Connor Volpe hosted a webinar on skills strategy, featuring Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson. The discussion emphasized the importance of a clear skills strategy, highlighting six key elements: scope and purpose, partnership and governance, culture, architecture, data, and technology. They noted a shift from no strategy to chaotic strategies over 12-18 months. Ericsson and EPAM Systems were cited as examples of successful skills strategies, with Ericsson focusing on AI skills annually and EPAM integrating skills data across their talent system. The conversation also touched on the challenges of skills validation and the need for a dynamic taxonomy.

Introduction

• Connor Volpe introduces himself as the host and explains the webinar’s format, emphasizing that it will be interactive with questions from the audience.
• Connor thanks the participants and mentions the importance of the topic: skills strategy.
• Connor explains that the webinar will not follow a pre-planned slideshow but will respond to questions submitted in advance and those coming in during the session.
• Connor encourages participants to use the chat for technical difficulties and to ask questions throughout the session.

Introduction of experts

• Connor introduces Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson, the experts for the session.
• Dani Johnson introduces himself as the co-founder and principal analyst at Red Thread Research, highlighting their experience in skills and the format of the webinar.
• Stacia Garr thanks the participants for joining and mentions the busy nature of the current world, expressing hope that the webinar will provide some clarity.
• Connor initiates an interactive poll to gauge the audience’s skills journey, noting the advanced nature of the participants compared to typical clients.

Discussion on skills strategy and common challenges

• Stacia Garr shares insights from her workshops, noting the shift from no strategy to chaotic strategies over the past 12-18 months.
• Dani Johnson adds that many organizations start in one part of the organization and struggle to broaden the strategy.
• Connor shares the poll results, noting that most participants are in the structured approach or chaotic stages.
• Dani Johnson outlines the six elements of a strong skills strategy: scope and purpose, partnership and governance, culture, architecture, data, and technology.

Relevance of skills in the age of AI

• Connor asks if skills are still relevant given the rapid advancement of technology and AI.
• Stacia Garr argues that skills are more relevant than ever, emphasizing the importance of tasks as the bridge between people and AI.
• Dani Johnson agrees, stating that skills help organizations understand the building blocks of work and make better decisions.
• The discussion highlights the importance of skills data and the need for a skills-based approach to adapt to the evolving workforce.

Differences between skills and competencies

• Connor asks about the differences between skills and competencies.
• Dani Johnson explains that competencies are a mindset and structure, while skills are data that indicate what people can do.
• Stacia Garr adds that their research has shown that organizations with a clear skills strategy have better outcomes, including higher NPS scores and innovation ratings.
• The conversation emphasizes the importance of alignment, better decision-making, and transparency in a skills-based strategy.

Starting a skills-based transformation

• Connor asks how companies can justify investing in a skills-based transformation.
• Stacia Garr explains that a clear skills strategy helps foster alignment, enable better decision-making, and create greater transparency.
• Dani Johnson advises starting small, such as tagging content with skills or gathering data on performance, to build momentum.
• The discussion highlights the importance of starting somewhere and not waiting for everything to be perfect.

Adoption and implementation of skills-based practices

• Connor asks for tips on helping companies adopt skills-based practices.
• Dani Johnson suggests changing language to focus on skills and measuring performance against skills.
• Stacia Garr emphasizes the importance of understanding the “what’s in it for me” for different populations within the organization.
• The conversation highlights the need for clear communication and alignment across the organization.

Challenges and barriers in skills strategy

• Connor asks about common challenges in implementing a skills strategy.
• Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr agree that defining scope and purpose is a significant challenge for most organizations.
• The discussion also touches on the importance of data, technology, and buy-in from leaders.
• Connor shares the results of a poll on the biggest challenges, noting a concentration in data and buy-in.

Success stories and best practices

• Connor asks for examples of companies that have successfully implemented skills strategies.
• Dani Johnson shares the example of Ericsson, which focuses on a different skill each year and has deputized skills leaders within the organization.
• Stacia Garr shares the example of EPAM Systems, which has been using skills for 30 years and has integrated skills data into their talent system.
• The discussion highlights the importance of a clear scope and purpose, integration of data, and a supportive culture.

Final thoughts

• Connor asks for final thoughts and action items for the audience.
• Dani Johnson observes that skills will soon be integrated into the fabric of organizations, similar to the internet strategy.
• Stacia Garr emphasizes the importance of a clear scope and purpose and encourages participants to develop a tagline to communicate their strategy.
• The webinar concludes with Connor thanking the participants and experts for their time and insights.

 

Connor Volpe 00:00

Welcome to today’s webinar. My name is Connor Volpe. I’m going to be your host and emcee. Today we have an awesome topic—  we’re getting into all things skills: where they’re going and how to approach a skills strategy in your organization today.

A special thank you to all of you for joining, not just for taking the time to do this, but also because — Stacia, I’m going to steal your branding as a marketer (I’m kind of jealous of it) — this is a “non-webinar.” In other words, the vast majority of the time we’re going to spend today is not going to be on pre-planned slides or a talk track. It’s going to be responding to questions that you all submitted in advance. So it’s going to be fun.

Now I’d also love to introduce today’s experts, the stars of today’s show: Stacia and Dani. Would you mind taking a moment to introduce yourselves for anybody who doesn’t already know you?

Dani Johnson 01:32

I’m Dani Johnson. I’m co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread Research. We’ve been in business for about seven years, and we’ve spent quite a bit of time studying skills and all the things that go along with that. This is the second “non-webinar,” as Stacia calls it, that we’ve done in this format. We absolutely love it — just answering questions and continuing the conversation about skills. We think it’s really important and really fun.

Stacia Garr 01:59

I just want to say thank you to everybody for coming today. We know that things are exceptionally busy right now and the world’s kind of crazy, and we appreciate you taking an hour of your time to be with us here. Hopefully we can give you just a tiny bit more clarity after our conversation today.

