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, then you are probably going to start your journey with skills-based work design. If you are using a talent marketplace to manage business disruption or improve staffing then you are probably going to start with skills-based resource management. If you are facing recruitment challenges and labor market shortages, you are probably going to start with skills-based recruiting. If you need to develop new business capability to enter or quickly capture a new market opportunity, you are probably going to start with skills-based workforce planning. If you need to update your job architecture, standardize job requirements, or map similar job descriptions due to a recent merger, etc. you may start with skills-based job design.
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 going on 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 so they can ultimately share skills information across the enterprise.
However,
- 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 + Task’ first Journeys
There are many journeys that will require linking skills with work tasks, we will highlight some below. Some of these may leverage task ontologies, others may not. Linking skills to job tasks is an important step because it provides context to help you scope your skills taxonomy, and ensure your skills taxonomy is grounded in the work that adds value to your clients and customers.
Skills + Task First Journeys – Work Design (Process Efficiency)
1. Work Redesign – The Redesign of Work Due to AI
This is the one getting the most airtime recently, so let’s start here. This journey starts with the design of new ways of working due to the advent of new AI technologies. Reejig, Techwolf, and Workera among others have all written about it recently. So, what does that involve? John W. Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan first discussed this journey in their book Work Without Jobs, so let’s briefly summarize their approach:
- Identify current and future work processes (e.g., old/irrelevant vs. newly relevant).
- Document where, how, and when each task must be performed.
- Determine where and how automation can best support the process. For each step in the process, determine where human work can be:
- substituted
- augmented
- reinvented with AI
- Document the skills required for each deconstructed human task that remains.
- Group skills into logical jobs/roles.
- Determine career progression by analyzing work dimensions like physical/mental, repetitive/variance, independent/interactive
- Determine the best organizational/talent model for each deconstructed human skill set
- Determine how skills flow to task assignments (e.g., using a talent marketplace).
- Determine how to maintain reinvented tasks perpetually.
- Align the rest of the Talent Value Chain (Career, Pay, Benefits, L&D, Recruiting, Planning, etc.)
While opinions and frameworks for categorization may differ, and the recent advent of task taxonomies (or ‘taskonomies’) provide some additional AI muscle to the activity, the basic flow of the exercise remains – starting with today’s work, and determining where AI can augment, replace or reimagine work tasks. What tasks remain for humans are aligned to skills necessary to complete the task. This is why the exercise is sometimes called “human-centered work design” to focus on the inverse of “AI-enabled work design.”
One additional benefit of pursuing a ‘skills + task first’ approach is it facilitates the use of agentic AI. “Agentic AI” represents a type of artificial intelligence where autonomous agents can interpret context, make decisions, and execute actions to achieve goals with minimal human intervention, often utilizing a task taxonomy to navigate complex tasks effectively. Think of it like a more intelligent version of Robotic Process Automation which instead of following fixed rules can use probabilistic pattern matching and task inference to adapt more flexibly to context and complex task conditions. An autonomous AI agent can use a task taxonomy to better understand, organize, and manage complex workflows by breaking down tasks into manageable levels of abstraction.
2. Work Redesign – The Redesign of Work Due to Data Analytics
The digitalization of formerly analog or manual work processes produces data that workers need to analyze, process, and summarize. This is a new task for many workers and requires upskilling not just limited to IT personnel, but across every job grade and department. It typically differs from AI-enabled work redesign because it tends to add or augment work tasks a little more frequently than replacing them. (It can replace them when, say, analog monitoring is replaced with digital sensors). But, in general, the more prevalent impact is an additional work task requiring L&D upskilling linked to new work task requirements. As such, these initiatives tend to be more ad hoc than systemic, even when it touches a lot of people. The new data analytics tasks (linked to the requisite skills) are embedded in new workflows, and ultimately job requirements.
3. Work Design – The Redesign of Work Due to Talent Scarcity
Not all work redesign is due to new technology, there can be other goals driving the redesign of work processes. LEAN work redesign famously prioritizes throughput over resource efficiency. A big one today is talent scarcity, such as a patient workflow being redesigned to push work down to technicians. Clinical workflows captured in CIS systems are, in principle, a kind of task taxonomy, though they are very unique to the clinical specialty they encompass and very different from typical business workflows. The process is simple enough, instead of asking which steps can be replaced by or augmented by technology (in principle CIS systems are continuously doing this) it asks which steps can be pushed down to a tech, Physician Assistant (PA), or Advanced Practice Nurse (APN).
