A Skills-Based Organization

An emphasis on skills to increase the capability of people.

In the last year, I was introduced to the concept of a skills-based organization. It was first introduced by my team as we were challenged to skill up the workforce. My first thought was how does a 157-year-old global company skill up its workforce and meet the learning demands of our businesses in this fast-changing environment? Relating to the Human Performance Technology (HPT) course I'm taking, I also wanted to understand if there was correlation between human performance and skills-based organization.

Recently I listened to a podcast hosted by David Mallon and Michael Griffiths with Guest Speakers John Boudreau and Julie Dervin. Mallon and Griffiths represent one of the largest consulting firms, Deloitte Consulting. Boudreau is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and senior research scientist at Center for Effective Organizations. Dervin is the Head of Global Learning & Development at Cargill, a global privately-owned company that produced food, agricultural, financial, and industrial products.

"Imagine what happens to a workforce productivity and variable contractor costs when we can unlock the percentage of employee capacity that isn’t being tapped into today".

After listening to this podcast, there were several takeaways:

#1 Start with Learning and Development

"And based on that readiness and value assessment, we decided to start with learning and development".

The perspective I've gained with positioning learning and development to propel and get an organization ready to become a skills-based organization is truly a smart way to skill-up learning professionals. Often in other organizations, the human resources leaders will be the groups to implement skill, changes and often they forget to involve learning and development, the expertise behind the complexity and design of this development.

In the context of human performance competency, it begins with skilling up learning and development professionals with awareness, understanding, and application of the concepts that lead to putting it into practice. Similar to skills-based organization concepts, skilling up learning and development will prepare the organization to have specialized professionals to support the change.

#2 Data-driven Skills

"Now, there’s so much external data that we can pull in and start seeing what’s on the horizon by way of new skills. The ability to quickly adapt our people processes to acquire, build, and deploy these new skills, visibility of who has what skills, and connecting supply and demand through internal talent marketplaces".

So back to my initial question, how does a large organization manage to skill up a workforce quickly with this changing workforce? Dervin insights increase my belief and confidence in a skills-based organization. The amount of information and data that is available can inform an organization what skills are critical, what skills need to be developed, and what skills are contributing to a broader capability. Imagining that an organization can have all of this at its fingers tips makes me question if pre-assessments and post-assessments are necessary if skills can be measured in real-time while the learning is in process.

In the context of HTP, we see data in the process during the investigation and the evaluation. Data inputs are identified for each of the interventions and this data informs our progress or effectiveness in addressing the performance problem.

#3 Establishing a Common Language

"...within HR, we need to speak the same language to each other, because skills are so foundational to many talent and people processes..."

To make it work, the team needs to understand each other and a common language is a good way to begin aligning and working through the processes of creating a skills-based organization. Dervin stated skills are foundational and so it would be logical to make sure everyone is aligned that this is key to the success of the organization.

In the context of HPT, there are terms that perhaps can be translated for organizations who are not as mature in their methodologies or are beginning to expand their organizations. For instance, in the HPT we use the word interventions which for small tech or learning businesses, they may use the term solutions. For a learning professional who is navigating the human performance environment, a need for a common language for their own purposes can be valuable. More certainly for an entire training or human resources team.

Summary

A skills-based organization seems exciting and listening to this presentation was one of the most motivating learning for my career and profession. It has helped me understand there are connections and similarities among concepts and systems. It has encouraged me to continue my career as a learning professional to implement a skills-based organization. It has taught me the importance of having a common language and leveraging data to make quicker decisions on which skills we build, develop, and deploy learning for.