How can HR keep up with rapidly changing job specifications and skills needs when it’s so hard to predict what the future of work looks like? Sarah Lardner argues that it’s not impossible.
With traditional job titles and frameworks losing relevance in today’s dynamic working environments, and hybrid working more commonplace, how many business leaders and HR directors can honestly claim to fully understand the capability of their workforce?
This lack of visibility is a strategic blind spot, which is also likely to be compounding another common area of concern.
With rising people costs and widening skill gaps, particularly impacted by AI, organisations cannot just keep hiring to fill capability gaps. Without smarter workforce planning and upskilling strategies, productivity and innovation are at risk.
This means businesses need to invest in keeping people in their organisations.
Strategic partners
First, they need to empower our HR divisions to operate as strategic partners within the business, armed with the kind of new tech tools that can help them build skills, intelligence and connect people initiatives with tangible business outcomes in productivity and performance.
Workforce planning
By investing in people’s skills and encouraging both role mobility and organisational agility, companies can expect loyalty to grow and retention to climb alongside project success.
Secondly, there needs to be a sharper focus on skills, making career paths more visible and empowering people to be more accountable for their own progress.
Assessing, setting and managing skills development is hugely important but can feel like an overwhelming exercise.
After all, what is the best metric for any given company to understand whether one skill is worth more than another, or why a skillset may be less prevalent but more crucial?
Working together
Making these judgment calls with confidence requires insight and nuance, which usually means strong collaboration between line managers and HR.
The ability to make quick and easy judgements can differ from sector to sector, or even from one division to another within the same organisation.
For example, if you work as a pharmacist, your skills matrix is likely to be clearly defined and tightly regulated.
Your career path typically follows a structured route of formal education, professional qualifications and licences with specific competencies tied to each stage.
By contrast, many roles in digital, innovation or hybrid functions lack that same structure. They may end up being more transferable, but they lack clarity, which makes it harder for organisations to access capability, identify gaps and plan effectively.
This feels like a complex area, but doesn’t need to be. Ultimately, businesses need the appetite and aptitude to look inwardly and question the skills they need now and also in the future, while also assessing how those future skill sets might complement, or work alongside, new AI or robot-driven technology and how HR tech can expedite that process.
Making careers visible
So far, job evaluation tools have done a decent job of enabling companies to set an organisational structure but typically they have stopped short of making career paths genuinely visible for employees.
Moving forward, new tech is going to build on that, translating a job-levelling exercise into a tangible path that an employee can look at and use to understand how they move upwards or sideways.
To do that, first they need to understand where their current role sits. Then they need to be able to explore other possibilities and roles within the business.
By understanding the profile and requirements of those other roles, they should then be able to tick off or plot the skill developments and competencies they would need in order to progress on up the ladder or make a necessary sideways move.
In an ideal scenario, a company apprentice should be able not only to aspire to the role of the chief executive but also to find out – with the help of AI and a clever algorithm – the level of technical skills, soft skills and/or competencies they would need to set themselves on that career pathway.
Employee accountability
Sometimes HR or managers can become ‘blockers’ to progress. Often as HR we can simply be too overworked or overstretched to invest the time in individuals.
Similarly, line managers can be guilty of overlooking people or lacking the bandwidth to fully understand whether someone is ready to take the next step.
Often as HR we can simply be too overworked or overstretched to invest the time in individuals.”
In providing this kind of path-finder tool, businesses can alleviate some of these strains by tipping the ‘control’ balance away from HR and line managers dictating careers – and possibly delaying development – towards a situation where employees feel more empowered to take accountability of their role, understand and manage their skills and take greater ownership of their career.
If employees have a tool that is intuitive enough, they can build their own profile and do a portion of the work upfront by logging tasks or demonstrating when or how they have acquired a certain new skillset.
That can leave HR or their line manager to sense-check the need for a particular skill against the role’s requirements, validate the acquisition and ultimately assess the value and relevance of it to the organisation.
They will be able to understand the prevalence of skills or skill gaps within the organisation, and which roles are being explored most by employees.
If companies fully understand the nature of roles and the value of their workers, and workers understand where that value can take them in terms of progression, concerns over retention can be a thing of the past.
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