveraging skills data to improve talent management that can address current business challenges. Our intent was to broaden the conversation about how skills-based talent management can drive value, and hopefully explain how local, independent skills-based journeys can drive value and how they can build toward enterprise-wide solutions with a good strategy and some governance. If you are interested in learning more about these topics, stay tuned for our forthcoming book, Enterprise Skills Unlocked, due for release in the coming months.