The webinar on skills strategy and its implications featured Teresa Wykes, Stacia Garr, and Dani Johnson. They discussed the evolution of skills-based approaches, emphasizing the importance of integrating skills data with other data types for a comprehensive talent strategy. They highlighted the need for clear definitions and strategies, noting that the scope and purpose of skills initiatives vary by organization. The conversation also covered the role of AI in skills assessment, the challenges of implementing skills-based strategies in large organizations, and the importance of leadership alignment and stakeholder engagement. The panel also touched on the gap between educational preparation and organizational needs and the potential for skills-based compensation.

Introduction

• Teresa Wykes introduces the webinar, focusing on skills strategy and its implications.
• Teresa invites participants to place questions and technical difficulties in the chat.
• Teresa introduces herself as part of the Talent-centered Transformation team at Eightfold.
• Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson introduce themselves as co-founders of Red Thread.
• Teresa initiates a poll to gauge the audience’s progress in becoming skills-based, with results indicating a mix of early and advanced stages.

Defining skills-based approaches

• Teresa asks Stacia and Dani to define what it means to be skills-based in 2025.
• Stacia explains that the term “skills-based” is outdated as it implies excluding other data types, advocating for a data-driven approach instead.
• Dani emphasizes the importance of having a reason for using skills data and not doing it for its own sake.
• Teresa inquires about the importance of having a solid skills definition versus a fair attempt, with Dani and Stacia agreeing that it depends on the organization’s scope and purpose.

Strategies and implementation

• Teresa asks about the number of skills assigned to employees and the rationale behind it.
• Dani explains that the number of skills varies based on the organization’s scope and purpose, with some focusing on a few critical skills.
• Stacia and Dani discuss the importance of understanding the skills required for different roles and industries, using Ericsson as an example.
• Teresa and Dani discuss the challenges of implementing skills-based strategies in large organizations, with Dani emphasizing the need for a clear business use case.

Challenges and solutions

• Teresa addresses the challenge of keeping skills up-to-date in fast-changing environments.
• Dani explains the difference between ontologies and taxonomies and their relevance to skills-based strategies.
• Stacia adds that the frequency of updates depends on the function or group within the organization, with technology aiding in this process.
• Teresa asks if a job architecture is necessary for a skills-based approach, with Stacia and Dani agreeing that it can be challenging but not always necessary.

Engaging stakeholders and low-risk strategies

• Teresa inquires about engaging stakeholders and getting people interested in skills-based approaches.
• Dani suggests identifying champions and detractors within the organization and focusing on business use cases.
• Stacia emphasizes the importance of finding a strong use case with high visibility and clear metrics for impact.
• Teresa asks about low-risk strategies for testing skills-based approaches, with Stacia recommending starting with a clear business case and use case.

Impact of AI on skills

• Teresa asks about the impact of AI on skills assessment and balancing innovation with responsible data use.
• Stacia highlights AI’s effectiveness in inferring skills and the importance of context.
• Dani discusses the challenges of verifying skills using AI, including the use of chatbots and live sandboxes.
• Teresa asks about identifying hidden skills in employees, with Dani suggesting that organizations should ask for this information.

Balancing human and AI tasks

• Teresa asks about best practices for determining whether a role is best suited for a human or an agent.
• Dani explains the ongoing discussion about defining tasks and the importance of context in making these decisions.
• Stacia adds that AI should not replace human tasks that provide long-term benefits, such as data cleaning.
• Teresa and Stacia discuss the importance of defining work and tasks in a way that aligns with the organization’s goals and values.

Employee engagement and career progression

• Teresa asks about the value of focusing on skills for employees and how to get buy-in.
• Dani emphasizes the benefits of a skills-based mindset, including opportunities for growth and development.
• Teresa adds that skills data can provide career currency outside of the current job.
• Teresa asks about shifting the culture and expectations of employees from traditional career progression to skills-based growth.

Leadership and skills development

• Teresa asks about upskilling senior leaders and shifting their mindset towards skills.
• Dani recommends starting upskilling efforts at lower levels and building systems that support skills-based thinking.
• Stacia discusses the importance of understanding the value of expertise and experience versus skills in different contexts.
• Teresa and Dani discuss the challenges of changing organizational culture and the role of leadership in this process.

Education and skills gap

• Teresa asks about the role of education in equipping young people for a skills-based approach.
• Dani and Stacia agree that current education systems are not well-aligned with organizational needs, with a significant skills gap.
• Stacia raises the question of the purpose of universities, suggesting that they should prepare students for broader societal contributions.
• Dani and Stacia discuss the potential for a more flexible education system that prepares students for a rapidly changing job market.

Skills and total rewards

• Teresa asks about aligning skills with total rewards and compensation strategies.
• Dani explains that most organizations are focusing on skills for development rather than direct pay alignment.
• Stacia suggests checking out a podcast episode with Angel share Puri at IBM for insights on this topic.
• Teresa and Dani discuss the challenges of aligning skills with pay and the potential for future changes in this area.

Final thoughts

• Teresa thanks Stacia and Dani for their insights and contributions to the webinar.
• Teresa thanks the participants for their questions and engagement throughout the session.
• Teresa encourages participants to take the ideas discussed back to their colleagues and continue the conversation.
• The webinar concludes with Teresa wishing everyone a good day or evening.

Teresa Wykes 00:00
My name is Teresa Wykes. I’m part of our Talent-centered Transformation team here at Eightfold. Stacia, would you like to introduce yourself next?

Stacia Garr 00:59
Yes, hello everybody, and welcome to today’s webinar. We’re so glad to be here and so glad that you’re here as well. I’m Stacia Garr, I’m co-founder of RedThread.

Dani Johnson 01:11
And I’m Dani Johnson. I’m the other co-founder of RedThread.

Teresa Wykes 01:16
We’re going to cover a few various different aspects of the whole skills world here. I think we’re going to start off with a poll. Is that right? That’s right. Okay. I think just to get us started, I think it’s going to be helpful just to find out from the audience today how far along you are in your journey to becoming skills based, so you can see you’ve got some options there. Let’s just give everyone a chance to look at that, and then we’ll then we’ll get started. I’m okay, so I think I’ll just get started with our first question. Oh, here we go. Here we go. We’ve got some results now. Okay, interesting.

