Today, just 13% of employers say they can hire and retain the tech talent they need. What’s changing? Everything, all the time. The skills organizations need to thrive, the technology that drives business outcomes, and employees’ desires and motivations.
In the tech talent crunch, competitive advantage and long-term survivability are at stake. So, how do you find top talent and keep them engaged?
Watch this webinar with Eightfold and Deloitte to discover how to unite IT and HR to reinvigorate your workforce, capture the skills that will make you a leader, and stand apart in the tech talent marketplace.
In this session, we discuss how to:
Speakers:
This webinar on tech talent transformation emphasized the critical need for IT and HR alignment to secure top tech talent. A poll revealed that 40% of attendees find securing top tech talent critical, and 44% find it very important. As per IDC, Deloitte’s Nate Paynter highlighted a $5.5 trillion IT skills gap by 2026. The discussion covered continuous workforce planning, leveraging internal and external talent, and creating micro-cultures to enhance retention. Vodafone’s success in reducing time-to-hire by 56% and increasing learning hours by 67% through skills-based approaches was highlighted. The importance of managers in driving transformation was also stressed.
00:06
Hello and welcome to today’s webinar, “Tech Talent Transformation: Uniting IT and HR for competitive advantage.” Now I have a few housekeeping notes before we begin. Please use the Q and A module on your screen if you have any questions or technical concerns. You can resize and minimize the different modules on your screen by using the options in the top right corner of each module. This event is being recorded and can be watched later on demand using the same link. Attendees will also receive the recording of today’s event. Look for that email within 24 hours. Post-event, we want to encourage you to put your questions in the Q and A Module throughout the event for our speakers to address. You can also use the reaction module in the menu at the bottom to relay items you may like or want to express an emotion to and now I will pass the stage to Jason Cerrato, Vice President, Talent-centered Transformation, Eightfold AI.
Jason Cerrato 01:03
Thank you everyone for joining us. Excited to be here today with HR Executive for this webinar, and excited to once again be partnering with Deloitte on this session for today, I’m really excited to be joined by Nate Paynter. We’ve had a chance to connect a couple times in preparation for this session. Most recently, we were able to connect last week at the HR Technology Conference. And how appropriate today we’re going to talk about the unification of HR and IT so to be able to connect in person at the HR Technology Conference was a great opportunity to work on this together in person, but also very timely and very topical. So with that, I want to have just a chance to thank you, Nate, for doing this with us and joining me and give you a chance to introduce yourself.
Nate Paynter 01:57
Yeah, absolutely, Jason, and it was so great to see you and spend some time with you last week, and it was great to see all the different events and different presentations that were happening at HR Tech. Pretty cool event. So my name is Nate painter, and I lead our tech talent transformation efforts for Deloitte, which really means that I’m super passionate about how we sold for tech talent, tech workforce, tech organizations, and how we can really try to optimize the value of our tech workers. And so the partnership we have with a fold and making sure that we can kind of advance those priorities has always been really powerful. What it really means, though, is, at the end of the day, we have to solve for a pretty dramatic challenge that the companies have as they’re trying to advance and define what their future is going to be, and really looking at their tech talent as a key unlock, a key point, a key critical resource to being able to deliver on all those key priorities. So look forward to talking more about that with you, Jason, and with this broader group as we go through the next hour or so.
Jason Cerrato 03:03
So to keep our group engaged, we do want to hear from you a little bit. So as mentioned, there is the opportunity to submit questions through the Q&A, and we’ll try to get to those either at the end of the session, throughout the session, or maybe even as a follow up. But to kind of keep you on your toes and hope to get you engaged, we also do have some polls that we want to use through the content today. So stay stay close to your mouse, or whatever device you’re following along with, because we do want to get some responses from you as we go through the content. And to kind of test that off, we’re going to start with the poll right now. So the first question we have here is, how important is securing top tech talent for your organization’s success? And as you can see here, you have a couple options, so take a moment to review those and give us your feedback. And while you do that, I want to ask Nate, you know, part of the reason why we’re having this discussion is this isn’t necessarily a new topic. I remember, you know, before joining eight fold, I spent some time as an industry analyst, and I was writing about this, you know, as far back as 2018 2019 in the middle of digital transformation, but especially now with, you know, the the impact of AI and on the on the heels of digital transformation, the impact of talent transformation, I think this is very topical. How are you hearing this play out with the organizations that you’re partnering with?
