This is a contributed piece from RedThread Research, a human capital research and advisory membership dedicated to helping organizations make better people decisions. RedThread recently hosted an invitation-only workshop to give Eightfold customers the clarity, tools, and framework they need to build a practical skills strategy that aligns with their long-term organizational goals.
At RedThread, we have been researching skills for many years. We’ve published frameworks, interviewed dozens of leaders, and watched the conversation evolve.
But designing and leading a four-week workshop dedicated to skills strategy reminded us of something — frameworks are easy. Practice is hard.
This skills workshop brought together HR, talent, and learning and development leaders who are actively trying to build or improve a skills strategy within their organizations.
Over five weeks, we walked through the six elements of a skills strategy — scope, governance, culture, architecture, data, and technology — and saw, firsthand, where things tend to get stuck.
Here’s what we learned.
Related content: Skills, not résumés, are the key to unlocking talent potential.
1. No scope, no strategy
“We would be better served with a more defined and narrow strategy that can evolve and expand over time based on what we learn from this initial work.” — Workshop participant
Few disagree that a strong skills strategy starts with a focused scope. But when it comes time to define it, most teams get stuck in the same places: Do we start with one function or roll it out company-wide? Do we define skills for today’s roles or build for the future? What do we include — and what are we willing to leave out?
These aren’t academic questions. These are the reasons many strategies never get off the ground.
And yet, the teams that we see making progress have one thing in common — they are willing to start small, get specific, and iterate. They figured out that being “comprehensive” often means being too vague to be useful.
In our workshop, the phrase we kept coming back to was this — scope is strategy.
If you can’t make hard choices up front, you’ll struggle to make any downstream decisions later on.
2. Governance is not a checkbox
“Right now, it seems like WAY too many cooks in the skills kitchen.” — Workshop participant
The second lesson: work lives or dies based on who’s involved — and how.
It’s tempting to build a big stakeholder map and invite everyone. It’s also tempting to build it with a small internal-to-the-function-leading team.
But most of the teams we worked with realized pretty quickly that not all stakeholders are equal, and that internal-only teams often lack the breadth necessary to make a strategy work across the entire organization..
Too many voices can dilute the effort. Too few and you lose alignment and buy-in.
We saw a shift as workshop participants moved from, “Let’s engage everyone,” to “Let’s get the right people on board first.” The most sophisticated teams were already thinking about champions, influence mapping, and targeted messaging — not just org charts.
Governance is more than just sign off. It’s about assembling a cohesive team to challenge and champion the effort all along.
Related content: Ready to shift to a skills-based approach? Learn more in our e-book, Talent-centered design: A blueprint for success in the digital era.
3. Don’t skip the culture work
“Job title is tied to identity in our culture. Moving toward skills is going to take some time.” — Workshop participant
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, few participants had previously considered culture in their skills strategy. Culture can either be a very big help or a pretty rough hindrance.
In theory, a skills strategy should unlock agility, identify hidden talent and create transparency. In practice, it bumps up against identity, hierarchy, and trust.
Many organizations are still wrestling with the aftermath of layoffs, restructures, or failed change efforts. In that context, introducing a new way to categorize, evaluate, or redeploy people feels risky to employees and leaders alike.
The lesson: skills work is culture work. You can’t separate them.
4. The blueprint you ignore will undermine you later
“Job architectures without the right level of detail to accommodate the right level of skills — some are too generic, some are too detailed. Finding the sweet spot is going to be interesting.” — Workshop participant
Admittedly, architecture is HARD. Questions we heard included: Should we build on our job architecture? Do we tie skills to roles? Use overlays? Start from scratch?
Underneath those questions, though, is a deeper issue: most organizations are trying to fit skills into systems that were never designed for this. This includes job families built around hierarchy; competency models written for compliance; or talent platforms that don’t speak the same language.
Many organizations are trying to retrofit. A few are scrapping legacy systems and starting over.
The red thread (see what i did there?) is: whatever model you choose, it has to serve a purpose.
The best architecture isn’t elegant — it’s usable. It supports real decisions about mobility, hiring, staffing, or workforce planning. It aligns with the why of your strategy, not just the structure.
Related content: RedThread is committed to helping talent leaders understand how AI adoption can help overcome talent shortages. Learn more in this blog post.
5. Skills data is a social contract
“Are associates feeling big-brothered … or are they open to it?” — Workshop participant
Everyone has data. Most organizations have too much. But what this workshop revealed was that most organizations don’t trust their data, and their people don’t trust what leadership will do with it.
That last part is critical. You can have the cleanest data in the world, but if employees think it’ll be used to reassign, rank, or replace them, they’ll disengage.
Skills verification is a very large conversation right now — how to do it well and how to correctly use it. So is data privacy.
The lesson: transparency is non-negotiable. You need to be crystal clear about what data you’re collecting, how you’re using it, and how it benefits the people providing it.
6. Don’t let tools lead
“More tech is just more tech.” — Workshop participant
Our workshop’s final week centered on tools. While most participants had some system — or were under pressure to get one —we again saw that tech often isn’t the problem.
Or at least, it isn’t the problem.
If anything, the tech conversation revealed the absence of a clear strategy. Organizations are buying tools because they feel they have to. Others are trying to make existing systems talk to each other without agreement on what they were solving for.
When tech is driving the strategy, everything gets more complicated. When the strategy is clear, the tech decisions get simpler.
Final thought: Frameworks practice makes them real
This workshop reminded us that strategy is a contact sport. It’s not tidy. It’s not linear. It doesn’t live in a slide deck. It lives in conversations, trade-offs, tensions, and experiments.
The organizations making real progress are the ones doing — not just planning.
We built this workshop to help talent leaders wrestle with the real work of building a skills strategy. What we learned is that the wrestling is the work. The questions matter more than the answers, and the next version of your strategy should always be a little smarter than the last.
Let us know if you want to join the next one!
Ready to improve your organization’s skills strategy? Learn more at RedThread’s next workshop.