Dani Johnson 02:35
It was really okay. Fully embedded this, and I wanted to talk to those people. Looks about like we see in other organizations.

Teresa Wykes 02:48
Does that happen? Does that reflect what you would expect down your station?

Dani Johnson 02:56
It absolutely does.

Stacia Garr 02:59
Okay, yeah, we do have a few folks in there, though, with scaling enterprise wide, with measurable impact, which, you know, as I reflect on what we saw, let’s call it just two years ago, we wouldn’t have even seen that. So those folks come, come find us, and we want to hear from you and understand what you’re doing.

Dani Johnson 03:18
Even the people that we have on our podcast now, always, always start with people. We’re just getting started. We’re not experts in this. We’re just getting started. So I think there are a lot of people toward the beginning part of this journey.

Teresa Wykes 03:31
Excellent. Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for participating in that. So I’m going to start with exploring a little bit about how we might define and understand skills based approaches. And I think if we could start so, I could always rely on Dani and Stacia for some straight talking. And, you know, cutting beyond the buzzwords today, in 2025 what would you both say that being skills based actually means.

Stacia Garr 04:02
Yeah, well, I will start, I would say that first, we actually don’t use the term skills based anymore and and the reason for that is that it connotes that an organization is only using skills data at the exclusion of other types of data or other or throwing out other information that we may have. And we know that in reality, that’s not what happens. No organization is like, hey, you know, we’ve got this great assessment data, and we’re not going to use that to make talent decisions. We’re just going to use skills like that, it’s not accurate. And so when we talk about it, when we talk about using skills data as a complement to the overall set of data that we have when it comes to making decisions about people and designing talent systems. And so today, if I’m talking about what an organization that’s doing this well is using skills data where appropriate. It’s using other types of data where appropriate, but most importantly, it’s having a data driven approach to the overall talent system and making decisions in the organization.

Dani Johnson 05:19
Yeah. So when we think of skills, we think of it almost, I wouldn’t say exclusively. There are a lot of things that go into it, but we’re talking about skills data. We’re not talking about skills. We often say that doing skills for skills sake is stupid unless you have a really, unless you have a reason for it. There’s really no point in going down this path. It’s really hard.

Teresa Wykes 05:39
Thank you. Okay, how so, how important is it then that you have a solid definition of skills, versus a fair attempt in an organization skills framework to be able to measure impact like that? I mean, I think certainly we have a lot of conversations when we’re out there, about, right, so how? How solid does it need to be? How detailed does it need to be, you know, where can you know what would be good enough versus, you know, perfection.

Dani Johnson 06:06
So are you talking about, like, the definition of the word skills, what is a skill? Or are you talking about sort of a strategy, like Dropbox, yeah, probably. So, I mean, what you’re seeing on the screen are six elements for a skill strategy. We think that understanding these is important. This is important. We also know that there is no perfect. There is no perfect anywhere, and it is continually evolving based on what your organization is doing and the needs of your organization, as well as the technology that is available and new developments when it comes to data and all those types of things. So I think it’s pretty important to have a blueprint. We see these six elements as things that we use to describe what a skill strategy should include. But there’s no such thing as perfect, and we see far too many organizations get into that problem. They think that they need it perfectly. They think they need a perfect job market, care, architecture, they think they need a perfect team. Sometimes they jump in with tech first. None of those things are going to get you what you need. Need an overall strategy or general direction of where you’re going, and then you need to be able to adapt.

Stacia Garr 07:12
Yeah, I would just add to that. So much of what we see with organizations comes down to scope and purpose, right? So like, you know, in this question with how important is it to have a solid definition versus a fair attempt? Well, so much of it depends on what you’re trying to do. What’s the scope of the work? How, how big, how many types of work, roles and people, and what are, what are your objectives? Because, if your objective is just to dip your toe in and get started and begin to understand what’s happening here. Then you know your your kind of faith effort or fair attempt, I think was the way the question was phrased, is fine, but if you’re trying to use it to make really important talent decisions and to move and help people move into different parts of their career and all the rest of it, then you’re going to want something that’s higher fidelity. But it really just depends on where you are as an organization.

Teresa Wykes 08:09
Thank you. Do you think, I mean, I’m thinking of conversations that I’ve had out there, they’ve been organizations that have said, Oh, well, we’ve given everyone like, five skills. You know, everyone has the same, there’s no more than that. Have you got any kind of anecdotal, you know, examples that you could give us about the numbers of skills that people are assigning to people in the workforce? Why? That’s, why that, why that, why that’s good enough?

Dani Johnson 08:36
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And kind of back to the station point. It depends on your scope and purpose. So we’ve seen organizations say, You know what we need. We know that everybody in our organization needs this skill, and we’re gonna throw L&D dollars and performance and everything at that. So they define one skill like this is where we’re going. This year, we’ve seen other organizations that say, why would you even dip your foot into skills unless you understand all the skills clearly. The more skills data that you have, the more decisions you can make, but the more complicated it gets, the more data streams that you have, the more harmonization that needs to happen, and all of that kind of stuff. And so we haven’t seen, we haven’t seen a trend yet. Some organizations are going all in, and they’re doing as much as they can, as fast as they can, and some organizations are being much more pointed about the direction that they’re going in, the skills that they’re leveraging.

Teresa Wykes 09:26
Yeah, interesting. And have you seen a certain type of skills that companies are like, so everybody has to be AI-literate, or everybody should be good at project management, or, you know, data analysis, that kind of thing. Could you talk about that a bit?