Connor Volpe 02:22

Awesome. I think where we want to start today is with a little bit of interaction from everybody on the line. We actually have a poll that I’m going to flash up now. Take a moment to think about it. I think this is a great way to get a sense for where everybody stands on their own skills journey and how it’s coming together for everybody on the line.

Dani or Stacia, do you want to say a few words? I’m sure there’s a question that you delve into all the time with the clients and people that you work with. Where do you typically see people fall on the spectrum? I’d love to hear more about what you’ve seen with a question like this.

Stacia Garr 02:59

Yeah, sure. I’ll share because I’ve been doing, I think, three skills workshops at the same time right now, and I’ve been asking this question a lot. What’s interesting is when Dani and I started this work, we would see a lot of organizations with no strategy at all, or they were talking about it but not acting. Over the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen a big spike into “you started, but it’s chaotic.” That’s good because it shows we’re seeing a lot more folks who are farther along the journey, but it also means that they’re hitting some roadblocks and need some guidance and support from others who have gone before them. The good news is there are many who have gone before them, and hopefully we’ll be able to channel that today.

Dani Johnson 03:49

Yeah, I think the other thing we’re seeing is many organizations that started in one part of the organization—like talent acquisition or learning—and now they’re trying to broaden it. So it’s kind of restarting or rejumping their skills strategy, because what works in a small part of the organization isn’t always scalable.

Connor Volpe 04:08

Makes total sense. Okay, it looks like most people have submitted their answers. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the poll results. We’ve got a bit more of an advanced group — people have started or they’re working towards it. So it looks like we have folks who are going to be a little bit more familiar with the basics, which is great. But this sounds like it’s maybe a little atypical from what the two of you see with the clients you work with.

Stacia Garr 04:36

I don’t think so. I think there’s more in the “structured approach,” but about the same in “you’ve started, but it’s chaotic.”

Dani Johnson 04:51

I was going to say the exact same thing.

Connor Volpe 04:51

Awesome. As we mentioned, everybody, we want to get to your questions, but first I want to give us a chance to talk through the elements of a skills strategy and framework. I think it’s important for everybody to understand how the two of you and RedThread approach this. So by all means, please take it away to help everybody understand the perspective that you’re coming from.

Dani Johnson 05:09

All right, I’ll do that. We’ve been talking about skills for about seven years. In the beginning, many organizations would just say, “You need to figure out skills,” and they often mirrored competency frameworks and those types of things. As we talked to organizations and the vendors serving them, we found that there are basically six big elements of a strong skills strategy.

The middle one is the one most organizations struggle with, believe it or not, and it’s also one of the most important because it feeds into all of those other areas. That’s scope and purpose — understanding why you’re doing it and how big that effort is. That’s key to making sure that you get your strategy right.

Partnership and governance is the second one — figuring out who your partners are in the organization and who’s in charge of making decisions.

Culture is one that often gets left out. We see a lot of people putting the back end into place without changing the minds of the people on the front end. In instances like that, sometimes those skills strategies fall flat.

Architecture is a really interesting piece — it’s the back end and making sure all of your skills data flows together and you’ve got the right technology so that data works together.

Data is the next one, and then wrapping up with technology.

So architecture, data, and tech are the back-end things. Purpose, ownership and governance, and culture are the front-end things.

Connor Volpe 06:38

Awesome. Stacia, anything to add, or should we get into our first question?

Stacia Garr 06:44

Let’s get into our questions. That’s what we’re here for.

Connor Volpe 06:47

Cool. So we want to start with one that’s maybe a little provocative. Stacia, you were actually getting into this when you thanked everybody for being here, which I think is really important because it does feel like things are moving faster than they ever have before—and that’s because they are. While things are advancing, while technology, people, process, and culture are moving so quickly, maybe it’s important to start with a question: Are skills still relevant, given how fast and constant everything is changing?

Stacia Garr 07:16

Yeah, and I would say that they are more relevant than ever and only going to continue to be so. I think we’re in this moment right now where we’re starting to see a shift in focus to tasks in particular. The reason for that is twofold.

One is because of generative AI. A lot of people are saying, “What can the AI do that people can’t?” We’re seeing a focus on tasks really as the Rosetta Stone between people and AI—they’re the one thing that they both do.

The other reason I think we’re seeing a questioning of this is that we as an industry like to run after the next bright, shining object. When you see tasks, it’s like, “Oh wait, I don’t have that. I have to do that now too.” So I think some people are like, “Oh, well, skills are passé.”

I would argue not, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, when we’re looking at a job—let’s say we decide that we need to automate 30% of a job or we can do that—we’re going to then need to put in another 30% of tasks for somebody to do that the AI can’t do. But they don’t necessarily know what those tasks are or how to do them. We need to know the skills necessary for those tasks so we have to have that to train people. That’s one thing.

The second thing is that I think we’re going to continue to have fewer good external signals of what makes somebody good. I was just reading an article this morning—a scientific article—showing that the power of a really well-written cover letter before ChatGPT was very high as a signal. It’s now not a signal at all. So we’re going to turn to things that we can point to and measure to understand if people should be able to do jobs, and that’s really going to matter more, not less.

Dani Johnson 09:23

I completely agree. This is one of the things that Stacia and I do agree on. Skills is becoming—for a minute there was a dip where people were like, “Is it even worth it to put this into place?” And yes, 100% absolutely it is. It’s because of all the things that Stacia said, and because skills as a concept is just breaking down the abilities of the individual into more granular pieces so that you can make better decisions about what’s going on.

There’s a big conversation out there right now about the building block of work. Is it a job anymore? Is it a task, or is it a smaller piece? Until we understand the tasks, as Stacia said, and the skills that we have in the organization, it’s hard to put all of those things together to build the organization the way that it needs to be built.

