Julia Brandon, PhD, Lenovo, Director, Organizational Development.
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Skills-based talent management continues to make headlines as we ring in the New Year as one of the key opportunities for HR in 2024. Next year and beyond, I believe we will see further advances in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that can help leaders gain greater insight into skills, streamline talent processes and improve decision-making.
For example, in an upcoming release, Workday may enable manager skills assessment, a critical tool for scaling skills-based talent management. (Disclosure: Workday is Lenovo's ERP, but I have no relationship with them beyond being a user.) However, to implement this assessment, the infrastructure needs to be optimized. The added discipline up front is essential to realize the promise of skills-based talent management, which can further help employees take ownership of their careers and bring additional value to the business and customers. Five hurdles need to be overcome for successful implementation. Are you R.E.A.D.Y.? Let's dive into them.
R: Restrict The Number Of Skills
Skills can be defined as a practiced act or capacity to perform a specific task. Given this granularity, there can be well over 200,000 skills in a single data library. While this provides precise detail that can help us each feel unique, it is far too granular to measure gaps on 200,000 skills!
It is only through aggregating related skills into clusters, and limiting the skills domain, that we can have a meaningful unit of measurement. The key is to group related skills together that are needed to perform a specific function. This can be done analytically with AI, input from subject matter experts or a combination of the two.
E: Eliminate Multiple Definitions For The Same Skills
For all aspects of talent management to run on skills, from hiring and selection to development and workforce planning, the terminology needs to be the same. This serves as the fundamental building block for ensuring all jobs are consistently defined and communicated. However, given that the skills journey takes time, organizations often try several pilots first. If the pilots are run by different vendors, they will likely use different definitions for the same terms.
As a result, the investment is only short-term. The cost can add up, as projects can average a quarter million dollars, so it’s worthwhile to balance short-term goals with the longer-term vision. In sum, as soon as an organization finds a skills database that works, sticking with this single source of truth can help connect and scale skills projects.
A: Aggregate Skills Into Meaningful Categories
Imagine going into a grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner, only to see all the food on the floor, without any meaningful way to walk down aisles and pick up what you need. Likewise, to scale skills-based talent management, it is essential to define skills for job categories, as there are too many individual roles to define skills for each one.
The key is to ensure there’s a consistent governance process for assigning roles to the job architecture. If left to chance, skills cannot be assigned to job categories because there will be too much variation at the role level to create meaningful categories of jobs.
D: Decide On Standardized Proficiency Levels
In addition to ensuring the same terminology for skills, the proficiency scale must also be consistent. Workday has five levels of proficiency by default, and this aligns with best practices for measurement. Given the added risk of customizing and inadvertently creating too much complexity, it can be a smoother path to go with what the technology offers by default.
The choice also depends on the longer-term vision. If the vision is to have five levels, for example, to help differentiate compensation, then a flexible approach can be taken to aggregate five levels to three levels for training that may only have three levels of proficiency (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
Y: You Can Manage Change
The tallest hurdle for most organizations is that optimizing the infrastructure can require more undoing than doing, as it is common practice for individuals to take unique approaches to skills-based projects. The good news is that there are well-tested processes for successful change management, such as the ADKAR model. ADKAR is an acronym for the five individual outcomes needed for the change to be successful across an organization: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. This change management model can be applied to create a skills-based infrastructure in an ERP system.
• Awareness of the need for change: Take time to understand business needs and how skills-based talent management can best support the business. Leaders (in business, HR, IT, Compensation and Benefits) and employees need to understand why the desired change in the ERP system is needed and the benefits of the transition to skills-based talent management.
• Desire to support the change: Identify a use case (i.e., hiring for strategic roles, developing skills for critical roles, career development for key talent) that highlights short-term and longer-term strategic wins. This can help motivate leaders and employees to make the desired change toward skills-based talent management.
• Knowledge of how to change: Provide employee-facing resources, live training and opportunities to meet with the project team so employees know how to make the desired change happen.
• Ability to demonstrate skills and behaviors: Pilot and respond to customer input to make sure the process is simple and effective. This can help ensure leaders and employees are given the right information and training.
• Reinforcement to make the change stick: Communicate and celebrate positive behavior change to encourage and sustain the change to scale skills-based talent management.
Wrapping Up
Skills-based talent management requires a blend of cutting-edge technology, with a disciplined approach to implementation, to address business needs and opportunities for workforce planning. The sooner an organization starts, the less time it will likely take to clear the hurdles to skills-based talent management.
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