Nate Paynter 04:31
Yeah, I completely agree, Jason, as we’ve seen right right around that same time frame, and even a little bit before we were seeing the early stages of you couldn’t have an IT or a business strategy, without a tech strategy, without an IT strategy. And we’ve really changed a lot of the lexicon, I think, as we’ve even been framing that, because when I say Tech, I mean it, but I mean broader. And so we start to look at it like it is truly technology that, in many cases, is driving, in most cases, is driving the innovation of the company, right? I mentioned that in my quick intro. But that future focus of organizations, it’s not just you need to have an intertwined tech and business strategy. In many cases, the tech strategy is unlocking new business opportunities, and that is creating a vastly different dynamic. So, you know, I think it’s continued to evolve, and it’s continued to really angle towards we’ve got to have that focus on tech if we’re going to drive the results of our organization for the next 510, years. And
Jason Cerrato 05:35
I think with digital transformation, instead of functions and organizations being supported by it and supported by technology, they’re all becoming, you know, very technological functions, right? And as a result of that, the impact to HR and what it means for talent and job descriptions and how work gets done is impacted as well. So all the reasons why we’re here today to talk about this unification of priorities and joining forces to achieve some of this. So we’ll just give a couple more seconds here. We already have about 60% of attendees have submitted their responses, and we’ll see what the results are. But very timely and very topical, because the pace of change continues to evolve. And you know, as people think they’ve addressed this, the finish line keeps moving right. So let’s see what our audience had to say here. So how important is securing your top tech talent? No surprise, 40% say it’s critical. 44% say very important. So obviously, there’s some self selection for the people that would attend a session like this, but I think in general, this is top of mind for anyone working in either the IT function or the HR function. So hopefully we’ll get some benefit from the conversation today. Any surprises here for you?
Nate Paynter 06:53
Just to add Jason, I guess, not surprised but, but I am thrilled to see it. I’m thrilled to see these responses this way, because I think you know, more and more the importance of this organization really does become more critical for that. So I love seeing this group of professionals that’s that’s seeing the importance of that and driving the importance of that in their in their organizations.
Jason Cerrato 07:17
All right, so let’s jump in. Let’s start diving into the research and what you found and what we can share with the audience here.
Nate Paynter 07:26
Yeah, absolutely, Jason, and there’s a there’s a couple points that I think are really critical and that are really driving, you know, my focus in this space, and why we at Deloitte, feel like this is an area that we really need to help companies to solve this challenge. I’m going to start with just a couple of key points. So number one, we continue to see corporations betting on technology, and I already talked about that briefly, but it’s in a couple of key areas. We’re seeing them betting on it from an efficiency perspective, how do we operate more effectively and more efficiently, right? And I would say a lot of the AI focus right now is still in that space, right? But we’re also seeing organizations that are actually eluding and building out a different business and market strategy. They’re accessing different customers, they’re able to create new products, and they’re driving something that’s dramatically different. And then the third piece is they’re taking what they’re doing today, and they’re driving finding new new customers or new channels to drive a direct growth that might not be related to a current product. It’s just, how do we take competitive advantage over the companies that might be our competitors? But if you add that all up, what we really see is we see companies that are really committing some significant bets, to the street, to shareholders, to the board, and so we see this massive kind of commitment to our future growth. So when I say that, I don’t mean I don’t say that lightly. It’s not just hopefully, if we drive the right tech we’ll drive the right growth. We’ve actually made statements now to shareholders, and we got to go deliver on those commitments over the next few years in order to drive the corporate performance that we’re anticipating. So what does that mean? Means the streets embedded that into our share price, and it means that essentially all of our executives and everyone at the company has to help us figure out how we’re going to deliver on those priorities and advance the company right. And it’s a massive shift, I think, from where we’ve seen historically, which was digital as part of it, digital enabling. I work a lot in consumer we saw a lot of omni channel. But this is really a fundamental, I think, shift to where we’re now placing fundamental bets that the street is going to call us on if we’re not able to deliver it. And you take that and you add another piece to it, which is what we’re seeing, is that tech talent is the most fundamental critical resource that is not sold for. And all of a sudden we get tech workers. The tech workforce, the tech organization, has a hypercritical component to being able to deliver on that ambition for companies. And so that’s why, when I look at this, I get excited about, how can we help to unlock that value and deliver on those commitments in a really, really dynamic space where we’re going to see more tech jobs created, we’re going to see more tech jobs in demand, and the tech jobs that we have are going to continue to shift, because the half life of skills is going to change. So even when we see things like, Oh, we’re gonna grow by, you know, 25% of the overall tech jobs. Well, if you compound that with the skill shifts that are happening, we’re multiplying that by about 200% it’s pretty massive. So I get really jazzed about the space. It’s something I’m really passionate about. I know you are as well, Jason.
