Key Takeaways
Skills Over Jobs: A shift toward a skills-based talent management strategy improves workforce agility and empowers employees to manage their career growth. It addresses limitations of traditional job-centric models that hinder adaptability and mobility.
AI Accelerates the Transition: AI-driven platforms, like Cornerstone Galaxy, automate the transition to a skills-based organization by harmonizing skills data across systems, reducing the time and resources required for implementation, and enabling continuous updates based on market trends.
Organizational and Individual Benefits: Skills-based talent management approaches promote internal mobility, better alignment of employees’ strengths with roles, and increased engagement, which boosts retention and drives cost efficiencies for organizations.
Current business strategy and human resource research widely acknowledge the importance of focusing on skills rather than jobs in today’s world. The documented benefits of a skills-based organization include both increased adaptability to rapidly changing business conditions and the opportunity for employees to take greater control over their own professional growth and career trajectory. But if the value of a skills-based approach is accepted orthodoxy, why haven’t more organizations successfully adopted it? Making the transition to a skills-based organization requires strategic investments in time, resources, and technology and, to date, the perceived burdens may have exceeded the benefits. However, new technology may change the calculus by harnessing AI, thereby speeding the journey towards a skills-based organization and generating the expected return on investment.
An Organizational View
The relatively recent shift to favoring a skills-based approach to talent management points to a number of inadequacies with traditional job hierarchies. Chief among the shortcomings identified with a jobs-centric approach to talent is that it inhibits workforce agility, the ability to adapt to market conditions, and limits employees’ mobility within organizations. Job descriptions may not reflect rapid changes in technology, nor are they likely to provide sufficient visibility into skills gaps within the organization. Likewise, employees may feel artificially constrained in their jobs and unable to apply skills that make them valuable outside the hierarchy they inhabit.
Even when organizations recognize the benefits of moving away from job hierarchies towards skills, they may face challenges in making the transition. For example, creating a granular matrix of tasks and the skills needed to execute them can seem daunting, given that it can take a great deal of time and effort to accomplish. If the necessary resources are available and leadership agrees to pursue this goal, there is still likely a major change management effort required. And once the skills taxonomy is established, what is the strategy for maintaining it? This is where choosing the right technology may make the critical difference.
The AI-driven skills platform at the core of Cornerstone Galaxy offers the promise of accelerating the shift to a skills-based organization by overcoming common challenges to adoption. First and foremost, the platform automates the task of converting a traditional job architecture into a repository of skills harmonized across integrated systems and business units. A similar type of automated process analyzes documents like resumes and performance reviews to identify the skills currently held by employees. Together, the results of these two processes can be put to work in the service of workforce agility. It is not an exaggeration to say that in the past a more manual approach to this effort could have taken years. The automated process might yield initial results in weeks or months.
Once the foundational skills taxonomy—the skills needed across the organization—is in place and skills are mapped to the organization’s employees, Cornerstone Galaxy AI provides another opportunity to save a significant amount of time and effort: automatically updating the taxonomy based on global workforce data. Those automatic updates are driven by a collection of skills and labor market data, from over 180 countries worldwide, which continually refreshes the organizational skills matrix so that it reflects market conditions, including the changing demand for various skills based on political, economic, and technological factors.
The automation-assisted transformation to a skills-based organization, together with the dynamic refresh of skills data, can provide a multi-faceted return on investment. Viewed from the organizational side of the equation, one of the most obvious immediate benefits is greater insight into skills gaps in the workforce. In addition to insight into current skills gaps, constantly updated global data informs strategic decisions by considering market trends. This more accurate representation of present gaps and future needs creates opportunities for efficiencies and cost savings. Can more targeted learning and development upskill employees to fill the gaps and meet future demand? Where there is a need to look outside the organization for talent, will the focus on specific skills allow the search to be expanded to a wider pool of potential applicants by, for example, removing barriers like specific academic credentials that may no longer be relevant? Will employee retention increase if employees are placed in roles that better align with their strongest skills? The evidence suggests that the answer is ‘yes’ to all these questions.
An Employee View
If we turn the lens to how employees directly benefit from skills-based talent processes, we see the opportunity for them take greater control over their own professional growth and career development. This perspective also reveals yet another way AI can be infused into talent management to the benefit of all involved. A good example of a skills-based AI-driven process that directly benefits employees is Cornerstone Talent Marketplace. Talent Marketplace promotes the internal mobility of employees by creating a digital destination for them to seek out experiential learning that matches their skillsets or offers ways to expand them to achieve career goals. The platform does not rely on employees finding the right experiences though. It uses AI to match employees with those projects, roles, internships, and mentorships, as well as formal learning paths, that align with their strengths and aspirations. This kind of internal mobility supported by Talent Marketplace is associated with increased employee engagement, satisfaction and competence which, in turn, feeds the virtuous cycle of greater retention for the organization.
We began with the proposition that the journey towards a skills-based talent approach can produce tangible benefits for organizations, but that the journey is not without costs. In fact, to date some of these costs may have been a barrier to entry for organizations that might have otherwise embarked on the skills-based path. AI-based innovations, however, offer new short-cuts around those barriers, allowing more organizations and employees to reap the benefits, including those highlighted here. In relation to these short-cuts, it was noted that in the process of establishing an organization’s skills repository, AI plays a key role in harmonizing the skills across systems and organizational units.
This last point deserves further emphasis for two related reasons. First, to unleash the real power at the heart of an AI-driven skills platform like Cornerstone Galaxy, the AI needs to act upon one comprehensive set of data from all relevant organizational systems. This, in turn, highlights the importance of system integrations. Thus, the second related reason for highlighting this issue: planning for this journey must include an assessment of how the required integrations will be accomplished. And given the importance of integrations to the efficacy of the overall effort, this may be one area where having a services partner, like Educe Group, will increase the odds that you successfully reach your skills-based destination.
Interested in learning more about how Educe Group can support your journey with Cornerstone Galaxy? Contact us and a member of our team will reach out. Or join us at Cornerstone Spark Las Vegas on May 27-29th.
