One example is by clearly defining criteria that indicate that employees are qualified to move into a different role in another part of the same company, and communicating those criteria transparently. Googlers are encouraged to work with their managers to identify and document what their “priorities” should be in terms of their own development, and identify specific learning opportunities based on these priorities to act on in subsequent quarters.20 For many organizations that retain the job, employees may have both a base salary based on their job, and a “skills” salary based on the market value of and organizational need for their skills. It then created algorithms to search and hire for those—increasing the talent pool by at least three times what the company had estimated. For example, the US Department of Defense and private sector defense organizations jointly created the Public-Private Talent Exchange to share talent across organizations through temporary projects and assignments.10
If skills are to become the lingua franca of work and the workforce, then organizations need to create a common language and framework for skills. Instead of managing employees https://alliancetac.com/leadership-and-management-training/onsite-course/succession-planning-developing-your-leadership-pipeline-course-outline in jobs, 72% of business and HR executives agree that the role of HR will move away from managing employment to orchestrating work. Ninety percent of business and HR executives say moving to a skills-based organization will require a transformation for all functions and leaders, not just HR. For example, finance will need to change the way it values work so that HR can set compensation levels, procurement will need to assess and deploy skills when hiring freelancers, and strategy and operations will need to think differently about how to structure and organize work.
Routing all gaps to training without modeling sourcing and automation alternatives produces underfunded learning programs and unresolved capacity shortfalls. Skills-based workforce planning is an approach to organizational talent strategy in which workforce capacity is measured, forecasted, and managed at the level of individual skills, competencies, and capabilities rather than at the level of positions, roles, or headcount. Skills-based workforce planning restructures how organizations identify, deploy, and develop talent by treating discrete capabilities — rather than job titles or headcount — as the primary unit of analysis. They mapped over 20,000 employees’ skills and redeployed talent dynamically across global projects, reducing reliance on external hiring while increasing innovation capacity. Creates mobility frameworks that let employees move across teams, projects, or geographies.
DELOITTE INSIGHTS
- Modern off-ramps from college and on-ramps into the workforce must be inclusive, skills-based, available to all college students, and embedded not only in the college classroom but also extended into real-world work experiences.
- Within two years, 30,000+ gigs were completed, retention improved by 41%, and employees reported stronger engagement and mobility.
- The goal is to create a comprehensive skills inventory that highlights strengths, gaps, and emerging capability risks.
- When one telecommunications company needed machine learning skills, for example, it didn’t search for those who held machine learning or AI jobs, or who had degrees in the field.
- The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 estimated that 44 percent of workers’ core skills will be disrupted within 5 years, a projection that has accelerated organizational interest in skills-level visibility (WEF Future of Jobs Report 2023).
77% of business executives agree their organization https://consultprofound.com/accounting-insights-navigating-growth-and-technology-trends.html?noamp=mobile should help their workers become more employable with relevant skills, but only 5% strongly agree they are investing enough in helping people learn new skills to keep up with the changing world of work. Instead of turning everyone into the same kind of contributor through standardizing them in jobs, skills-based organizations let people’s uniqueness as humans shine through, with work tailored to their strengths. This indicates that those who’ve adopted skills-based approaches to a significant extent are building organizational models that better align to their organizations’ needs—and workers’ expectations—today. And by basing people decisions on skills more than jobs, organizations can still have a scalable, manageable, and more equitable way of operating. According to a global Deloitte survey of more than 1,200 professionals, organizations are increasingly experimenting with what they hope is a better way. It’s so embedded in everything companies do that people rarely stop to question it at all.
Benefits of Skills-Based Workforce Planning
As a result, many organizations are shifting to a skills-first approach that focuses on employees’ capabilities and potential. Traditional https://www.ournhs.info/5-uses-for-6/ workforce models that rely on job titles, degrees, and years of experience often make it difficult to identify the right talent for emerging roles. Organizations today face growing skill shortages, rapid technological change, and evolving business demands. Transforming the way in which we approach talent acquisition and performance management may offer a solution to the struggle to hire people with desirable skills.
By aligning workforce planning with these critical business needs, organisations can position themselves to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive and fast-changing environment. Skills-Based Workforce Planning (SBWFP) emerges as a strategic imperative – not just an HR initiative, but a business-critical enabler of agility, resilience, and innovation. Skills are now the currency of competitive advantage, and organisations that fail to align their workforce strategies with this reality risk falling behind.