Connor Volpe 10:12

Shameless plug for your framework, or the six elements of the strategy. I feel like we covered this when you mentioned what the purpose of why you’re doing this in the first place is. Dani, that’s exactly what you’re getting at. This is a way to hopefully better understand people and what they can do and how that maps to the work that will need to be done in the future as that changes.

So if that’s maybe why you’re investing all this time and effort into a skills framework and a skills strategy, that is still very relevant today—maybe even perhaps more relevant than before, given how fast things are changing.

But speaking of how fast things are changing, let’s call a spade a spade. One of those things is AI—generative AI, agentic AI. Those are forcing, I think, everybody to perhaps rethink what work is like, what talent does, what humans do. So in that context, are skills still the best way to think about the workforce given how fast some of these external factors, like these technologies, are evolving?

Dani Johnson 11:11

I don’t know how else you would think about it. It seems like we went from professions to careers to roles, and now we’re at skills. We’ve gone down that progression.

When I’m thinking about a workforce moving forward and the way that work will need to be done in the future, I was on the phone with a CHRO this morning, and he was saying, “Yeah, in our organization, we’re starting to think about how we organize the people around the work that needs to be done, instead of organizing the work around the people structure that exists in an organization.”

So when we get down to a skill level and we understand the skills that people have, we can configure them in different ways than we ever have before to get very specific pieces of work done, whereas in the past we’ve just been sending them through the assembly line that has been in place for the last 150 years. So I think it’s more important than ever.

Stacia brought up this point earlier—this idea of understanding the tasks that you have to do and the skills that you have and understanding the data that is needed in order to get that structured.

Stacia Garr 12:16

Yeah, the only thing I would add is that skills—there’s a lot of data we have on people in an organization, and I would hate for people to think that we are advocating for only using skills data. There’s such a plethora of it. So yes, we should be using skills, but there are organizations that have competencies and behaviors and other data about what people are doing. All these things factor into what’s happening with a person in their role and what they’re doing.

So I think skills—reinforcing Dani’s point—are as relevant as ever, but there may be more as we go along that we can use to understand people and the jobs that they do.

Connor Volpe 13:13

Speaking of competencies, we did get a question in the chat before you were even mentioning it about the difference between skills and competencies. Since you brought it up, let’s address it now. How should people think about the differences between those two? I think maybe oftentimes they’re used a little bit interchangeably, and that’s probably not entirely fair.

Dani Johnson 13:32

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I play a lot in the L&D space. I think the difference is that competencies are a mindset and a structure, and skills are data. The thing that we should be paying attention to with respect to skills is data.

Have we seen organizations use skills like competencies? Absolutely we have. They’re just as outdated—they’re outdated within three months, just like competency models are. So holding on tightly to the idea of skills, or how you picture skills to be, is really different than listening—as Stacia was saying—to the signals that you have in the organization about what people can do and how they do it.

So that’s how I see the difference: one is a structured idea of how you want people to behave and what they can do, and the other one is the data that proves or indicates that they can do that.

Stacia Garr 14:30

I’ll just add that this has been such a perennial question that literally the first article Dani and I wrote on this was called “Skills versus Competencies: What’s the Deal?” And I’ll tell you that “What’s the Deal” was not the first title of that report.

Dani Johnson 14:48

I think it was also telling. At the beginning of our work, we actually asked this question when we interviewed people: “What’s the difference between skills and competencies?” A bunch of them said, “I don’t care. What I want to know is what people can do.” That gets back to that idea—do I really need a framework to view all the things, or do I just need data that can help me make better decisions?

Connor Volpe 15:15

So speaking of a framework to make better decisions, we’ve talked a lot about being “skills-based,” right? I think that’s a phrase that we use quite a lot. What do you see when you work with your customers, when you work with folks in the industry? What is the case to be made if someone said, “I want to do a big skills-based transformation at my company”? How do you see people justifying to leaders that, “Hey, we need to invest in this in order to get us where we need to go”? What do you two see from companies who’ve done that well?

Stacia Garr 15:52

So I’ll start by saying, unlike most HR initiatives, this tends not to be something that HR needs to go to leaders to say, “Hey, do you think this is a good idea?” Yeah, I need a skilled workforce — go figure it out. So this argument that we have to justify is less the case for this particular topic than some other topics.

That being said, we actually did some research on this last year. What we found was that organizations that had a clear skills strategy actually had better outcomes. Specifically, they were 3.4 times more likely to give a positive NPS score, two times more likely to report the company as innovative, and 1.7 times more likely to say that the company met its previous year’s business goals.

It’s kind of interesting because you can then say, “Well, why is that the case?” Not that many organizations have a good skills strategy, or certainly when we collected the data, they didn’t. The reason for that was actually three things we learned through our follow-up conversations.

One is that just putting together a skills strategy can help foster alignment. To your question about senior leaders—if you’re putting together a skills strategy, and if you use our framework, particularly around scope and purpose, you’ve got to be clear in what you’re trying to do, and that requires alignment, and that gets everybody on the same page.

Second, it enables better decision-making because you have that alignment. You’re having the conversations, you’re asking more questions, and you’re getting to a better answer.

Third, because of the sheer scale of the skills effort, it creates greater transparency around where we’re going and what we’re trying to do, and people ask fewer questions and you get people moving in the right direction. That’s all before you see the benefits of potentially being able to get people to the right roles and understand your skills gap, etc.

So I think the better question is, why wouldn’t you focus on skills?

Connor Volpe 18:10

I really like what you said there about it essentially forcing a conversation that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise happened and starting to get some of that alignment. Dani, is there anything else you want to add to that one?