Dani Johnson 09:40
It also depends on the industry and what you’re trying to accomplish. So but you Christian is a really good example of this. She’s the CLO at Ericsson. I use her as an example a lot. I really like what she’s doing there. She’s the single one. So they take a look every year and say, All right, for our business to continue the direction that it wants to go, these skills are the most important skills. And so they have anywhere from one to seven skills that they’re like. These are the ones that we’re going to focus on as an entire organization. At the same time, they’ve also put systems and structures into place so that people on the ground are analyzing what skills are necessary and deciding what types of skills should be in place. And so she’s taking both approaches. Here’s everybody. Everybody needs these skills, and only a small percentage of people need these skills in this section. And so we’re going to sort of isolate it to this. When we talk about scope and purpose, we’ve done a couple of workshops where we have people come in and walk through these six steps and put a strategy into place. And the first step is defining your scope and purpose. The reason that that’s first is because all of these other five things depend on that step, defining your scope and purpose. And so sometimes we get an L&D team that comes in and says, I’m the L&D team. All I really care about is personalization of getting information to people that are going to help them build the skills that the organization needs. So I’m going to draw my box around that. My purpose is to get the stuff that’s good, the stuff to people that they need. And the scope is just learning. That’s the only thing I’m doing. Or sometimes we’ll have somebody come in and they’ll say, Okay, I’m looking at skills for our tech department. So that’s my scope. And my purpose is to make sure that everybody has this type of tech, you know, everyone has AI skills moving into the next year. And so the definition of that scope really defines everything else. Some organizations have come in, and they’ve tried to boil the ocean, but I’ve also been really surprised at the number of organizations that have come in that have started somewhere else. They’re deep into tech or they’re deep into architecture, and they haven’t considered their scope and purpose, and almost always, they have to circle around and decide exactly what they’re doing right now. It doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that they do, but if you start there, then it’s easier to build on and try to boil the ocean all at once.

Teresa Wykes 11:48
Yeah, no, that’s true. That’s true. We’ve had a comment in the chat that it’s challenging to build a skills based strategy in large organizations because skills are moving so fast. So yeah, have you? Have you seen any examples of where, of how to, how to keep on top of that, you know, I mean, what’s, what’s the skills refresh? You know, rate. How often are you seeing companies, you know, change their skills, tax holidays or their lists?

Dani Johnson 12:16
Yeah, all the time. We’re there. There are a couple ways to look at architecture. And Stacia could talk much more deeply about this, but the high-level ways that almost everybody can kind of understand, there’s an ontology and there’s a taxonomy. Taxonomies are usually tied to job architectures. This job requires these, this, you know, these types of skills, therefore these types of skills are the things that we’re going to measure for this job. And then there are ontologies, which are a little bit more flexible and allow people to take a look at, you know, overall, the skills that we have in our organization, and if they have the skill, then it’s likely that they have the skill. And so it’s a much more relational type of arrangement. Both of those are accurate. I have completely lost the question, Teresa, can you repeat that?

Teresa Wykes 13:03
Just how to keep on top of skills like, how often? How often would you know? How often would you actually refresh or update your skills requirement list?

Dani Johnson 13:12
Okay, yeah, it really depends on the organization. And some organizations, they don’t have to be updated that often. Traditional organizations, some of the industries that are changing a lot right now, need to be updated quite a bit. Technologies can help with that. But really, I mean, the thing that we’ve seen work the very best is a dedicated team for skills in the organization.

Stacia Garr 13:34
Yeah, I would add to it that it also depends on the function or group within the organization. It’s not necessarily the same across a single organization. So we were talking with one organization that’s pretty far along with this, and they really focus on making sure they have up to date skills and competencies and other information on their peers and their technologists, but for HR, they don’t put as much in. They don’t have to update that as often, just because the skill sets are not changing quite as frequently. That’s not to say that they aren’t changing. Of course, they are right, but it’s just about the frequency. And the other thing that was embedded in what that leader was telling us is that it’s also about, where do you drive the most business value? So for them, they are a technology organization, and so the business value is driven out of the engineering function and so it’s less driven out of HR. And so that’s, again, another reason why they’ve made that decision, because there’s only so much time and energy, and so they’ve put it in the place where it’s going to drive the most business results.

Teresa Wykes 14:44
Agree with that 100% just going back to architecture, I think, you know, lots of people get a bit hung up on the job architecture side as well. Can you be skill-based without a job? Architecture?

Stacia Garr 14:59
Yes, you can, but it’s, it’s challenging. So, I mean, we have some really good examples from our podcast where we’ve interviewed folks who want to even talk about technology. Some of them have literally done it, like, basically, you know, and Steve, you can question is, how difficult is going to be for you to do the things you want to do, and how long until you see the impact that you want to do, with a with the job architecture, you Know, I would we’re seeing a lot of organizations return to Job architectures right now, also in conjunction with some of the work that they’re doing, I and understanding the work that’s getting done in the organization, various responsibilities and but not trying to again, boil the ocean all at once. They’re focusing on the highest values, roles, and they’re doing the job, architecture work there, and then kind of expanding from there. An alternative approach, though, that we’ve seen is for skills that we know are really critical in an organization. I’m going to go back to the Ericsson example. You know, they saw a focus on AI that was essential across the organization, and they did that across organizations that required no focus on job architecture. It’s just these are some skills every single person organization needs to have.

Dani Johnson 16:30
Yeah, and it also depends on the structure of your organization. Like a professional services firm, for example, may do much better without a job architecture, because job architectures are a lot here there. Whereas in organizations where the job is defined by the skills you do might make you better, to immerse the job architecture.

Teresa Wykes 16:51
Okay, I do want to talk a little bit about different types of organizations, as you’ve touched on it. We’ve had, we’ve had a couple of questions about, how do you get started with skills in a smaller company? You know, obviously a larger company is going to have access to resources, huge volumes of data, different systems, different resources, that kind of thing. You talk to us a little bit about, if you’re working in a small to medium sized organization, how that might look in terms of skills, approach that would be different from a larger company.

Dani Johnson 17:22
Yeah, the difference is, you’re right, there aren’t as many resources. But the difference is, also, in a lot of cases, it’s less complicated. I think everybody should start with the business use case, like, why are you doing skills, and what problem are you trying to solve? And then go from there. And in that case, it doesn’t really matter if you have, you know, a gigantic team working on it, or if you have just a few, you’re solving a problem. Steven mentioned an organization that we talked to that was trying to solve a front line problem of, we’re losing too many people within the first three months, or whatever. They did it on paper. They did a paper and pencil approach, and were able to do it. We do not recommend that, but there are technologies that can help both small organizations and large, larger organizations, and it also depends on the scope and purpose of this organization. Are you talking about a specific character? Is this three people? Is this 10 people? Those types of questions are really going to define what types of technology you need, but also what you can do with the information again.