Jason Cerrato 10:38
I think you know, the pressure is that productivity per employee, revenue per employee, trying to drive innovation. And you know this is where as organizations are trying to figure out how they deliver to customers in new ways, how they potentially pivot into new industries or new areas where the skills conversation comes into this right? Because to drive business agility, you need talent agility. And as the work changes, as the job titles and job descriptions change, you need this kind of more granular understanding of the work that people are doing and the skills that are involved to have the agility to prepare for this fast approaching future we’ve been talking about the future of work now for quite some time, and the difference is, right now we’re living in it. So instead of talking about it, we’re living in it and building it as we go. So I love there’s a specific word on here that jumps out at me, activate, right? So when we think about it from an HR perspective, talent acquisition really is transitioning to talent activation and talent management is really evolving to talent enablement. So I love, you know where we’re starting the conversation, and it’s a nice jump off point for what comes next.
Nate Paynter 11:52
I love that framing to Jason. I want to quantify. So this is the other thing that I think is really powerful, is I want to quantify some of those things that I was just talking about news pretty quickly, but the big number, right, that I keep marching toward is, how do we help companies unlock a $5.5 trillion gap? So by 2026 right? That’s not far off. That’s two years away. We essentially IDC has come out, right? The analyst group, IDC has come out and said there’s a $5.5 trillion gap in being able to deliver on the revenue commitments of the IT organization, deliver effective quality of the IT solutions and the technology solutions in the market, deliver the right products, and it’s all because of IT skills. So if there’s anyone who’s focused in the HR space, the talent space and organizations making this a priority, right? There’s a number there to really attach to this, and I really find that to be a rally and cry. So Jason, the other things that I’ll just point out really quick are, you know, those are then reinforced, right? The numbers are reinforced by the survey data that we see, right? We see, I know you put on LinkedIn, 13% of employers say they’re unable to hire and retain, right? And I think retain is a big piece of that. We’ll talk about that as we go. But then we also see 46% of leaders who say they have right they’re not able to deliver that. So it’s not just IDC saying, Hey, we can quantify it. It’s leaders across organizations, through Deloitte studies and external studies, that we can really see that this is continuing to compound. It will continue to compound unless we really do something about it.
Jason Cerrato 13:32
So I think there’s a there’s definitely a sense of urgency and a burning platform, as well as a disconnect between capacity and execution. So for a lot of organizations that are faced with this, this really becomes a critical issue to address and a critical need to try to find solutions, to gather data and different strategies to try to solve for so I really think, you know, this is a wonderful conversation to be having at this time, because the pressure on on technical talent, on it, on HR, is just going to continue to grow as this world evolves.
Nate Paynter 14:15
That’s right. That’s right. And Jason, I’ll flip ahead and I’ll just go through this really fast, but you know, this is really just saying that it’s intensifying, right? It’s not going away. And it’s fascinating in the market today, because we hear all the stories, right? And I’m sure that we’ve got listeners on this call, or will that’ll look at us and say, you know, but my organization has actually decided to downsize in this area, or we’re seeing some reductions. And what I actually look at that as is we haven’t seen overall market adjustments. We’ve seen adjustments in which companies are hiring for which skills and how they’re placing their bets. And it’s pretty fascinating, because what it really points to is volatility. And when I see volatility, I see that as a constant need to stay on your pound ball, to stay on top of your game as to what you’re going to do to really, kind of make sure that these investments are going to be driven by the right people, right? So this point stat here, of 70% of tech workers had multiple job offers. I mean, that’s going to continue to contribute to that volatility. In addition to the companies trying to figure out which priorities they’re really going to invest in. How I hire those people? And then, did I over invest? Did I under invest? Am I delivering on that priority? And how do I balance the dynamic nature of the macro conditions of the market today? So it’s definitely an intensifying and crazy space. You talked about Jason a little bit of you know, so what are we going to do about it? And so we laid out four key points. And I know you and I have have batted these around a number of times, and I think there’s a lot here. What I want to point out is we’ve tried to roll this into four kind of transformation imperatives, but there’s so much that underlies all of this, and so there’s a lot to each of these, and we’ll try to unlock a little bit of that. But, you know, we’ll also be conscious of the time that we have today. But the key points I wanted to highlight, right? I still believe that there’s a ton that’s going to continue to hinge on planning continuously. And that sounds some organizations will look at me and say, There’s no way we’re ever going to get there, and some organizations say that sounds easy. How do we actually just go put it into place? But it usually is a pretty complex process that takes some real thought. And so we’ll get into that a little bit, because I think there’s a major underpinning and a major unlock there. The second piece is not work experiences, just to create an experience, but to really drive where the hidden skills, and how do we unlock the skills? And how do we deploy people? How do we use experiences to drive expert experiential learning? How to use experiences to also either build skills or deploy skills where we really need them and where they may be within the organizations? There’s a lot there. The third point we’ll talk about is, how do we cast a wider net around the ecosystem model? And it’s pretty fascinating, because when I start to look at talent, I’ve actually worked for a lot of organizations who almost feel like if they’re not bringing in their own internal workforce, using an external workforce is kind of like a second tier. It’s not what we desired. It’s because we didn’t have necessarily the right fit. I think there’s a major shift in the mindset and the thought process on how we really use external workforces to our advantage, not as a to fill a gap. And so we’ll talk about that for a second. And the last one is really around micro cultures, and that’s where we get into more of those experiences that are going to drive retention, they’re going to create unique spaces for people that might have kind of a different expectation of what they’re going to get from a company than the macro culture that we see, which obviously is still going to be important to the operation of that organization.