Dani Johnson 18:21

I think a lot of times when people think of “we’re going to become a skills-based organization,” it’s a gigantic, scary thing, right? We think of the ontology or the taxonomy first, and we think of reorganizing every single role in the organization so that there are skills associated with it. That’s what we think of in our HR minds.

The organizations that we’ve seen that do this really well — they do the scope and purpose, and they understand partnerships and culture and architecture and data and tech. But they also rally around use cases. Why are we doing this thing, and what can we do with this right out of the gate?

While different people might be doing different things in different parts of the organization with respect to skills and the back-end stuff—and the back ends definitely need to be aligned—where we see the greatest success is when they go after something like “we’re hiring the wrong kind of person” or “that means we don’t understand the skills that need to go into that role” or “we are losing people because we’re not able to move them around the organization. How do we solve that problem?”

So going directly after a problem while working on the back end is what I think a skills-based organization is. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with that theoretical structure we talked about. It’s all about how we start talking and thinking with respect to skills. When you think about culture, it’s no longer about “How do we promote somebody?” It’s now like, “What kinds of skills do you want to develop in your career?” It’s a whole mindset shift before it’s anything else.

Connor Volpe 19:47

I think to follow up there, the idea of a skills-based transformation can feel all-encompassing, can feel intimidating, can feel like you’re trying to boil the ocean. So I think what you were getting at, Dani, was having specific steps or ways to get where you want to go. But to dial that back maybe even a little bit, is that a place you’d recommend seeing people get started if they’re feeling like, “Hey, this is too much. I don’t know if I can get the buy-in. I don’t know if I can do all of this. It feels like boiling the ocean”? Is there a common place or way you recommend people think about getting started? How do you help coach people through going from zero to one?

Dani Johnson 20:29

Yeah, in all of the conversations we’ve had with every single organization that is doing this, nobody has said, “Hey, yeah, we’ve got it figured out. Follow our plan.” Every single person has said, “We’re just dipping our feet. We’re just getting started. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re just figuring this out as we go.”

The advice that we’ve given everybody everywhere is you just have to start. You have to start somewhere. That doesn’t mean going out and buying the technology right off the bat or making sure that all of the roles have skills associated with them. Start where you are.

In L&D, for example, is my content tagged with the skills that people learn? Are the job descriptions that we have out there tagged with skills? Are we starting to gather data on performance of particular skills that we know we need in the organization moving forward? These little tiny things where we’re starting to gather data and build momentum—that’s where we see a lot of success happening. Because once you have some of that data, you can do a little thing with it, and you have a use case that you can take to somebody and say, “All right, this is a bigger deal. We need to collaborate on this stuff. We need a technology that will help us harmonize the data,” or whatever it is.

But until you start, it is literally—one of the biggest things that we see is people are just like, “Well, it’s got to be perfect before we launch.” We’ll tell you now that it will never be perfect. No matter how much planning goes into it, it’s always going to be a mess. It’s just the nature of what it is. It’s messy. It’s always going to be messy. So getting comfortable with that mess and just starting where you are with little things that start making you think or act in the way of skills is what we tell people.

Stacia Garr 21:59

And then the other thing, which I know we’ve mentioned, but I just want to hit home again, is scope and purpose. What are we trying to do with this whole thing? Because without that, you might spend time putting tags on jobs that don’t really matter as much as the things that align to your business strategy. So scope and purpose—making sure that you’re having the conversations with folks— is so important. But like Dani said, just start.

Dani Johnson 22:34

We talked to one CLO — just an example of this, Connor — who was systematically going through their roles and tasks that their organization needed to do and weeding out anything that they thought was going to be done by AI in the next year. So instead of categorizing everything and planning skills for everything, they’re saying, “No, we don’t even need to address those in the skills planning that we’re doing for the organization.”

Connor Volpe 23:03

That actually ties into a question that we did get in the chat. So another good jumping-off point. Something that folks are thinking about is: as AI starts to become more and more involved in our work, as people start to get more and more augmented by AI tools, how do we think about humans in the loop?

Maybe more specifically, are there skills that people might need to unlearn, or skills that even become more important as we think about—if the nature of work is constantly evolving, if it’s more human-in-the-loop than humans that do everything, if we’re moving in that direction — have you two started to see or have conversations about—it sounds like maybe with the company you just mentioned, Dani—what kind of skills now become more or even less important in a world that works that way?

Dani Johnson 23:53

Yeah, it’s a really interesting conversation, right? Stacia and I have talked about this quite a bit because what we’re seeing is AI is sometimes taking first-level jobs—mail room type of jobs, people that come into the organization.

In our organization, we use the example of cleaning data. Do we need to clean data anymore? Probably not. We can get an AI bot to clean our data. But there’s tremendous value in knowing how to clean the data and cleaning the data to understand the database and understand what an anomaly looks like and all that kind of stuff.

As that goes away for some of these new jobs, it changes the nature of everything — the way we learn, the way we work, all of those types of things. A lot of organizations are struggling with this: How do we get AI to ride alongside those people so they’re still developing those skills?

What’s happening is people are coming into the organization, they no longer need to do that work that we used to use for training, and we’re now having to train them up so that they can meet the next level. That’s causing all kinds of weird things in organizations. Do we not hire those people? Do we no longer hire people right out of school? How do we handle that? So it’s something that organizations are struggling with.

I think the other big thing is we talk about “big AI” and “little AI.” Little AI is that little coach on the shoulder. I don’t really like “human in the loop.” I don’t think a human should be in the loop. I think that there are things that are innately human and that a human should always be doing. And I think there are things that can be repeatable, and the AI should be taking on. So it’s more dividing the jobs — giving the robots what the robots are good at and making sure that the humans are doing what the humans do. The challenge that most organizations are facing right now is: what is bridging between those two things?