A change agent, thought leader and advocate for human-centered work, workforce and workplace practices, Hiipakka has 24 years of experience across learning and development, talent management, and professional services, including as a learning leader in a professional services firm. His work focuses on highlighting how organizations can hire smarter, upskill faster, and build future-ready teams with data-backed talent insights. Small organizations can begin by identifying the skills required for key roles, assessing existing employee capabilities, and using skills data to guide hiring, development, and project assignments. With smart assessments, real-time skill data, and actionable analytics, it empowers businesses to build high-performing teams for the future of work.
One life sciences organization focused on designing a skills-based organizational philosophy and value proposition, and then developed a skill-mapping playbook that enabled it to tag its skills ontology and proficiency levels to learning objects. As it proceeded to also adopt skills-based hiring and a skills-based talent marketplace, it realized it had core skills hub work to do to realize the vision; so it embarked on an initiative to develop an enterprisewide skills framework, using skills as a unit of measurement to better acquire, manage, and develop its people going forward.27 Often, they’ll start with a particular talent practice and transform it to be based more on skills and less on jobs, and then continue to either similarly transform another practice or determine that they have to create a skills “hub” before realizing the transformation. If work becomes completely fractionalized into projects and tasks, will some organizations decide to match workers’ skills without the workers’ agreement, either via algorithms or at the discretion of managers? If work is unbound from jobs, and workers are given more opportunities to exercise choice and autonomy in how they apply their skills, what happens if the work workers want to do no longer aligns with the work that organization needs them to do?
- From assessing current capabilities to closing skills gaps and aligning roles with real-world strengths, the transition requires the right tools and insights.
- To navigate the future, businesses must embrace a skills-first mindset, leveraging SBWFP to unlock agility, resilience, and growth.
- Individuals and their managers should have a shared understanding of what skills are important for the employee to develop, and actively discuss on a quarterly basis (or more frequently) how to get the exposure, experiences, and education that will help them develop and demonstrate those skills on the job, in the flow of work.
- This indicates that those who’ve adopted skills-based approaches to a significant extent are building organizational models that better align to their organizations’ needs—and workers’ expectations—today.
- This enabled the organization to start on transforming learning with a skills-based approach, with an ultimate goal of creating more personalized development opportunities for its employees.
- Skill-building opportunities must be continuous and flexible enough to accommodate changing corporate needs rather than being viewed as sporadic or haphazard activities.
Regardless of academic major, higher education should equip college students with a core set of transferable skills designed to prepare them for life after graduation. Research by the Josh Bersin Company has indicated that the half-life of a technical skill can be as short as 2.5 years in fast-moving technology domains, requiring inventory refresh at least annually. Each requires customization to reflect the organization’s specific technical environment, strategic context, and language. Skills-based planning layers capability visibility onto existing or redesigned role structures; it does not inherently eliminate job titles, grades, or reporting hierarchies. Translating skills-gap analysis into headcount decisions requires a translation layer that most enterprise planning systems do not provide natively, creating reconciliation friction. Organizations maintaining taxonomies of 3,000 or more skills nodes often find that 15 to 20 percent of the taxonomy requires revision annually, creating governance overhead.
This model ensures people are positioned where they can contribute the most. Organizations can respond quickly to shifting priorities when they structure teams around skills. Focusing on skills instead of job titles or credentials allows companies to evaluate candidates more equitably. This approach can help close skill gaps, improve workforce agility, and support changing business priorities. A skills-based workforce helps organizations improve hiring, workforce planning, learning, and internal mobility by understanding the skills employees have and the skills the business needs.
Balancing agility with stability: The human element of SBWFP
Skills-based workforce planning is supported by platforms like iMocha, which combine skills assessments, gap analysis, taxonomy frameworks, and personalized learning paths. With this approach, organizations become more flexible in adapting to market changes. Through structured implementation and continuous measurement, companies can reduce talent risk, close critical skill gaps, and create a more adaptive workforce prepared for future disruption. Skills-based workforce planning is essential for building a resilient and future-ready organization. Forecasting should align with strategic planning cycles and long-term organizational objectives. The goal is to create a comprehensive skills inventory that highlights strengths, gaps, and emerging capability risks.
If jobs are no longer a useful construct to meet organizational goals and worker needs, many organizations are realizing it’s time to change their approach. In an era of accelerating, often unpredictable change, 85% of business executives say that organizations should create more agile ways of organizing work to swiftly adapt to market changes. For example, identifying adjacent or foundational skills of workers who are displaced by automation or whose roles are no longer needed can help organizations redeploy them to work that is needed.