Skills + Task First Journeys – Talent Marketplaces (Resource Management Efficiency)
4. Opportunity Marketplaces
Opportunity Marketplace is a term for internal talent marketplaces used by internal employees for internal work. By internal work we mean work not performed for clients or producing products for customers. We most frequently see two varieties of internal talent marketplace gigs.
- Staffing Internal Projects – In this example, the internal gigs are open positions on formal internal projects, such as a process improvement projects, technology implementations, or quality investigations. Open roles are driven by the project plan, which decomposes tasks into required skills. Such uses of a talent marketplace are often one-directional, meaning it is used more by management to find available staff, than by employees to find open gigs (though both are possible).
- Developmental/Housekeeping/Short-handed – These gigs are less formal, postal by individual managers when they could use an extra hand for some task in their department, which could also be a developmental opportunity. Examples might include extra hands for a rush order or during a busy season, or to backfill for a temporary absence. Other examples could be housekeeping tasks such as cleaning up customer lists, doing Slow Moving/Obsolete (SLOB) inventory analysis, cross-referring performance trend data, etc. In this use, gigs tend to be posted by individual managers. In describing the gig, they must assign the relevant tasks and skills they are looking for. They can do this based on their own expertise, by referencing job descriptions or process documentation, or by picking from a skills cloud/taxonomy or task taxonomy, if one exists. Such uses of a talent marketplace tend to be more multi-directional – used equally by management and employees to find matches.
5. Using Talent Marketplaces to Deliver Product/Client Work
Internal Talent marketplace is a term we most frequently see attached to a talent marketplace used by internal employees for customer-facing or product-producing work. In order for this type of talent marketplace to work, it needs to be connected to the demand engine, which can take a couple of different forms:
- For Project-Oriented work. A Professional Services firm might link sales opportunities in their CRM pipeline, once qualified and scoped, to their talent marketplace. Scoping generally involves a pricing model to translate work into staffing needs. Before being posted in the talent marketplace, however, the workplan would need to decompose tasks into required skills. Such a task could leverage a task taxonomy, if one exists. This use of a talent marketplace tends to be driven more by management to find available staff but can also be used by employees to find desirable roles.
- Customer Service/Help Desk. Talent marketplaces can be leveraged to triage and assign work tasks by groups that receive inquiries from customers. Such uses would replace ‘work ticket’ systems, assigning requested work to available service people by the skills required to complete the task. Once assigned, the work tasks would need to pass to a workflow management system to track completion and closure of such tasks. Such use of a talent marketplace would be entirely one-directional.
- For Product Firms. Though less common today, manufacturing or operations divisions could leverage a talent marketplace to assign workers, if it were connected to the demand planning system. Conventional MRP systems translate expected product demand into supply chain orders and staffing requirements through their S&OP planning process. Today the staffing projections are done primarily by headcount and shift. However, certain companies using LEAN manufacturing principles, and leveraging PULL planning system, might find it advantageous to leverage talent marketplace to assign workers to new orders, especially if the work requires differentiated skills. In either case, translating manufacturing processes into work tasks and required skills would almost certainly require a task taxonomy. MRP planning is typically a top-down affair, with management assigning resources without too much input from employees. Pull systems, however, offer some opportunity for employees to ‘pick up shifts’ as new orders come in.
6. Using Talent Marketplaces to Manage Business Downturn/Disruption Cycles:
Using a talent marketplace to shift internal work from areas of lesser to greater demand amid business disruption is a way to avoid cycles of layoffs/furloughs and rehiring. The process clearly implies that the demand has been translated to skills needs through some form of work analysis, such as a task taxonomy, and facilitates the reskilling and/or reassignment of internal resources based on skills. Several companies leveraged such systems during the COVID pandemic of 2020.
Why Did We Write This Blog?
So, we’ve highlighted here half a dozen skills-based talent journeys where tying skills to work tasks will happen first, or very early in the process. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it does highlight some specific examples where this process is critical. We’ll highlight some journeys that don’t start with task design in a future blog post. For now, we wanted to highlight three things.
Skill to task mapping is important, but not everything
Mapping skills to tasks is a powerful tool when it’s employed, especially when trying to optimize process and resource management efficiency. But other journeys exist. Not all journeys start with tasks, and even those that never get there can add value.
It depends
The way you approach mapping skills to tasks will depend a lot on context – what kind of company you are, what kind of problem you are trying to solve, and what can of technology you have to leverage. We picked these six examples to highlight that point.
There are smaller journeys and lower-tech options that add value
Many journeys absolutely rely on industrial strength AI tools like Talent Marketplace, Skills/Task Taxonomies, and Talent Intelligence systems. But sometimes, you can achieve tangible, pragmatic, localized results that add value even with technology already in house.