Teresa Wykes 18:24
Okay, thank you. So if we move on to looking at implementation and actually getting started, we had a few questions asking, how do you actually get people on, you know, with you, how do you actually get people interested in this, and how do you get your stakeholders engaged. And actually, I think to understand, I think, you know, like, I think we often assume that hiring managers understand everything about talent, and they understand everything about skills, and they understand everything that HR understands, but I think there’s often a gap between that. So how would you go about, say, opening up the conversation with a hiring manager or with a business stakeholder, so that it would suit your purposes.

Dani Johnson 19:08
I can take that one, Stacia. In our workshop, we do an activity where there’s basically a four square, and we ask them to put on that four square, your champions and your detractors, and measure them against how influential they are. And so the first thing, I think, one of the first things that organizations need to do is figure out who their champions are and who their attractors are, and how much power they have in the organization, because those relationships are going to be the key ones, right? And so figuring those people out, and then going to them and saying, all right, we can improve your business, or we can improve the business by doing this in these ways, again, bringing in the use cases, how you get, how you make detractors into champions. A lot of times, what we see is people say, oh, we need to do skills without a definite reason for them to do skills, and without getting the people on board that actually need to be on board. That step is we have found so key, like making sure that you’ve got the right team is so key to making sure that it can drive across the organization.

Teresa Wykes 20:07
Stacia, would you add anything to that?

Stacia Garr 20:13
No, I think Dani said it.

Teresa Wykes 20:17
Well, okay, okay, okay. And what would be some low-risk strategies for testing a skills based approach in your organization. You know what would be a kind of, what would a pilot look like?

Stacia Garr 20:30
I think the most important thing, and this goes back to what Dani was just now saying, is figuring out where, where there is a strong use case where you can make an impact with skills and focus there first. And you know, skills one of those things that we actually hear business leaders pulling, as opposed to HR pushing, and that can make a big difference in terms of finding a good use case where somebody, a lot of business leaders are like, I get, I get the reason here, like, let’s, let’s get this going. And so that is what, what it’s we’re hearing from folks is find that use case where you can show impact, make sure that it’s something that’s going to have high visibility, where you’ve got a leader who can influence others to want to move forward assuming it’s successful, and then make sure you’re very clear on the metrics that you want to track to show the impact that you’re hoping for.

Teresa Wykes 21:31
I agree with you. I think yeah, having champions and having them evangelize to others is a good way to influence. I’m good to look at a couple of our questions coming in now. Thank you very much. Keep them coming. We’ve got a question here. Given the pace of technological change in our organization, many of our team members are facing operational challenges that aren’t necessarily tied to a single skill. How does skills-based learning account for broader cross functional operational needs, like adapting to new systems, workflows or ways of working that don’t fit neatly into a specific skill category? So we’re talking, I think, about, you know, the need for people to be agile here.

Dani Johnson 22:21
We have an internal debate about whether agility is something that can be taught. I don’t know if it can be done or not, and that to be key to every single business out there right now. Everybody needs a more agile workforce. I think this goes back to, if I’m reading it correctly, it goes back to these gigantic skills that the entire organization needs, are these specific skills? The other thing that I would note there is the writer was very articulate in describing, you know, new systems, workflows, ways of working, those types of things often aren’t training issues. Often they’re issues. And so is it. Does the system make sense itself? Can we design it so it doesn’t need training? Can we design it so it doesn’t even need people? Where? Can we take out all of those so it becomes more of a system design problem than a training problem? So, in a nutshell, take all of it out that you can take out of it as far as learning goes, and then define which skills you need broadly in the organization, and go after those.

Stacia Garr 23:24
I think also this gets to the point that skills are as much as we love them. They’re not everything. Some of this actually is behaviors, right? And behaviors, in some ways, are, are different. And so it’s important to remember that some of this is not necessarily about just defining a skill and getting people to learn that skill, but actually being clear in the behavior, hiring for the types of behaviors that people exhibit, et cetera, and putting that into place in the context of the systems that Dani just mentioned.

Teresa Wykes 23:58
I’m glad you raised that, because I think the skills are like the what, aren’t they? But the behavior is like the how. And you can track that through onboarding. You can track that through performance management, as you go through you can, yeah, it’s a sort of a much fuller picture. Okay, I’m just going to go back to some questions here now before we move on to another poll, you mentioned detractors to skills, strategy, implementation, what are some reasons you’ve observed preventing complete by actually, I’m gonna save that until later, because that’s really a challenge, isn’t it? We’ll move on to that later. Bear with me. Actually, let’s go, let’s go to the poll. Let’s go to the poll now and then we’ll come back to that question, because I quite like that one. Okay, so another poll for everybody, please. So what is the biggest barrier holding your organization back from becoming skills based? We’ll just leave that there for you to pick your favorite option for you okay, maybe we can have a look at those results. Okay, so interesting, yeah. Dani Stacia, what do you make of that?

Dani Johnson 25:55
Yeah, I mean the 35% down on the bottom, competing priorities and limited resources. I think that holds true. A lot of people are doing skills off the side of their desk. Of their desk, rather than dedicating the resources that it actually needs. We’re currently working with an organization just a little bit whose L&D department is doing it, and is that an okay way to do it? Sure, but a lot of times it doesn’t get the time or effort that it needs in order to make it. And when somebody’s doing it off the side of their desk, they’re not aware of what else is going on in the organization, and so often this very, very focused skills effort and something instead of something more broad that can be used throughout the organization. I’m surprised the lack of leadership alignment is so low.

Stacia Garr 26:43
Yeah, actually, I was going to go to the limited data or technology. I was surprised. I’m surprised that it’s so low. And that may just be my own bias, because I’m right now in this skills data architecture study, and that there’re so many challenges that come with the data and the technology and connecting the data to be able to pull all this together. But I thought that that might have been higher, but that also might be because we have a number of folks who are earlier in their journey. And what we’ve observed is that at the beginning some of this is, you know, for those initial use cases, you can kind of stitch the technology together reasonably well. It’s when you try to scale it that you hit some of the limitations that I’m seeing in that study.