Stacia Garr 25:41

Yeah, I would add a little bit here in terms of — we don’t generally go into what skills are good for the next 10 years or whatever, because it’s a little bit of anybody’s guesswork. But I will say my guesswork is critical thinking and logic.

We have been in an organizational hierarchy by and large where one level does what the level above them told them to do. Where does the AI fit in that? If I just do what my boss said to do, I don’t have to question the thing, the outcome, the why this should be done, or why that shouldn’t be done. But we’re going to have to question the bot. Did the bot run the analysis right? Did it do this? Did it do that?

We use AI for lots of things, but I’ll tell you that even with tons of publicly available information out there, even with the things that we have fed into our own models, it gets it wrong. I was writing something yesterday, and it referenced somebody’s Gen AI assistant — it literally referenced their competitor’s Gen AI assistant in reference to this company. I was like, “Good thing I know better than that because that would be a reputation killer.”

But the point being, you have to have the bigger logic. You have to have the critical thinking. You have to have a knowledge base in the areas to be able to question. That is something we’re going to see have increased importance.

But that’s when we taught people to read, when people started to read the Bible, it opened a whole can of worms. When we start questioning and asking questions of not just the bot but those around us, there are going to be bigger societal implications of that need for more critical thinking and questioning than what most folks are talking about.

Connor Volpe 27:53

I totally agree. By the way, this could be an entirely separate webinar. I think we could probably go on forever on this topic. But just a quick little example: How long ago was it when the role — not just the skill, but the role — of a prompt engineer was all the rage? I think we’re getting to a point now where that’s maybe more of a skill that probably all of us need to have to some degree, and it’s maybe less of a really popular role. It’s not to say there aren’t going to be prompt engineers out there — that is still something that we will need — but that’s probably more of just a democratized skill as we’ve now figured out how and where people and these AI models or these agents or these bots work together.

Like I said, this could be a whole separate webinar, but that’s not what we’re here for. My next question for the two of you has to do with adoption. Now, this is something that even Eightfold as a solution provider — we work with our customers every day on getting them to adopt more of our product. But specifically for the two of you, do you have tips or strategies for helping companies buy into skills-based practices, a skills-based strategy? Is there anything you’ve seen that is really useful, particularly effective, to helping them adopt more and more of these skills-based methodologies?

Dani Johnson 29:15

I have two. I’m sure Stacia has several as well.

My first one is you’ve got to change your language. You can’t talk about the same work and just layer skills on top of it. Performance reviews have to become about skills. Learning journeys have to become about skills. Talent acquisition has to become about skills. We have to change our language around how we’re addressing development and performance in the organization.

Measurement kind of goes along with that as well. We’re no longer measuring “we generally like you and we think you’re a good guy.” We’re now measuring against actual skills.

The second thing is we’ve also seen people try to layer it in over something that already exists. A lot of times, skills at its core is just a different way of thinking. We can’t have — we’ve seen it — we can’t have “skills are super important in our organization, but we’re still going to measure butts in seats.” We’re still going to measure how much time people spent per year on traditional development. It’s a completely different way of thinking, and the leaders, particularly the people practices, need to change the way that they’re thinking and communicating about it so that it infiltrates the entire organization.

Stacia Garr 30:38

I would add to that: we spend a lot of time talking about being very clear on the “what’s in it for me,” or the “with them” for the different populations that skills touches.

When we’ve done this in our workshops, people have been really good at understanding what HR is going to get as a benefit or what the talent acquisition team is going to get. But when we say to them, “Well, what’s the CIO going to get from this? What is the CIT organization going to get, or what is marketing going to get?” all of a sudden people are like, “Oh, not really sure.”

Then we say, “Okay, well, what’s your average employee going to get?” “Well, they’re going to get development.” “Okay, have — to Dani’s point — are you assessing them for that? Do they know what the connection is?” “Oh, well, maybe not really.”

So it’s really about being crystal clear and taking yourself out of your HR seat and saying, “What if I’m just an average employee? Why in the world would I do this? What is the benefit that I get?” Or, “If I am a business leader, why in the world would I want to look at this data?” Make sure that you’re crystal clear on why this is good for the whole organization and not just broadly good, but with a business case tied to numbers that people care about.

Connor Volpe 32:02

Yeah. Again, it sounds like a good strategy is just keep asking yourself questions. Once you answer one question, that probably leads to three or four more. To your point, asking the right questions about how the rest of the business is going to use this, or maybe more specifically, what they’re going to get out of it.

I think there’s a case to be made that even just having skills available provides great visibility to employees about how they might advance their career or what it might take. But to your point, that leads to follow-on questions — are they being assessed by skill? How are we tracking those skills? All of those things then lead to more and more questions.

Stacia Garr 32:40

I think it’s interesting to think about how those data are going to be used. I’ll use myself as an example. When Dani and I were at Deloitte, they had an internal system with a profile, and you were supposed to share your skills and your knowledge and all the rest of that. I came in through an acquisition, and when that happened and they’re like, “Oh, you should fill this skills profile thing out,” I was like, “Oh no, I’m not doing that. Not in 100 years am I doing that.”

The reason for that — I hope none of my former Deloitte colleagues are listening — but the reason for that was that I was going to get pulled on projects that I didn’t have the bandwidth for as a new acquisition. I was going to get asked to do things when I was already so overwhelmed and overloaded in the organization that I actively didn’t want people to reach out to me. That is just one reason why somebody might not want that.

But there might be other people who are like, “I don’t know about all this ‘rah, rah, got to go up and keep on doing more.’ Maybe I’m totally happy in my role, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” If you’re doing your job well and you’re continuing to develop or do whatever you have to do, that’s okay.

So I think it’s so important to think about the motivations. Don’t just assume, particularly with folks just now entering the workforce who have a different foundational experience of what work is post-2020. Don’t just assume they want the same things that you wanted, because that may not be the case, and that can significantly impact adoption.

