Many companies dived right into skills technologies with little strategy or thought, and are now struggling to see a return on their investments.
A senior leader at a Fortune 100 company recently told me they felt vulnerable due to the lack of progress with their skills project efforts to-date, and the lack of demonstrable value for their peers and the C-suite.
This is a common reason organizations look to SkyHive as a skills transformation partner — to help define how and why to use skills within the business before embarking on this journey.
It's also the reason why many companies are revisiting their job architecture, which must be fluid and automated, while evaluating where and how current talent management practices can be improved.
At SkyHive, we understand that transformation does not happen overnight. HR leaders, whose customers and key stakeholders are internal, must partner with their peers in the business to understand how a skill-based approach could help address critical talent issues.
Below is a helpful visual for facilitating this conversation internally.
First, and most importantly, companies must identify key business issues. ‘Go where the energy is’ is a consistent theme we hear from HR leaders, because gaining broad consensus in complex organizations can be tough. In many cases it might be easier to start small, solve a problem, and then expand and iterate once you have clearly demonstrated value.
Once we have identified a problem, we must then ask ourselves:
- What systems do we have in place today?
- What role do they play?
- Where do we anticipate the need to change or adapt those systems in the future to accommodate emerging needs?
- Where will the skills data will be stored (system of record)?
- Where will the work will be done (system of engagement)?
- How will this experience be improved or automated (system of intelligence)?
Most large companies have multiple platforms creating or ingesting skills data, whether that be their HCM system (Workday, Success Factors, Oracle), LMS or LxP (Degreed, Cornerstone, SumTotal), Talent Marketplace (Gloat, Fuel50) or CRM system (Eightfold, Beamery, Phenom).
Other key technologies such as ServiceNow and Microsoft also have skills offerings. Data silos and manual processes quickly result in spiraling costs and a high total cost of ownership.
In my first article, we touched upon why this disconnected ecosystem doesn’t work. There is no way to easily gather a skills inventory of your workforce (e.g. supply of skills), determine how it relates to the jobs within your company (e.g. demand for skills), and see the gaps between the two.
This is why we created the Human Capital Operating System. The HCOS is fundamental to enabling large organizations and governments to reskill at scale.
There are several components to this. The first is that SkyHive gathers and analyses data on the labor markets across 200 countries and 63 million companies in real time. Jobs and economies change, and it is crucial to have a continuously evolving comparison with ‘the market’ to adapt your talent strategies and make smart decisions.
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Furthermore, to use skills in a meaningful way, you must be able to integrate skills data from various platforms into a single language. We call this process normalization.
To normalize skills between disparate systems, a technology must be able to understand entities at syntactic, semantic, contextual, and structural levels. This is incredibly complex. SkyHive’s patented approach means that today we are the only company in the world capable of normalizing skills between two different systems and the labor market in real time.
This is important when you think about the future of skills, and how skills will be embedded across the entire employee lifecycle (and various different technologies) including candidates applying for roles; the hiring process; onboarding; doing work (e.g. delivering value to customers and internal stakeholders); finding new roles internally; succession planning; and then eventually offboarding.
The most important part of the HCOS is that it is a foundational technology, not necessarily an employee-facing technology. Our HCOS can be deployed either as a SaaS and/or PaaS solution in any cloud. This provides choice, flexibility, and customization.
As referenced above, each company has different priorities and business issues to tackle, and any technology trying to facilitate reskilling at scale must be able to work with, rather than against, the tools and technologies in place today.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. Next time around we’ll be examining how to gather a skills inventory for your workforce, common (and costly) mistakes, and how to avoid them.
Paul Scott is a Senior Account Executive at SkyHive. Contact him at paul.scott@skyhive.io
