Building an Intelligent Skills Strategy to Drive Growth
We look back at 3 key themes that were explored in our recent SHL Connect event around how organizations can transform into a skills-based powerhouse.
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Earlier this year, SHL hosted over 70 senior HR leaders in an exclusive event where our own skills experts, customers, and award-winning Chief People Officer, David Blackburn shared real-world experiences, insights, and research on current trends driving change with businesses today. Here are 3 key takeaways to help your skills strategy.
1. Focusing on Skills and Potential is The Way Forward
The World Economic Forum did research of over 685 million people, showing that more than 100 million of these are under-utilizing their current skills. Andy Nelesen, Solution Lead at SHL, spoke about how this has led more organizations to move to a skills-based approach, and the relationship between skills and performance. He also presented SHL research on 12 critical skills that have emerged as being highly predictive to job success across roles, companies, regions and industries. Focusing on reskilling potential can provide huge advantages to organizations, securing talent that demonstrate a growth mindset, are agile to change and quick to learn as the business evolves.
2. Driving Transformation Relies on an Effective People Strategy
Another discussion revolved around how skills are being used to address 3 common problems for organizations today—Business Transformation, Talent Scarcity and Overcoming a Non-Diverse Workforce.
SHL’s Talent Management Lead, Lucy Beaumont, shared SHL Labs research of the Top 10 Essential Skills for Business Transformation, and the importance of collecting skills data about your talent to plan for these major strategic initiatives. Customers shared examples of how skills data has been used to inform organizational strategy, identify critical gaps and close these gaps through reskilling, redesigning job architecture and recruitment. Retention of employees through career development based on insights that analyzing skills data provide was also an important area that was discussed.
3. Data Should Be at the Forefront of Creating Skills-Based Organizations
Award-winning Chief People Officer, David Blackburn shared his experience with FSCS, speaking about the skills revolution and how the traditional job structure has hindered most critical organizational objectives—agility, growth, innovation, equity, diversity and inclusion, internal mobility and career progression.
He emphasized the importance of using data to make decisions and highlighted that although skills data is everywhere, it is being utilized by employees, leaders, and HR in an un-managed, incoherent way. As part of this, David detailed a 3-stage approach to using skills data:
- Building a Skills Taxonomy—listing the skills required for all jobs across your organization into a coherent hierarchical structure.
- Mapping Roles to Skills—working across the organization to build the skills requirements for each different role within the organization and their teams.
- Skills-Based Talent Audit—measuring each employee’s personal skills to understand if they have al the skills required for their job and what skills they have that may be utilized elsewhere or fit other roles.
With these insights, we learned that although no panacea, with a systematic, organized approach, and right knowledge and tools in place, you can learn how to build a skills-based organization, working around people and their skills to maximize productivity, performance, and agility.
Join us for more insights on October 9 at the SHL Virtual Summit where we’ll be speaking about The Changing Role of Skills and Why Assessment Data is Your Secret Weapon, featuring a session from Josh Bersin.