Connor Volpe 34:16

I think both of you touched on this a little bit, but I’ll ask a more pointed question: Do you think we’re moving in the direction of seeing skills-based career growth? Instead of getting promoted based on a role, do you think that there is a path now that some organizations are tinkering with or adopting or thinking about where, in order for you to grow, it’s maybe more of a language of skills than roles? Have you seen something like that start to happen in the market?

Dani Johnson 34:43

Yeah. About five years ago, Stacia and I were talking about it with respect to reputation. So reputation and work as the reward. Instead of a promotion, you got to do the interesting things because you have certain skills or have proven yourself in the organization. That’s what we were talking about five years ago with skills. I think that’s absolutely true, especially as we’re seeing the unit of work changing and organizations changing to put the people around the work instead of the work around the people.

Stacia Garr 35:23

I think where people are falling down on it is operationalizing it—that is the word I was trying to get out there. What we’re seeing is right now, the way that we budget is in jobs. The way that career hierarchies are built is in jobs, etc. So if people are going to move in that direction — like Dani said, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen a lot of energy around it — but it takes a thoughtful restructure of how work actually is organized and done, and importantly, the technology that enables you to do it.

The number of times I’ve talked to folks who are like, “This is what we want, but X HCM won’t let me do it. And because that HCM connects to my ERP, I can’t pay these people. I can’t do all the other things I need to do.” So it is a system change when you’re talking about it at that level.

Broadly, we’re not there yet, but we sure see a ton of energy around it, particularly right now, as people are thinking about — we’re seeing a lot of focus on job architectures and what those look like. They’re breaking down the jobs themselves into these skills and tasks and such. So they’re laying the foundation to be able to do that in the future, even though it may not be widely adopted yet today.

Dani Johnson 36:57

Yeah. If you’re looking for some industries that have been down this pathway: consulting firms is one, media and creative firms is another, law firms is another, tech firms are another. They’re already starting to say, “Okay, this project has come in. We’re doing this piece of work, and we’re going to bring in the best people who have these skills for it.”

I was talking to a CHRO this morning. He’s like, “It’s a really interesting concept. But you know what? If that extends more broadly — somebody’s coming into the organization and we’re pulling somebody from HR and somebody from IT and somebody from wherever — it makes me wonder what will happen to specializations.” Do we need an instructional designer? Do we need someone that can think strategically about work? Do we need an IT person that can handle the back end? Or do we need somebody — it’s an interesting way of thinking about it, but we still see large organizations trying to do this a little bit better than the more traditional and very static approach.

Connor Volpe 37:58

Yeah. We’re starting to see some of our customers go in that way of skills-based work, where: How can I find people to do the work based on their skills, not necessarily who they know or what their role is, but do you have the skills required for the work that needs to be done? So it’s kind of exciting to see because it leads to a more flexible model. But then also, hopefully, people get to work on things not only they’re good at, but maybe they actually want to work on. So you get a little bit of both, which is kind of the goal.

Dani Johnson 38:25

It also opens up talent pools. Organizations have dipped into contract work and gig work and consultants and things like that, but it really opens that up. I need an expert in this thing — bring that person onto the team.

Connor Volpe 38:40

So there’s a word — or rather a phrase — that we haven’t used yet, which is “skills taxonomy.” Speaking of something that maybe sometimes can feel a little overwhelming, how do you two see companies doing a good job of this? How are they developing their skills taxonomy? What are they doing to maintain it — not just create it and let it lie fallow, but then also have it be relevant once you put all that work into potentially building it? What have you seen? How have companies that have done this well done it?

Dani Johnson 39:11

Stacia is actually in the middle of a skills architecture paper. Let her take that one.

Stacia Garr 39:19

Yeah, absolutely. So there are a few things. You mentioned the taxonomy, and just to be clear for folks who are on the line, a taxonomy is basically how you organize things, and every single thing has its place within a relevant category. Think like genus, species, etc. That is the highly traditional thought about competencies, skills, etc.

But what the technology is enabling us to do now is to do more of an ontology, which is where you can see groups of skills that fit together. But a skill that’s in that group could also be in another group.

Now, why I mention this in the context of your question about taxonomies is that a lot of organizations’ ontologies are enabling them — the groups of skills, as opposed to the columns, if you will — to have a better sense of how skills are changing. Then, because they’ve got technology that connects the taxonomy to the ontology, they’re able to pull it through and connect it and keep those taxonomies much more up to date.

This is one of the things that when people say, “Well, how are skills not just like competency models for the last 20 years?” Well, actually, we have technology that can kind of see where skills are, where skills are evolving toward or from, and then translate that over into the taxonomy that the organization is using. So it can just be far more dynamic than it ever was before.

So I think your question though, Connor, was how are people doing this well?

Connor Volpe 40:40

Yeah, exactly.

Stacia Garr 40:41

So I think, one: use the tech. Dani and I on our podcast, Workplace Stories, have interviewed some people who have not used the tech, and you can almost see them praying like, “Please don’t do what I did. Don’t do it,” because it’s so difficult. But it’s not just that it’s difficult — it gets out of date so quickly if you’re doing that.

So the things I would recommend are, one: make sure that whether you use an ontology to keep the taxonomy up to date or use some other technology to do that, make sure it’s up to date. First and foremost.

Second, don’t build it on your own. Eighty percent of the skills are the same the world over. Twenty percent, I’m sure, fit your special organization and your own needs, and that’s fine. But the 80% — don’t build it. Work with somebody who can help you get there. There’s all sorts of taxonomies out there that you can customize to your organization. Some may fit a little bit better than others, but make sure that you get the one that’s right for you, and involve your leaders in doing that.

