5 Lessons from Comcast on Building a Skills-First Approach to Talent

It’s one thing to recognize the value of a skills-first strategy. Adopting one is a different story — many companies are struggling to actually put a skills-first model in place.

A lot goes into creating a skills-based hiring strategy, regardless of whether organizations are looking for outside talent or seeking to promote from within. Companies must identify evolving skills, change the way they source candidates, and create opportunities for upskilling and internal mobility. 

Sara Dionne, vice president, learning and development (CLO) at Comcast, believes a skills-based strategy benefits companies that are looking to source top talent as well as employees who are striving to build stellar careers. In a conversation with Aneesh Raman, a LinkedIn vice president, she shared a few lessons she and her team learned by engaging both company leaders and employees in the process of creating a skills-based environment that gives all talent the opportunity to thrive.

Give everyone a reason to have a vested interest in skills

Why should an organization’s leaders — and talent — buy into the idea of a skills-based approach? Much of it comes down to them understanding how important skills are to each employee’s professional development — and the success of the company as a whole. 

Skills can be viewed, in a sense, like one’s very own superpower. They’re “the tools that I have in my own unique tool kit,” Sara says, “that I can then take to make an impact whether it’s a job, a project, or a gig.” When you have an understanding of your skills, you know what value you bring to the team. When company leaders understand an employee’s skills, they can identify roles where that employee is likely to excel.

However, your current skill set is only half of the equation. Employees should also know which skills they need to develop if they want to move forward in their careers. Likewise, senior leaders must know which skills are critical for employees to have if they are going to excel in different key roles within the organization.

If you don’t know what your skills are or which ones you need to develop, “you’re driving without the GPS and you’re not sure where you’re going,” Sara says. It’s up to L&D professionals to support employees with the content and experiences to develop the skills that will be most beneficial to their career growth and to the organization in an increasingly competitive environment. 

Determine what skills your organization needs — and expect your list to evolve 

With so many skills in demand, how do L&D professionals determine the ones they should be focusing on when it comes to upskilling their current workforce? 

To answer that question, Sara and her team sought feedback from employees about what skills they wanted to build, along with feedback from leaders about what skills they felt were most important for employees to have. They also referred to external data on skills deemed most important in today’s workforce. 

Once they had this information, they put together a cross-functional team that included technology and content experts. The team developed a platform that would continuously receive feedback on desired skills and, based on that information, highlight 10 different skills each quarter that employees could work on. In one quarter, employees might be able to learn strategies for building resilience; in another quarter, employees might focus on becoming better storytellers.

As leaders and employees saw a need for new skills, the company would be able to quickly adapt with the training opportunities to develop them.

To identify skills for yourself or other talent within the organization to work on, Sara recommends asking:

• What gaps in knowledge do we have?
• What skills will our profession need in the future?
• What skills will we need for the role we want/need in the future?
  

Anticipate the impact AI will have on skills development

No skills-first strategy can ignore the budding impact of AI. Not only do most employers want their employees to have skills in AI, but AI will change what other skills are deemed most valuable. 

Some skills will take on a very different tone, or as Sara says, “they’re going to have to deepen.” Soft skills, in particular, will become more critical, as AI will be able to perform some hard skills satisfactorily. 

For example, in the past, you may have needed the skill set to put together a presentation, but now you might call on AI to do it. As a leader, you still have to be able to identify when one of the presentation’s bullet points isn’t quite right or when the presentation doesn’t convey the right tone. 

Along the same lines, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools may be able to write a motivational speech for you, Sara says, but it’s up to you as the speaker to recognize that a sentiment doesn’t align with your audience. “So that is where some of those people skills and the leadership skills are going to be so critical,” she notes, “because the entire work world around us is going to be changing and you have to use those skills very, very differently.”

Know that it won’t be easy and embrace the uncertainty

As organizations adapt to a skills-first strategy, there can be a lot of pressure to get it right. However, Sara recommends that L&D professionals give themselves permission to make mistakes. “In all honesty,” Sara says, “we’re still trying to figure out a lot of the answers and we’re going to have to be flexible to figure it out as we go.”

That means we can’t expect change to happen overnight. But we can forge an easier path by sharing best practices and identifying organizations that are doing a good job of building a skills-first environment. 

“I think we have to start by giving ourselves some patience and grace and realize we’re all in it together,” Sara says. “Every step of the journey is going to be another accomplishment toward this.”

But at the same time, it will be important to convince leaders within the organization that slow and steady progress is enough. To get — and keep — the buy-in of business leaders, Sara suggests using data like the LinkedIn Workforce Report along with storytelling that illustrates the power of a skills-first strategy to transform. Perhaps you can describe a success story that shows how upskilling key employees ultimately added 20 percent to the business’s bottom line. “Our business leaders want stories that are based in data,” Sara says. “That is how we’re going to keep influencing.”

Create a framework for developing a skills-first toolbox

For a skills-first strategy to work, employees at every level of the organization should understand the importance of building a skills-first toolbox. For those who are new to the idea or starting out in their careers, Sara provides advice on how to develop the skills that will be most valuable to their careers.

• Step one: Just say yes. Being open to new experiences even when you don’t know where they will lead can give you the skill set you need for a position that hasn’t even opened up. “I have built my career on saying yes to opportunities, projects, gigs, even when they were things that were not anywhere on my road map or even had crossed my mind,” Sara said. Sometimes she said yes to things she didn’t even want to do. “The reality,” she says, “is you will learn from them and it will grow your career.”
  
• Step two: Explore your vision. Allow yourself to dream about where you want your career to be in a certain timeframe such as the next five years. Write that vision down and identify skills you may need and steps you might take to get them.
  
• Step three: Share the vision. The last thing you want to do is keep that vision to yourself. By sharing it with leaders, peers, and others in your network, you give others the opportunity to share experiences and advice that could help. “These are people who are there to support you and help you,” Sara says. “So lean on them.”

Final thoughts

A successful skills-first strategy isn’t created in a vacuum. It takes the buy-in and input of all stakeholders to develop a culture where skills are prioritized over factors such as education and employment history.

Making such a fundamental change in a company’s culture also takes time. Through patience, feedback, and a willingness to try new things, L&D professionals can implement a strategy that equips talent with the skills that will help them — and their organizations — prosper.