Skills Bite: How to find your path with SkillsTech
SkillsTech is a hot topic, with high demand to generate, utilise and drive value from skills data.
Why is this so urgent? The corporate world has reached a tipping point.
First, we’re living in a global skills crisis: the degree of change in technology and market conditions means you need to always be investing in people and skills or you risk being left behind. That’s why 59% of HR Leaders have made building critical skills their primary goal in 2022. (1)
Second, employees are demanding improved experiences at work; skills and career development are important to delivering this.
The good news: advances in analytics, user experience and skills data are making sophisticated approaches easier to access and use. This means there’s never been a better time to explore the potential of SkillsTech. Keep reading to learn more.
How to think about SkillsTech
We’re often asked for guidance on the best way to get a grip on skills using technology. As with any fast-moving and growing area, there’s a lot of hype to cut through. The following points frequently come up when we help customers work out their approach to driving business value using skills:
1. There are many use cases related to skills
And many ways in which skills data can bring value to your business and employees. SkillsTech is really a collection of different problems; a single solution is unlikely to meet all these needs equally well. Most organisations are looking for the best combination of existing Enterprise software (your main HRIS) and the right specialist technology supplier(s). Typical use cases are shown below.
2. No single role owns the business case and value.
Many use cases can lead to many stakeholders to work with (e.g. potential sponsors, beneficiaries and end-users). Skills management is fundamentally a team sport. Across your business and HR leadership team, you’ll have several leaders who can sponsor investment in skills (commonly the CEO, MDs, CTO or CIO on the business side, and the CHRO or member of their HRLT).
Our experience is SkillsTech investments are often sponsored by HR in the early stages, and then transferred into BAU ownership by the business. Either way, there needs to be visible sponsorship from the business to ensure managers and employees understand the importance of skills development and growth plus any technology put in place to support that.
3. There is no single, integrated platform for skills.
Your Learning Management System, HRIS and Talent Marketplace probably speak in a different language when it comes to skills. So, they might need the skills data at different levels of depth and breadth. This leads to disjointed information for business decision-making and a fragmented experience for employees. Talent Intelligence and Rightskilling solutions like Simply can help with this issue, joining together the data to create a map of the relationship between roles and skills.
4. New solutions bring better new choices.
As the market is still maturing, problem statements are becoming clearer and solutions are improving every day. In leading companies, the focus is on the skills that challenge and improve longstanding approaches to HR processes.
Take career development conversations: now, a manager and employee who are plotting out career development can explore hundreds of potential career pathways options. These options are curated for the employee, rather than a one-slide list controlled by HR and forgotten about between performance cycles. The value of such innovations to employees is huge.
What should I do next?
From working with prospects and customers to scope and deploy Simply, we have identified the following tips to help plot a course through your SkillsTech journey.
1. Establish a clear business problem.
With so many new solutions and vendors around, there’s a need to always bring it back to the real business question you’re trying to solve. Only then can you make an informed judgement on whether a particular tool or data set is going to deliver value. Josh Bersin, a leading industry research and advisory firm in enterprise learning and talent management, identifies three types of business problems: fixing underperformance, solving a talent gap or enabling a long-term transformation. (2)
2. Focus on strategic impact.
As we’ve seen, SkillsTech can quickly develop into a very broad discussion. With clarity on the business problem to solve, you can be clear on the priority of use cases, and in turn, where you start with skills. Focus on a few mission-critical business problems aligned to your strategy. That way, you can demonstrate strategic commercial value while building the case for a skills-led approach across the organisation.
3. Be conscious of your workforce model.
Many SkillsTech solutions are oriented toward enabling a specific decision or action. For example, Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) are designed to facilitate better learning, not challenge whether those skills should be learned or developed at all.
When deciding to invest, you must consider the long-term outcome. The right outcome might be a fully flexible workforce where employees can learn anything on-demand through the LXP, and work is organised through internal gigs in the Talent Marketplace. But such solutions require major operating model changes and significant change management.
4. Consider the ‘Intelligence’ layer of your HR Tech landscape.
Skills architecture and technology is fast becoming a separate line item in HR technology budgets. Josh Bersin categorises SkillsTech as part of an ‘Intelligence’ (green) layer in your HR stack. This sits above your ‘transactional’ (blue) HRIS and other applications such as performance, wellbeing, learning and recruitment, which may or may not be integrated. Together, these layers enable the employee experience layer (red). (3)
Josh Bersin, 2021
A key question we’re asked about Simply is: How is this different from Workday/ HRIS? The answer lies in the levels. Workday and other core HR systems in the ‘Transaction’ layer are critical. They feed to and from solutions in the ‘Intelligence’ layer such as Simply Navigate.
For example, several Simply customers are running on Workday. They use Simply to join up internal and external data, driving insight and prioritising ‘Winning skills' before feeding the answer into their transactional system (e.g. populating job profiles or skills assessment tools).
5. Work out what skills data you really need to drive action.
It will be different depending on the use case you prioritise, the level of depth in skills data and how often you need to update it. Skills data is dynamic, sourced from multiple systems and updated in many ways.
Due to the multitude of different use cases for skills data, there are lots of choices on which parts are joined together and left as distinct processes or systems. Prioritise your likely use cases by depth and frequency to provide a view of the right solution. For example, implementing a job matching solution may help deliver job or work matching. But it won’t help you make a big decision around location strategy or automation.
6. Utilise external insights to accelerate progress.
Sorting out skills across your entire HR technology landscape can be time-consuming. And the longer you wait, the more likely your competitors will gain an unassailable lead on key skills. Your people might also grow dissatisfied with their career or development options.
Make rapid progress by combining internal and external data. Simply helps you understand the skills in demand in your market, estimate skills out the box and cut years off projects to develop skills taxonomies. As Bersin puts it: “third-party data is critical”. No matter your long-term technology strategy, knowing how your decisions play out in the context of the labour market and your competitors is critical to gauging progress and demonstrating return on investment.
The key takeaway on SkillsTech
SkillsTech is a fast-growing technology area that business leaders and HR teams need to embrace to compete for critical skills in the market. Prioritising your ‘Intelligence’ layer in your HR technology landscape can enable you to make rapid progress, generating and sustaining business value.
Simply gives you user-friendly tools to rapidly identify the skills you need, the skills you have, and the skills needed to close gaps and future-proof your workforce.
Simply. The rightskilling platform.
The strategy-led, data-driven way to conquer skill gaps.
Simply uses data and machine learning to define your skills strategy, build the skills architecture you need to make it happen, and pinpoints how to rightskill your workforce, fast. Learn more here, follow Simply here or get in touch at info@simplygetresults.com to discuss your needs and book a demo.
References:
1 Gartner, Top 5 HR Trends and Priorities for 2022
2 Josh Bersin, Eight Learnings About Jobs, Skills, And Org Design. And The Apple Genius Bar
https://joshbersin.com/2021/08/eight-learnings-about-jobs-skills-and-org-design-and-the-apple-genius-bar/
3 Josh Bersin, Ten New Truths About The HR Technology Market
https://joshbersin.com/2021/09/ten-new-truths-about-the-hr-technology-market/