Dani Johnson 27:28
I just wonder. Lisa Evans just said, basically that we are four years into implementing a skills framework. What our largest challenge on adoption is technology connecting all our processes that provide visibility into the value skills.

Teresa Wykes 27:50
Okay, I just, I lost a bit of audio there, so I’m going to ask a question, so hopefully this might just repeat what you said. I’m interested to know where you think most organizations trip up. And, you know, do they trip up for the right reasons or the wrong reasons?

Dani Johnson 28:08
Man, these are all trips. I think somebody mentioned that it’s hard to choose this one, the one that comes out in the workshops that we’ve done is unclear strategy and business case. Clearly they’re self-selecting into a skills Strategy Workshop so that might be super biased, but the unclear strategy in the business case, we see a lot like they’re trying to do skills for no reason, or they aren’t really clear on the things that will make a strategy successful.

Stacia Garr 28:37
Okay, I would add the attention is around responsibility and accountability, so not necessarily being clear on who is driving this effort, who they need to have involved in it, getting all those players on the same page. And that’s not the same as leadership alignment. It really is kind of around the team that’s coming together to make this work. That is another area that we see folks get tripped up on pretty commonly, or they keep prevention from getting started.

Teresa Wykes 29:15
Okay, could you talk to us, Stacia, a little bit about like, if you’ve got an ideal team that is doing skills or looking after skills, like, what are the roles within that and who are the people on that team?

Stacia Garr 29:33
Yeah, so I think there’s a number of folks. I think you know, again, my bias, because where I spend a lot of my time is around data. So my first place would be, you know, who’s the data team? What are they? You know, if it’s from people analytics, a great option. If you have folks who are in a centralized data team, an analytics team, that’s good too, but you need to make sure that you have data, and you may need to make sure you have technology. So that’s part of the team. You very clearly need to have an owner with a vision of what this is, what what is the problem we’re trying to solve that can come from any number of different parts of of certainly HR, but the organization more broadly, and for some, you know, we see it from the learning team, and we want to understand what the skills are that we have and how, you know, we can get people up skill, etc. Sometimes we see it from the workforce planning team. We want to understand what is happening with organization, what types of supply of skills we need for the future. And you know, the point is, you need someone with a vision on that team. Then you also need to make sure that you have relevant stakeholders throughout the organization. So I already mentioned it is a big one. Particularly if you’re operating within Europe, you’re going to want to have your HR technology organization involved. You will want to have your talent organization involved as well. And then you want to have business leaders as well as probably some employees, because some of the adoption is going to come from employees themselves, and you need to make sure that their perspective is included. Dani, would you add anybody to that list?

Dani Johnson 31:17
Oh, that I would. That was pretty thorough. Yeah.

Teresa Wykes 31:23
So that’s brilliant. How so and how are organizations actually doing it in your experience, like, what, what is, is that team? Is that the team that you observe, or is it actually a version of that?

Dani Johnson 31:40
I mean, I think eventually, when exactly they get there, they usually start in a smaller thing, like HR will be like, we need skills, and they’ll go off. Or L&D is one where we see it a lot, or operations. Sometimes we need to understand whatever. And especially with the conversation about AI coming in, I was hoping we would get a long discussion before that came in. But as it comes in, we need to understand what AI can do and what people can do, and that’s the combination of skills and tasks. Yeah, more often it’s starting over and operations are in the business functions.

Teresa Wykes 32:11
Okay, okay, so that is a good time. Let’s pivot a bit to talking about AI within skills. We’ve got some questions in the chat that I’m gonna throw out there. AI is obviously transforming the skills landscape right now. So what would be the emerging threats or pitfalls in using AI for skills assessment, and how can organizations balance innovation with responsible data use?

Stacia Garr 32:42
That’s a great question. So I think a few things, one is that we know that AI can be really effective for helping us, particularly as Dani mentioned earlier, understand skills within an ontology. So which skills relate to which other skills can also be used for helping us infer skills that somebody might have. So if you have x skill and y skill, it’s likely you have z skill. And I think that those are some excellent ways that AI can be used. And some of the areas to make sure that you are cautious about are one around, making sure that you know, just because, for instance, you inferred the skill that somebody actually has and the degree to which they have it, if that, if degree is critical to you. So that’s one thing. The second thing is context. So you know you can say that somebody has a seal of project management, and in one part of the organization, that means something in another part, it means something else. But if you don’t bring along the context of project management in what format, that can create some real challenges for you, because the technology, the AI, just sees project management, it doesn’t seem that bigger concept context.

Dani Johnson 34:00
Yeah, and I want to add a little to this. This goes deep into sort of skills verification. How do you verify a skill? We’ve written some research on that. We have some more coming out on merit skills verification. There is Stacia mentioned. She was talking a lot about inference. If you’re using AI to infer skills, we’re also AI being used to verify skills in really different ways. So we’re seeing a lot of chat bots come up. It can sort of measure you as it’s chatting with you about what kind of skill and knowledge you have. We’re seeing live sandboxes that are using AI to determine what kinds of skills you have. So using it like that is a little less sort of squishy and a little bit more ethical than just inferring skills based on sort of latent data in the organization. If you want more information, please contact me. I’m so deep in skills verification right now I’m dreaming about it. And we can give you, like the seven things that we see, plus the 56 methods verifying skills. How you might do that you might want to pay attention to all kinds of decisions you can make with that verification data, which varies greatly.

Teresa Wykes 35:04
Yeah, yeah. No, no. I’m glad you talked about that. We did have a question that came in earlier about identifying the people who are not screaming their skills from the rooftops, you know, people who are kind of quietly, quietly, quietly, highly skilled at certain things, but not actually sharing that with the world, you know? I mean, how do you get that skill information? Should you get that skill information?

