As the world continues to evolve very rapidly, organizations find themselves in a conundrum where skills required to excel in the marketplace are changing and evolving faster than ever before. Having a clear skill strategy, and using tools to understand your current and future skill pool, shifted from being a luxury to a necessity in order to stay ahead of competition. See articles 1 & 2 in this series for a more in-depth analysis.
From our experience working with industry giants, we’ve developed a journey map for skill development, and we have guided numerous organizations to progress on their journey to truly understand their skill ontology and strategy. This article explores some of the journeys that these organizations have taken and the benefits we’ve facilitated and observed through our work with them, highlighting key outcomes and insights.
Transformative Journeys with two Global Industry Leaders
A. Partial Skill Strategy, Disintegrated Skills Landscape
In partnership with this leading multinational, we reviewed their current and future Skills strategy and how their technology landscape facilitated their vision for becoming a skills-driven organization. Early on it became clear that the fragmented, siloed technology landscape led to two key issues:
- Disconnected Data Landscape – having been led by the philosophy of “best in class technology” their tech and data landscape quickly became fragmented and disconnected. This resulted in data point duplications, complex integrations between systems and difficulty to report on and analyse data outcomes.
- Voice of the customer – another unintended consequence was a consistent theme in voice of the customer feedback loops of confusion of where to add which data, coupled with frustration to have to enter the same data in multiple systems.
The shift that this company had to adopt for an interconnected skills journey meant they had to make incremental changes in their tech landscape and their strategic approach to managing skills. Some of the strategic and most important interventions was to consolidate their people data & talent related activities onto a smaller number of strategic platforms in order to improve both the data interoperability and the user experience.
By bringing their annual Performance & Feedback processes into Workday, they have observed an uptake in employee engagement which enabled them to swiftly shift focus to a metrics-based performance culture in the following year. By consolidating employee development activities onto Workday Career Hub, they have been able to deploy mentoring programmes at scale and across geographies, as well as maintain a healthy pipeline of development gigs. By implementing comprehensive reporting & dashboards as part of these projects, the company was able to identify critical data gaps, anticipate, and prioritize key change initiatives and ultimately bolster employee engagement.
As a result, they saw a 40% increase in self-reported employee talent data and an increase in the number of available flex team opportunities.
B. Starting Out on Their Journey to Become a Skills Driven Organisation
We collaborated with this top-tier global company to implement niche technology that supports their strategic goal of making development opportunities accessible to all employees. Here’s how we did it:
Step 1: Enabling Skills Cloud in Workday
We began by implementing Skills Cloud in Workday, encouraging employees to build and maintain their skills profiles to support career development.
Step 2: Introducing Career Hub and Opportunity Marketplace
Next, we piloted Career Hub and Opportunity Marketplace within specific parts of the organization. This agile deployment allowed the company to gather feedback, refine the process, and prepare for a broader rollout. The deployment of Flex Teams and Mentoring has been a key driver for employees to create and update their Career Hub profile as they review suggestions and search for Flex opportunities to support career development.
Key Focus Areas from the Pilot:
1. Improving Data Quality for Machine Learning Suggestions:
- Job Catalogue Review: Ensuring job profiles accurately reflect relevant skills by refining generic profiles into more specific ones.
- Skill Curation: Enhancing machine learning capabilities by carefully curating skills for each job to improve suggestion accuracy.
- Flex Team Coordination: Working with Flex Team hosts to assign appropriate skills when creating new teams.
2. Boosting Employee Engagement:
- MS Teams Integration: Deploying a solution through MS Teams to suggest skills and keep employee profiles updated throughout their lifecycle.
- Change Management and Communication: Focusing on educating employees about the technology and its benefits to ensure widespread adoption and understanding.
The company recognizes the ongoing importance of embedding skills into learning and development, as well as strategic workforce planning, to stay competitive and attract top talent. We continue to support them in integrating skills into all HR processes, from hire to retire, and in enhancing data interoperability for a seamless skills experience across all platforms.
Key Learnings and Best Practices
- Leadership: Both company’s transformations were rooted in a clear strategic vision which integrated transparently with their business goals, providing a roadmap for success and guardrails for prioritization of work across several years.
- Effective Technology Utilization: Understanding and continuously optimizing the technologies in HR in relation to the business strategy is crucial. Technologies evolve really quickly these days, and having a hand on the pulse can mean improved solutions can be deployed more quickly than in the past as they become available, and customizations are becoming more flexible as the technologies mature.
- Commitment to Continuous Learning: Embracing a skills-based model requires ongoing adaptation and learning based on previous successes and failures. Both companies maintained an open mind, evolving their approach by testing what works and ensuring that successes are celebrated and replicated, while failures are learnt from and not repeated.
Conclusion
The experiences of these global industry leaders demonstrate the importance of embracing the journey and starting somewhere, without waiting for all factors to be perfect. Navigating new approaches and technologies often means starting small, adjusting frequently, and getting comfortable with continuous change and improvement while keeping a pulse on your key initiatives. This approach is crucial even for the largest and most established organizations in the world.
by Lea Ralic and Lynsey Lambert
