A Quick Review of Skills-based Talent Journeys
This is the third blog in a five-part series on skills-based talent journeys. This one focuses on ‘Skills + Workforce’ first journeys. We hear a lot about these journeys from talent leaders in reference to talent scarcity and skills-first recruiting. Before we jump in, let’s quickly reiterate our point of view on skills-based talent journeys and where ‘Skills + Workforce’ first journeys fit in.
Remember, skills are, first and foremost, a special kind of HR data strategically linked to several 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. If you need to develop new business capabilities to enter or quickly capture a new market opportunity, you are probably going to start with skills-based workforce planning. You may begin 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 + Workforce’ first Journeys.
Many journeys will require linking skills with the workforce plans, and we will highlight some of them below. Some of these may leverage formal skills taxonomies; others may not. Linking skills to workforce plans is important because it provides context to help you scope your skills taxonomy. Skills-based workforce planning is near the right end of our Skills-based Value Chain, making it a topic most often center of mind for talent functions supporting strategic business plans. It links market intelligence on skills present in the labor market, with future business plans decomposed into the skills required to achieve those plans, and any gaps in skills present in the current workforce. This, in turn, often leads to skills-based recruiting targets and job descriptions.
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 + Workforce’ First Journeys – Revenue Growth
1. New Business Capability
A company wishes to invest in a future business area that relies on the company developing new technical or engineering capabilities. This might be driven by new product designs, the decarbonization of supply chains, or entering new markets across any number of industries.
This journey will probably start with a new business strategy – a new product or business segment they want to enter or capture. As they develop the business plan, they will inevitably need to model their internal capacity and capability gaps, leading to skills gaps, sourcing strategies and recruiting targets. The driver for such journeys is usually speed to market.
2. Expansion of Business Capability or Production Capacity
Similar to the above, this use case surrounds a company with a successful product or service it desires to grow dramatically. To do so, it needs to replicate the skill set only a few currently possess, and existing talent development methods are believed to be inadequate for the scale and timeframe required. Examples might include explosive product growth, territorial expansion, post-pilot implementation, greenfield operation, or the like. The driver for such journey’s is usually scale to drive growth. This can be complicated by talent scarcity issues, if the market for the target skills is small, especially competitive, or shrinking.
‘Skills + Workforce’ First Journeys – Talent Outcomes
3. Efficiency and Diversity – Opening Recruiting to Non-Traditional Talent Pools
As STEM professions experience historic talent shortages in labor markets, many firms are abandoning traditional college degree hiring requirements. They are reaching out to non-traditional talent pools if they can demonstrate that they can perform the skill or have the potential to learn the skill. This opens recruiting channels to larger pools and allows greater diversity through access to historically underrepresented groups. Such journeys can be driven by either of the business drivers above, or simply a need to improve recruiting efficiency when demand is high and supply for qualified candidates is low.
4. Workforce Shaping – Changing the Mix of Skills of the Workforce at Scale
Some companies seek to alter the mix of skills within their current workforce populations at an aggregate level. Examples might include a company that wishes to commit to supporting a particular workforce segment (military, STEM, or DEI hires, Contingent workforce); it might include the transformation of skills in a large workforce segment (e.g., onshore transformation, digital transformation, etc.); or it might include purposeful upskilling of large critical workforce segments (e.g., leadership skills, sales force enablement, etc.). The difference between workforce shaping and traditional talent development initiative is the scale. It typically involves an adjustment of the skills mix/makeup of employees at a company or workforce segment level. This often involves more than just talent or leadership development, but a coordinated sourcing strategy that includes recruiting, right-sizing, contracting, offshoring, and automation.
5. Improving Employee Experience and Retaining Institutional Knowledge
Some companies are especially hard hit by turnover in the ranks, driving a consistent cycle of recruiting, onboarding and retraining costs. Such turnover can also exacerbate a loss of institutional knowledge and weaken the internal leadership pipeline. Some companies with significant turnover problems seek to reduce attrition and improve employee experience by improving career mobility and workforce development options with skills-based solutions. In our ‘skills + jobs’ first blog, we highlighted how this can be accomplished through internal company initiatives. A second route involves the integration of external talent marketplaces to better integrate contingent workforces into the company operating model.
With external talent marketplaces, internal work assignments (gigs) are open to a combination of internal workers and external contractors, seamlessly integrated into combined work teams. Some forward-thinking companies include the possibility for fluid reclassification of workers across these categories over time – allowing employees to move to contract arrangements, and contractors to flow into full-time positions with relative consistency. Many hospitals employ such tactics in nursing populations, where shifts are routinely comprised of a combination of hospital employees, ‘traveling’ nurses (ST contractors), and agency nurses (temp workers) to fill shift requirements and backfill periodic absences. Such arrangements allow scheduling needs to be fulfilled while offering increased flexibility of work arrangement to attract talent and retain institutional knowledge.
Some Advice on ‘Skills + Workforce’ first Journeys
Pursuing a ‘Skills + Workforce’ first journey can encounter significant challenges. Timing and access to real-time data can be a challenge. Workforce planning, when tied to business strategy, often has time pressure associated with speed to market or growth plans. Running scenarios are often dependent on a combination of market intelligence and internal skills information. While market and internal talent intelligence systems can be purchased, or licensed, implementing them can add time to the process. If no internal effort of transparent skills reporting currently exists, internal capacity projections must necessarily rely on assumption-based models (i.e., predictive analytics). Also, more transformative workforce shaping endeavors may seek large-scale work re-design, job redefinitions, or workforce model transformation which can complicate the reliability of existing workforce data. Finally, global business plans must integrate regional labor market data, as supply and or regulatory differences can complicate data gathering across jurisdictions.
Why Did We Write This Blog?
So, we’ve highlighted several skills-based talent journeys where tying skills to workforce plans 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 people 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. Keep it simple, pragmatic, and focused on tangible outcomes.