Dani Johnson 35:26
I mean, those are two questions, how and should? You can ask for it. You can ask for that skill information. But if somebody’s an accurate chemist in their free time, and they would, you know, would do your company good to bring those in, you got to ask for those skills, you’re not going to be able to get them any other way, and I don’t know that it would be ethical to get them any other way.

Teresa Wykes 35:45
Yeah, yeah, no, of course, we’ve got a nice question here with AI looking at tasks and automation. What are the best practices for skills plus task strategy so that we can determine if the role is best for a human versus an agent. So we’re looking at which pieces of the work we give to an agent? Which piece of the work do we keep humans?

Dani Johnson 36:08
Yeah, this is an ongoing discussion with us and every single other provider out there. That’s exactly what we need to figure out. I mean, we don’t have a pat answer that we can give you. I think AI is good and can be leveraged probably more than it is right now to determine the tasks that need to happen in an organization. I think the challenge is determining the tasks as it applies to the ideal versus the task as it applies to your particular context or the way things are done in your organization. So we’ve seen some big, huge hiccups where somebody comes in and they’re like, oh, we’ll just have a sort of like, fix this or, you know, replicate this process. But the process is on paper that’s in people’s heads. Isn’t actually how it works. The family needs to call Doug on Thursdays to make sure that the right information gets put into the right place in order for blah. And so it definitely needs to be done. I think AI can get us a long way there. I also think that we’re entering this space, and I would love Stacia’s thoughts on this too, because I don’t know that we’ve talked about it. I think we’re entering this space where work needs to be redefined. We’ve been sort of band-aiding it forever, and now within our organizations, we need to define what is the work being done, but also how is that being done, so that we can decide, can it be automated? Is it finite enough that we can automate it and you’ll get the same sort of result every single time? Or does the human need to be in the loop? And if so, then what are the skills that are needed?

Teresa Wykes 37:31
Yeah, and keeping it consistent in line with does this work actually develop me? Does this work engage me? Because if you’re having the whole skills thing, I think, empowers people. It gives people transparency, and it gives people choices that they maybe weren’t able to make before. So if you’re going to break down that work into who does what, it needs to be consistent with what you know, for it to make sense for you to get engagement. Stacia, sorry, you were going to say something?

Stacia Garr 38:00
Yeah, I was going to add, actually, a comment on what you just said, and then go back to what Dani was saying. You know, I think the other thing that we need to be conscious of is when and to what extent and for what reason might we still want to have a human doing some of this work which might be automatable. So one of our kind of favorite examples internally is around data cleaning, right? We run surveys, we collect a whole bunch of data like others do. And, you know, could it be really nice to just push a button and have that data suddenly be clean? Yeah, but we learn a great deal by going through the data and cleaning it, and understanding kind of where maybe people didn’t understand the question, or where there might have consistently been anomalies in the data, or something like that. And so, you know, while it looks on the face of it like a really boring, automatable task, it feeds other downstream effects that ultimately makes the work product a lot better. And so I think one of the conversations that we will need to have, whether it’s with regard to work product, ultimately, or just sheer development, particularly of junior talent coming in to organization or earlier stage talent, is what by automating are we removing, in terms of kind of our long term capability or quality of the work that that comes out. So that’s a conversation I think we need to be having, particularly with tax time. I think back to this question about, you know, the one that was submitted about best practices, I think that I would go back a little bit to what we were talking about a few moments ago, about job architecture and skills, and we’re seeing folks who kind of dive in that next level down where it’s job architecture, skills and tasks to understand, kind of the full stack, if You will, of what goes into a job today, and so looking at the tasks in the context of the rest of that, I think, is important, because it gives you a sense of, again, context. You know, that’s the thing that we risk losing with all of this, is the context in which a task is done, as well as the relationships that have to be in place for the task to get done. You know, it’s important for us to be thinking about if an AI is doing a thing now, instead of the human, is it going to get the same results as the human did? Because there may be more, either follow on things, information that’s necessary, or there may be just, fundamentally a relationship component, right? Like somebody gives somebody information because they’re a human and they trust them, versus an AI, where they’re not sure where it’s going to end up, it might end up that there’s different results. The human part of all of this, I think, is what we make sure we’re not using.

Teresa Wykes 40:56
Yeah, yeah, and staying on that theme. Then how would you position the value of a skill? I know you don’t like the terminology, but how would you position the value of focusing on the skills to the employee? What’s the best idea to get that buy in? What’s the best way to get people to understand it rather than just comply with it?

Dani Johnson 41:21
Yeah, well, there is an aspect of it that’s going to happen, whether or not the employees on board, so maybe just keeping that in mind as background. But I think there are a lot of benefits for employees. I think having a skills-based mindset opens you up to not just choosing roles, but choosing things that can help you develop skills. We talked to an organization a few years ago, and their answer to it was a mobility study that I was doing, and they said something really profound. They said, not everyone is going to be CEO, and so training them all up to be CEO, or setting that expectation is stupid. What we should be doing is saying, hey, while you’re here, let’s develop the skills that you want to develop, and let’s give you opportunities to do that. We can’t do that without skills data. So that’s one, like the idea of mobility and developing skills that you want to develop, to share with the organization, perhaps by the organization. The other one is opportunities for growth and development, like just making sure that the organization understands what skills you want, what skills you have, gives you opportunities for interesting types of work, but it also gives you opportunities even just from technology developing the types of things. Yeah, those, those, those types of things are their employees do have to give up some information in order to get them. They can be a mutually beneficial relationship if it’s sold that way, and too, if the organization actually treats it.

Teresa Wykes 42:53
I would also add that, you know, I think, I think knowing about skills, or using this whole approach, actually gives you a lot of currency outside of your current job. So, you know, there’s that kind of career, career validity, you know, career currency, which I think is quite important. We’ve had a couple of questions about leaders that I just want to like. I’m going to mix them up, actually, because I think quite a lot of people on the call might be quite important to them in their work. So one question says, in my organization, we have many leaders in senior positions who do not have the key skills for developing and leading others. How would you approach skilling? And I guess we could add other skills here. So how would you approach skilling at the most senior level? And then I’m going to bolt another question onto that with a deep-rooted culture around expertise and experience or knowledge, so not skills. How do you get leaders to shift their mindset towards skills being viewed as a catalyst for future organizational health? So what’s, what’s, what’s the role of leadership in all this? It’s key.