I was just actually on a workshop I just came from — somebody was talking about how they were using one of the big HCM vendors’ skills taxonomy, and they said, “Look, it just didn’t work for us. It’s not that it’s bad. It just wasn’t working. So we ended up going with somebody else, and then we kind of backed that into our system of record.”

So I think the other part of this is these organizations are not afraid to be like, “That didn’t work. That was a neat experiment. Didn’t work. We’re going to do something else.”

Dani Johnson 42:43

Also, the conversation between ontology and taxonomy is an ongoing conversation. Which one’s better? It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Some of those skills and those rules that don’t change over time, or that need certifications or things like that — sometimes the taxonomy does work better because you’re outlining everything and it’s contained, and you know exactly what it is.

In most organizations that are trying to get a very broad view of what their organizations are doing, taxonomies tend to be a little bit inflexible, and ontologies seem to be a little bit more flexible. So it really does depend on how big your scope is and what exactly it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

But pay attention to the way that your vendors talk about this as well, because a lot of times they’ll try to force on you a taxonomy that has every skill in the known universe that still doesn’t fit your needs. You need something more flexible.

Connor Volpe 43:35

We got quite a few questions in advance on this topic, and actually including a couple in the chat, about capturing skills, validating skills, assessing skills. I know there’s a lot of meat on that bone, but one of the specific examples was: If I’m assessing someone’s skill, maybe I have a different rating for them than you might, Stacia, or you might, Dani. It kind of leads to all kinds of questions of, “Well, if I think they’re five out of five, but you think they’re three out of five, how do we rectify all this?”

So I think it kind of comes back to the idea of capturing skills data and then validating that data. So I don’t just say I have X or Y skill — that I can speak Portuguese — but that somehow, somewhere, you have the confidence that I can or I can’t. And I cannot, but I can say it, and then maybe that gets pulled in or maybe it doesn’t.

So can you talk a bit about the actual skills data, and how you might capture it and validate it, or how people should think about doing that?

Dani Johnson 44:35

Yeah. So when we talk about skills data, we’re basically talking about signals—data signals that tell me whether or not somebody has a skill. In the last three or four years, there’s been a big conversation about this idea of validation. Is a self-assessment—somebody telling me that they have a skill—as valid as a manager telling me that that person has a skill? Could be. There are many things that go into making that judgment call.

But what we have cataloged — we wrote a paper called “Skills Verification,” and it outlines seven types of skills verification. There’s self-verification, there’s self-assessment, there’s formal assessment, there’s a manager looking over your shoulder, there’s external benchmarking like CPA exams and things like that, there’s work data that can send signals to your skills tech to tell me how many times you’re failing on a machine, and then there’s also HR data or people data.

So we see each of those as a signal. And then overall, we’ve cataloged about 37 different signals that you can use to verify skills.

So the question isn’t — and it was really interesting, we just ended up working with an organization that was trying to figure out skills verification, and they’re like, “We want the most valid data in every single circumstance.” We’re like, “No, that’s a gigantic job. It’s super expensive. There’s no way you can do it. We’re not doing that.”

So instead, it comes down to: Which skills do we actually need to verify? Which ones do we know are going to pertain to the outcomes that we want in the organization? And then what kind of signals do we need in order to make the decision that we’re trying to make?

Self-assessment, for example, may not be the most valid, but it can give me a sense for what people think they have and where I might need to invest L&D dollars to build skills. Whereas if you’re trying to move somebody from one role to another or bring somebody into the organization with the right skills, a different level of validation might be necessary for that person.

So it really is a patchwork of ideas and a lot of decisions that need to be made. It’s not just like, “Yeah, he rated me as a four, she rated me as a three, therefore we’re going to average them out,” which is also a problem. That idea of harmonization between systems is also a problem, but verification is a much bigger discussion.

Understanding exactly what you’re going to use that data for and then looking at the right signal — looking at the right skills signal to get that information—is where people should be pointing their attention.

Stacia Garr 47:07

Yeah, I would just second what Dani said. Don’t have anything to add there.

Connor Volpe 47:15

I think you kind of said it all. It sounds like you have to figure out a framework that works for you. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck—to overuse the phrase—boiling the ocean, and nobody wants that.

Dani Johnson 47:26

Yeah, I think it kind of falls into the same category as some of the other things that we do with skills. We want to just solve skills. We want to solve verification. And that’s not the thing. What you want to do is figure out what you’re trying to do, figure out the decision you’re trying to make, figure out if you have that data or figure out how you get that data, and then make the decision. It’s the same process for every single decision you’re making. Do I have that data? Hopefully I do, then I can use that to make this decision. Or do I need to go get that data?

Connor Volpe 47:55

So I imagine you two probably see this somewhat frequently, where there are companies who put together a skills strategy, a skills framework, but maybe have trouble actually putting it into practice and reaping the benefits of all of that work. What do you see from companies who are able to then see the value — to finally reach the top of the mountain and say, “Hey, at least we’ve gotten our first wave of results in here. We’re starting to see some of that value, ideally measurable business outcomes”—the golden ticket for all of this? What do you see those companies doing? Is there an example that you can share of a company that has done this so people know, like, “Maybe I can get there if I do all of this, then I can get to that point”? Would just love to hear more about some companies who have done this and done this well.

Dani Johnson 49:01

We’ve had Ericsson on our Workplace Stories podcast twice because the way that they handle skills is both pragmatic and aspirational, if that’s maybe a good way to put it.

Genji Christian, the CLO at Ericsson, six or seven years ago said, “You know what? AI is coming, and we need everybody in our organization to understand on some level AI.” And that was the skill that they tackled for that year — everybody is going to have some sort of literacy in AI. So they took a really pragmatic way of looking at it.

Every year they reevaluate: “All right, what are the skills that are going to align with the business that we need to go after? That’s what we’re going to focus on, and we’re going to build everything around that.”

