In an age of rapid digital transformation, Chris Chesterman explores how organisations can maximise their human capital by shifting focus from traditional job roles to a dynamic, skills-based approach and examines how L&D professionals can use emerging technologies to drive measurable growth in skills and capabilities.
Despite all the technological strides we’ve taken in the past 20 years, human capital is still the definitive business currency. Companies nurture talent, identify top performers, do their best to retain them and offer them opportunities to develop, upskill and take on more responsibility.
They do this through the framework of jobs: constructs which bundle (usually) related responsibilities together in a more or less logical way.
Are ‘jobs’ still fit for purpose?
In recent years, though, that logic has come into question. Work, it’s argued, is simply an accumulation of things to be done and the skills required to do them. Just as a project manager takes a goal and creates a project flow, breaking it into its component parts, so jobs can be broken down into tasks. And just because someone has always done a particular task by virtue of their job role, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are the best person to do it.
By looking at work as tasks to be done and by taking a clear view of the skills you have within the organisation, it’s possible to deploy your resources more precisely and more effectively. By looking at the skills you’ll need in five, 10 or 20 years, it’s possible to gear your recruitment and L&D initiatives with absolute precision and expect maximum return on investment.
And now is the time. Is there a business sector left which isn’t being affected by digital transformation? If your lifeblood is human capital, it’s in your interest to ensure that your people have opportunities to upskill. Your business needs that knowledge, whether it’s a new application of generative AI or simply the skills it takes to promote your brand and sell your products in a rapidly evolving digital environment.
Do we have the capability to map skills?
Creating a taxonomy of the skills your business has (and needs), then mapping each of your employees to a competency framework, is something that feels like it should take a large consulting firm several months and millions of pounds to produce.
Skills-based organisations
Transforming the role of skills
Depending on the size of your organisation, that’s a powerful barrier to entry. But just as digital transformation is helping to create the environment which enables skills-based thinking, so it offers ways around these barriers.
With AI-powered capabilities collecting data from recruitment resources, it’s possible not only to create these systems quickly and cost-effectively but also to make them dynamic and reactive: in other words, to highlight skills that are in demand in the job market, showing you skills related to the ones you’re searching for but might not yet know you need.
L&D professionals will see opportunities in these waters. Skills are very much part of the L&D portfolio, and this offers the chance to take a new metric to the board. Instead of talking about engagement and types of learning content, they could be discussing measurable skills growth throughout the business: salespeople with better negotiation skills; customer-facing staff with better communication skills and product knowledge; marketing people with serious tech and data capabilities.
And yes, CEOs will want to know about course completion and engagement with learning, but those metrics become much more powerful when they’re supported by indisputable gains in capability, testified to by line managers and evidenced by the bottom line. If L&D leaders can position themselves as enablers of skills, they’ll be driving a dynamic, evolving capability which yields measurable competitive advantage.
How does it benefit our people?
The possibilities become business-wide. Internal recruitment benefits from a pool of people constantly upgrading and refining their capabilities, enabling them to pivot rapidly into evolving roles as technology disrupts or market conditions demand it. Managers have readily available insights into skills growth, giving them a clearer picture of their resources and plenty to discuss during performance conversations. Perhaps most importantly, you create the conditions for the organisation to be able to evolve, rather than waiting for evolution to pass you by.
Skills may be within L&D’s responsibilities, but the truth is that we’re all responsible for skills – from the CEO who needs them to achieve his vision of success to the manager who needs to deploy them day to day. But we shouldn’t forget the huge benefit to employees of being able to take a more proactive approach to how their work evolves.
Even leaving aside the argument about technology encroaching on jobs, employees who embrace skills growth will be able to move much more fluidly in this environment. If we’re all agreed that the organisation’s purpose should be to provide some inherent value to employees as well as shareholders, then offering a way to continuously learn, upskill and develop is a powerful argument in your favour.
How is this different from our usual L&D initiatives?
Change is now our landscape. We create it, as a species, through technology, or we have it imposed on us (it’s still only five years since the Covid pandemic began, a change that still has a profound effect on how we work). But if we place skills at the heart of what we do, we create a new layer of resilience to change. Skills-based thinking helps us to look at what we really need in order to succeed. It permeates both core HR and learning, as well as offering a new perspective to employee-manager relationships. And yes, historically, that has been a daunting process. Even creating the language framework to describe skills in a consistent way might have taken months of hard work and inter-departmental cooperation.
But that’s no longer the case. Personalised skills gap analyses can be created in minutes. Language models already exist and are easily tailored and adapted. This still leaves the work of persuading the leadership, engaging managers and employees and finding insights in all the new data you have to work with. Technology can do the admin. L&D leaders need to set the trajectory.
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