Dani Johnson 43:58
So one of it is a development question, how do we develop our senior leaders? And the other one is a mindset. Question, how do we make sure they have the right mindset? On the first one, the way that I would approach it is as quickly as possible to make sure that they have the skills that they need. Good leadership is hard to find, as they say, and it’s really important, and that’s why so many organizations spend so much money on their senior leadership, because it is crucial for them to have the right skills and for them to treat the people downstream the way that they need to be treated. There are many ways to do it at the senior level. You have many, many more ways to do it. We see coaching a lot. We see advising a lot. We see rotations a lot. We see stretch assignments a lot. We see all of those types of things in order to develop. I would also recommend that you don’t just start with your senior in leadership. You start at least a tear down, maybe two tiers down, to make sure that you’re developing those as you go, so you don’t have this continual let’s catch up process. So that’s for the development of the skills at the senior level. As far as mindset goes, that’s a hard one. It’s really hard, especially if leaders turn over quickly and they don’t see a future in their organization. There are all kinds of things that happen with respect to this, at least, to get it up and going. It’s time consuming, and it’s hard to start thinking in terms of skills. The thing that we have found probably the most useful is to build the systems so that you’re not depending on your leaders. So are there ways that you can build in the IDP to talk about skills? Can we structure the performance, you know, performance process to talk about skills rather than job roles or next roles? What can we do to change the language and the environment and the air to talk about skills, so you’re not relying as much on your senior leadership.

Stacia Garr 45:48
Yeah, I would add to that one, because I think the questioner specifically said we’ve got this deep-rooted culture of expertise and experience and knowledge. In what way is that truly differentiating for your business, and is that a continued competitive moat? So, you know, and we ask this of ourselves all the time as a research firm that relies on expertise, but you know, in a world where you somebody can go to ChatGPT and get a credible answer. How is that expertise, experience or knowledge a differentiator for the business versus a skill set? And they’re not mutually exclusive, to be clear, but, but for the sake of this question, but, but a skill set which can be more malleable potentially and be more flexible and agile for the future of the company. And so if I were kind of in that position, obviously I wouldn’t put it quite that directly. I would, but I would think about how we show that the value, the traditional value of expertise and potential experience and knowledge has shifted, and where should we continue to focus on that? Because there’s still going to be a place for 100% right? Nobody thinks that chat GPT gets right all the time. But where is that in balance with skills? Think it’s just really kind of looking at the environment that we’re now all swimming in and what that means for the field?

Dani Johnson 47:23
Yeah, it also, I mean, that allows you to maybe reconfigure the way that you’re doing it. So if you’re relying on roles, and we are, we’re a very small company, but we have, we have had this problem as well. If you’re relying on roles to have all the skills that you need, your risk is really high. If you can start looking at work and saying, all right, where do these skills absolutely have to hang together, and where can we create a team so the team is doing the work instead. It changes all kinds of things and allows for all kinds of things that aren’t allowed for, if you’re just relying on person as expert,

Teresa Wykes 47:54
You’re right. And I think skills is part of a bigger journey, isn’t it, that’s coming towards changing the whole world of work, and I think career progression comes under that as well. I did want to ask about, you know, the way that individuals see their career progression, because with skills data, you suddenly have a lot of information about your career, that you that you a, you didn’t have before, and B, that you can do something with, that your manager isn’t necessarily involved in we see that a lot. So how would you shift the culture and expectations of employees from traditional views of career progression being an upward trajectory or more money to being one of maybe intellectual or role growth? And the person that asked this question says, given human psychology and motivations, is this even realistic? Given we all work for money, it is interesting to think about that.

Dani Johnson 48:47
I think it depends on where you live in the world as well. Western ideology leans heavily into I am as valuable as my title and or are, that’s not true everywhere. I also think we’re moving into a place where that can’t be true anymore, and we’re seeing it in certain organizational cultures. So for example, if we talked around this idea of reputation a few years back, and we haven’t really done anything with it, but in a consulting firm, for example, the types of work that you can work on are as important as the level that you are in the organization, right? So your reputation means a lot. Being able to work on really interesting projects and build your network by working with these different types of organizations is as important as being a senior manager or director within, or at least larger consulting firms. So thinking about it that way, and trying to build that culture within the organization, I think is increasingly important. I don’t like to go generational, but millennials and Gen Z’s in particular tend to be more malleable or more open to these types of ideas than we’ve done in the past. We’re hearing a lot more about a portfolio, a career, where you’re doing all kinds of things, and where you’re developing the skills that you want, and your work isn’t worth it unless you’re doing something that is interesting. Clearly, we’re gonna have the way that we’ve always done things for a while. That’s how organizations are built. That’s what we know. That’s how we pay people, that’s people around us, the type of power we give to people, that the momentum behind the system that we have in place is strong. So if you’re trying to change the way that people view their jobs, I would struggle with addressing those systems that are reinforcing that. I think there’s hope, because these younger generations are coming up, and they’re just thinking differently about what they want out of life.

Teresa Wykes 50:42
Okay? Would you have anything to say about how well education is equipping our young people for a skills approach?

Dani Johnson 50:55
I just had this conversation this morning. I had coffee with someone, and this is the conversation that we had. The short answer is, no, it is not um, what? What sort of output from universities is not getting in well with organizations that they need now, and that’s for a couple of reasons. First of all, education is a beast, and their momentum is even slower than organizations, and they think very traditionally about it. It is what it is, they are there, and it’s going to be a while before they get there. The other thing that is interesting, though, and Stacia sort of alluded to this a little bit earlier, if AI is taking all of those entry level jobs, we that we can’t use that work anymore to develop the people to the level that they need to be developed in order to be useful to our organizations. So it is a gigantic chasm right now, and all kinds of organizations are thinking about it. Yes, students are upskilling. America is thinking about it. I’ve talked to several groups that are thinking about this problem. It has to be solved. But we’re just seeing we’re just seeing teeny, tiny pockets in academia. We’re seeing some competency based or skills-based programs. So students are starting to think about it, and they’re starting to be sort of certified in smaller pieces, rather than just a master’s degree and whatever. But it is a long road. I don’t know if the collapse of higher education is going to come first or if we’re going to figure out how to do it in higher education, but it’s kind of we have to do it.