They’ve also done something really interesting in that they have deputized people within the organization and made them skills leaders within job families or within roles. They’re like, “Okay, it’s your job to determine what skills are needed and your job to tell us what those skills are so that we can make sure that everything is happening the way it should.” And they made it an honored position. You’re special if you have this job.

So the way that they have gone in with a scalpel and said, “These are the things that we’re going to focus on,” and yet, “We also want this body of information in the organization that we will eventually use” — that’s a really interesting way to do it. They’re using the data to make some of those bigger decisions, but then they’re also saying the body of data that we need in the organization to make sure that good decisions are being made is the level down.

Stacia Garr 50:37

I think that’s probably the best example of an organization that is super relatable, if you will, in that they kind of started where most others have started and then have done something remarkable.

Probably the least relatable, but most aspirational or inspirational example is what EPAM Systems does. Sandra Loughlin is there, and basically EPAM has been doing skills in one form or another for 30 years. They build their own technology, so they’ve been able to make all the tech talk to each other, which most companies are not going to do. But if you want to be able to see the value of an integrated skills system, I would look to them. Sandra’s written a lot about it.

But the things that they say specifically: One, they’re able to move the people to the work, not the work to the people, because they actually know what people’s skills are. They assess skills on an annual basis so that they can clearly make sure that the data are up to date and that they can assign people to things. Promotions and such are based in large part on skills and your ability to continue to develop them. They use skills at the beginning of the process, so from when somebody first applies to the organization all the way through their tenure. It is literally how they run the business.

When we were talking to Sandra — she was also on our podcast — she said, “We can’t imagine not. It’s not even a question. This is how we make decisions in our business about people.” So it takes a long time to get to that, but it is possible to do that. Even though it may feel a little bit like, “Wow, that’s really out there,” if you can begin to integrate those data, if you can get it into your talent system, it is possible.

Dani Johnson 52:35

I think that speaks a lot to their culture as well. From the very beginning, it was skills in their culture. People know exactly what the expectations are for their skill levels and what kinds of skills they need to either maintain their job or move to another job. Nothing is a surprise because they have all this data, and they talk in terms of skills.

Connor Volpe 52:54

Awesome. So I think we want to get into a bit of some of the barriers that folks are actually facing when it comes to their skills strategy. We actually, for all of you, have a poll. So we’d love to hear where you are on this spectrum, to see where you’re running into roadblocks and trouble.

But I wonder, Dani and Stacia, if there’s any association with this with almost like a maturity level. Like, if you’re maybe just getting started, you run into one set of problems versus maybe you’re a little bit further down the line and another problem pops up. Is there any truth to that, or is it really just you can run into any one of these at any time? It just depends on your luck.

Dani Johnson 53:32

I think — Stacia’s probably having this experience as well — we’ve run the Skills Workshop, I think we’re on our fourth time. Every single organization that has gone through, we have asked, “What’s your biggest challenge with respect to developing a skills strategy?” And every single one of them have said finding the scope and purpose. So even those that are far down the road are still struggling with defining why we’re doing this and what box are we drawing around it, which I think kind of aligns with maybe a little bit with some of the other options.

But other than that, we see different organizations with different things. Some of them have their tech together and some don’t. Some don’t know how to integrate their data.

Connor Volpe 54:26

I’m sure there is some just luck of the draw based on, to your point, the style of organization you come from, what has been done before you, the foundations you’re building on. So some of it is just, “Well, this is what I’ve got.”

But let’s go ahead and see some of our results. It looks like we’ve gotten most people in here, and we’ve got a decent spread at the top. Looks like data and buy-in. We talked about adoption, we talked about how to collect and validate and assess some of this. Then, of course, technology is in there as well, and we have a few for strategy. So it looks like we have a decent spread but a concentration in data and buy-in.

I know we only have a couple minutes left, so what I’d love to do before we end is just — Stacia and Dani, this has been great for the last hour — but I’m sure, is there something you’d want to share with the audience about, like, essentially a takeaway, an action item, based on everything we’ve talked about today? If you could try to summarize—it’s hard, but probably one action item for everybody they can take away — I’d love to hear what you have to say for everyone.

Dani Johnson 55:34

I think maybe less an action item and more maybe an observation. I think it’s not going to be very long before we’re going to stop talking about skills. It’s going to be in the water. We don’t necessarily talk about an internet strategy anymore. It just is in the water. And I think we’re moving that way with skills, and I will consider it a win when we get there. It’s no longer something that we — we’re not trying to be a skills-based organization. We’re using skills data to the best ability we can to make better decisions in our organization.

Stacia Garr 56:10

My addition would just be going back to scope and purpose. Whatever you’re doing, even if you’re a few years into your skills journey, make sure you’re crystal clear on the scope and purpose. In our workshop, we encourage people to develop a tagline so that when somebody says, “Well, why are we doing skills anyway?” you can say, “We are doing skills to [fill in the blank],” and be very specific about it and tie it back to what the business is trying to achieve.

We have certainly observed that scope and purpose shift over time, and they should, particularly if you have a really successful pilot and then you’re trying to expand. That scope and purpose absolutely will expand. But no matter how many times it’s changed, at any one point it should be clear.

Connor Volpe 56:59

That is all the time we have for today. So again, thank you, Dani and Stacia, for doing this. This is awesome. It’s my first “non-webinar,” and I have to say I really enjoyed it, so I hope everybody on the line did as well.

Seriously, thank you to everybody on the line for joining. Again, an hour out of anybody’s day is a lot to ask, so we really appreciate you spending it here with us. If you missed any of today’s webinar or if there’s someone you’d like to share it with, you can do that through the link you used to join. We’ll also be posting this on the Eightfold website as well.

But again, just thank you to everybody for being here. We really appreciate it, and we hope you have a great rest of your day, rest of your week. We’ll talk soon.