For more than a century, jobs emerged as the dominating work structure. It defines how organizations work, the leaders, how they manage and how employees support every HR practice. Everything is so embedded, from hiring and compensation to career progression and performance management, that people rarely stop questioning it.
With future-critical skills in high demand and short supply, companies cannot depend only on recruitment to meet their growth plans. Besides, companies fail to predict easily and train workers for new roles that might emerge. Faced with the challenges, most organizations plan to adopt a new approach- implementing a skills-based strategy.
How to Create a Skills-Based talent Strategy for Your Organization?
Although it might appear simple and slowly becomes cumbersome over time. A skills-based approach is a major. Implementing the strategy is complex and takes time. A successful transition to being a skills-based organization requires the following:
1: Determine and plan a skills-based talent strategy
First, you must discuss why you desire to create a skills-based talent strategy and what you hope to accomplish. You can examine the immediate priorities. You can even explode the long-term priorities associated with the business. After determining the purpose, you can develop a roadmap, deciding how the talent market would function. You need to answer questions like whether AI will help in machine learning, whether you can customize the users’ experiences and how to communicate the rollout.
2: Promoting a shared skills-based talent philosophy
Transforming from jobs to skills as the organizing principle of work and the workforce requires a shared approach across the organization. You need to explain the value and prioritization of skills as the connecting thread of talent management. The good news is that 63% of business and HR executives already report that their organization’s professionals aligned on the importance of skills in decision-making about work and the workforce.
3: Clear and established governance
Organizations require a clear understanding of skills ownership across the enterprise. It must also include the structures and processes that enable adoption and drive change management efforts. Approximately 64% of organizations reported that HR processes account for the transformation. However, transforming the very fabric of the work goes beyond HR, requiring cross-functional governance and buy-in.
Approximately 90% of businesses and HR executives report that moving to a skills-based organization requires a transformation for all functions and leaders, not just HR. Undoubtedly, HR departments will experience a massive transformation. Instead of managing employees in jobs, 72% of HR executives agree that the role of HR will orchestrate work.
4: Create a common language for skills
If skills are to become the language of work and the workforce, your organization must create a common language and framework for skills. However, only 10% of HR professionals reported effectively classifying and organizing skills into a skills taxonomy.
5: Enabling strong data and technology
Innovative developments in technology make skills-based organizations possible for the first time. Technologies span the scope of AI-powered skills assessment and interference. From the work side, AI can sense the work executed by the employees to create dynamic work charts or organizational network analyses instead of organization charts based on jobs.
Organizations still feel that they have a lot of work to take full advantage of such technologies. Even some organizations fail to know the skills possessed by their employees. Besides, if you are going to make decisions about your employees regarding promotions, pay, or deployment to work-based skills, then you must verify and validate the data. Most organizations continue to rely on employees’ self-reporting of their skills and proficiency levels rather than valid ways of confirming skills.
Conclusion
To make a skills-based strategy a companywide success, HR must be at the forefront to guide and monitor the effort. They must stay with the program from the beginning to the end for effective communication and motivation of the stakeholders. If you are looking for guaranteed and best results, an HR professional needs to stay curious and continually learn skills, making them more data-driven, business-focused, and experience-led.