Teresa Wykes 52:24
I completely agree.

Stacia Garr 52:28
I might actually offer something slightly different. I think it goes back to some point of university. Is the point of university only to prepare people for jobs and to go into those jobs, or is it to prepare them to be able to think and be productive members of society, etc? And I’m not positing the answer here, but I think that there is a fundamental question right now about what the purpose is of universities, and where do people get the skills, and how does that fit in so we think it’s a conversation that we don’t have the answer for, but I think just saying that universities aren’t preparing people for jobs is potentially a little bit concerning, because maybe that’s not what they’re there for.

Dani Johnson 53:20
And that is true. And universities are getting away. They’re getting away from liberal arts education such as yours, because they are not fulfilling the needs of the organizations. And so I totally agree with you station, I think everybody should have a liberal arts education like full stop, because that’s where you learn to make those connections and, you know, critically, think and all it, you know, disagree with people that disagree with you, like all of those types of things, are inherent in a liberal arts degree. That is not what I got. I got an engineering degree. But the organizations that are hiring people out of those universities are not looking for liberal arts degrees, because they are. There’s a level of training that they have to do in order for them to be useful in the organization. Maybe there’s, like a step if everyone does liberal dollars and then everybody goes to, like a training school, I don’t know.

Stacia Garr 54:14
Yeah, I don’t know. Actually, we haven’t talked about this at all, but it’s a really interesting question around you know, like, almost kind of short term versus long term, right? Like, at some point the fundamental underpinning of what you get in the liberal arts degree becomes useful as, kind of, like, the core knowledge and skills that you need to get started, you start to graduate, if you will, professionally from those but, like, it takes a long time, right? Like, there’s a much longer return on that investment than coming out and the like.

Dani Johnson 54:47
So I don’t know, we haven’t talked about super interesting things. It is super interesting. And if you look at, like, the history of education, at one point in this country, we had the choice to do a story type of learning, or worker bee type of learning. And we chose workers, so all the way up from the time they enter school at preschool, all the way through college education, they’re geared towards what organizations expect. But what if we did it differently? Would they be able to adapt and learn more quickly?

Stacia Garr 55:15
Yeah, it’s interesting. Becky wrote an interesting comment in the chat, saying, without entry level. Where do you learn critical thinking, socialization, etc.?

Teresa Wykes 55:28
So, yeah, in the UK, I know that we’ve seen there’s a sort of resurgence of topics like or subjects like philosophy, you know, that’s appeared on the high school curriculum again, because it teaches critical thinking, you know, it teaches you a variety of viewpoints. It teaches you how to, how to, how to read at speed, and how to, you know, form an opinion. But, yeah, no, I agree. It’s a fascinating subject, and maybe we’ll come back to that. I do want to see that we’re marching towards the end, but I do want to just throw in one last question, because I think it is something that’s on a few people’s minds, and I think it may be what we might see coming down the line at us. How does skills first organizations translate all the way through to total rewards and compensation strategies? So how do you, how do you align skills with pay and reward? Because, you know, it’s like career progression. It’s not linear anymore, is it? Or it might not be linear anymore.

Dani Johnson 56:24
So we have asked this question a lot. Have we vested in a couple of round tables? And in the round tables, we always get a sort of like, Nope, we’re not doing that. We’re just doing skills for development, like, hands down, that’s what we’ve heard across the board. There are a couple of organizations that are trying it. They’re sort of experimenting with it. IBM is one of them. They don’t say, hey, we’ll pay for skills. But they do say, hey, you’ve got these skills of value as our organization that’s going to be a factor in your world. Those skills are useful for us right now. I think that’s probably a more sane way to do it, straight pay for skills. Seems incredibly short sighted, and this is the context that stations have been talking about through this entire thing, but I do see a world where we stop paying for things that we don’t need anymore, and we start or to stop valuing things that we don’t need as much, and start valuing.

Teresa Wykes 57:20
Stacia, would you have anything to comment on skills and reward connection or not?

Stacia Garr 57:27
No. I would just, well, I say no, and then I keep going, um. The only thing I would add is we did a podcast episode with a gentleman named Angel. He was at the time at IBM that talks about this. And if folks want kind of a perspective on how that might be done, I’d suggest going and checking that out Theresa at risk of slightly hijacking. There is one question on here that I wanted to make sure we get to yes about the skills versus kind of engagement.

Teresa Wykes 58:06
Which one is that? Oh, the number 18, yeah, okay. Should I read it? Okay, yeah. The question is, I keep hearing skills, skills, skills. We have all the skills we need, but employees are disengaged, burned out and quiet, quitting. How does skill chasing help?

Stacia Garr 58:27
So the reason I wanted to go after, yeah, go after this one is one, if you have all the skills you need, that’s awesome. You are doing really well. But two, I think it’s important to remember that skills are not the solution for everything. Skills are not going to solve your culture problems or lack of engagement, or burnout, or any of these other things. It is a particular tool for a particular question, which is, how do we ensure a skilled workshop workforce? It is not a tool for how we ensure an engaged workforce. And I think that there might be some relationship between the two, but it’s important to make sure that back to the graphic that’s on here. How do you define the scope and purpose of what you’re trying to do and what problem you’re trying to solve, and not try to use it to solve every single problem in the organization?

Teresa Wykes 59:20
Good point. Thank you for raising that one station. So look, we’ve got a few seconds left. I think we’re going to bring it to a close. I want to say thank you to Dani and to Stacia for their golden comment here. It’s been fantastic. I also want to thank Sue and Kelly, on my side, for looking after things behind the scene. And finally, a big thank you to everyone that joined. Everyone that joined us today, and thank you for your questions before and during the webinar. I hope that’s given you food for thought. I hope it’s introduced some new ideas to you, or given you some topics of conversation to take back to your colleagues. So yeah, thank you very much everybody. Have a good rest of the day or evening.