Can you build a house without architecting it first?
Absolutely. We just don't recommend it.
Similarly, when moving to a skill-based organization, the best practice we've seen with customers is to start with your job architecture. As part of the transition, ask yourself these four questions, in order:
- What skills do we need? This is your job architecture: The definition of jobs and skills in your organization. "If you don't have that right, you don't have the anchor through which you can begin future reskilling journeys and movements from jobs to skills," SkyHive Founder and CEO Sean Hinton says. He says that most customers haven't unified these definitions in their organizations. One customer, for example, had about 70,000 employees and 55,000 different job descriptions. Within weeks, it was able to reduce that to roughly 1,200 job families and clear definitions within those families.
- What skills do we have? This involves automatically generating skill profiles for each employee, as well as assessments of employee skills.
- What are the gaps? Here, you identify skill gaps at an individual and workforce level. Labor market intelligence and skill supply-demand data is used to make a build-buy-borrow analysis.
- What actions do we take? This can involve internal projects, mentorships, as well as communities of skills, where people from different departments organize around skills they are building and assessing.
Let us know if you want to learn more about job architecture.