Jason Cerrato 17:56
And I think, you know, from an HR perspective, coming at this from from the other side, historically, a lot of HR practices and processes have been aligned with the CFO and the annual calendar, and, you know, cyclical annual processes. And with digital transformation, they’ve increasingly been aligning to the CIO. And you get more project based, and you get, you know, pulse check ins, and you get spot bonuses, and you get a lot more of the skills conversation, because work is changing and your skills are evolving faster. I think this conversation is the continued evolution of that now that that and that process and those practices have had a little bit more time to expand and evolve. So, you know, part of this, you know, planning continuously is, is enabled by tools like AI, but also kind of breaking away from that annual, cyclical process that we’ve been accustomed to for how we’ve gotten here, and is much different from how we’re going to get to
18:55
where we’re going. And I so totally agree, if we, if you want to flip ahead, Jason, I’ll, actually, I’ll hit on a couple points with that, because I think it’s such an important, powerful point. And honestly, it’s amazing. When you sit down and you think about how organizations have historically worked, and the role of it, and kind of these things that have become normal for technology organizations or IT organizations that might be different from the rest of the functions or the operations of the company. And one of the ones you just hit on was that whole project focus, right? And so when we really think about workforce planning and the importance of this, you know, continuous planning, I really do see that project versus kind of operating budget, business as usual, budget, keep the lights on budget, which is what we often hear it referred to in in IT organizations, but there’s almost this, this massive difference, even in that thought of most of the rest of the organization doesn’t have as much of that continuity around like project budgets that are constantly shifting with Regular priorities that are evolving, right? And so we may see that in real estate functions, but it’s more we see it in it probably more so than anywhere else. And what’s set in the budget this year we may not be able to get to and that means it’s going to pivot what our priorities are going to be next year and the year after that. So it’s this constant evolving pivot of, where are we going to spend our resources, where are we going to put our money, where are we going to put our people? And that, to me, can be a really daunting task, but it’s also pretty awesome opportunity for us to be looking at, how do we deploy people, how do we redeploy people, how do we really continue to pivot those skills in potentially roles that aren’t always going to be static, where somebody’s not in the same role or growing in the same pillar of the organization for the next 20 years, there’s a lot of flexibility, and it’s fascinating, because I think that’s what the IT workforce is really looking for. So three things I’ll just hit on really quickly. One, workforce planning, as we’ve been talking about. It’s really important. The second one is we’re also seeing a lot more globalization, a lot with global capability centers that are stood up in other geographies. And what we often see is we may plan for one, we’re not planning for both. And so that global calibration, the global collaboration and planning becomes a really key piece. Adds a little bit of complexity, but but the value you get out of it is tremendous. And then the third one is really right. We need to continue to really focus on elevating tech beyond traditional tech workers. I know you alluded to that, Jason and you and I kind of share that perspective, that we need to build that technology technology knowledge, and we need to make sure that people beyond the tech organization are thought through as part of how are we going to continue to advance this priority, and make sure that people are are continuing to drive the future of the business in the right ways. So three areas that I look at as you know, some pretty massive foundational pieces, if you can start to get these right and even start to move the needle on them, I think you see some pretty incredible value. And before I turn over you, Jason, I want to hit on two other quick, quick points, right? Because if you take a workforce that’s in a couple 1000 people, usually at most large organizations, and you say, and that’s, that’s a small right? We see financial services organizations that are at the 65,000 and tech organizations and the 100,000 of tech workers, if you can create a 10% increase, which is what Harvard Business Review says, Create a 10% increase in productivity of that workforce. I mean, think about the unlock of that from the number of people. That’s a return on investing in planning effectively. So it just loves the power of what you can do with this right planning. It does take some real focus, though,
Jason Cerrato 22:50
and I think, you know, we’re talking about change management and transformation, and this ability to flow, uh, across the organization, but also, you know what’s on the table to potentially change and be the under consideration for completely being thought of differently. We we talk about thinking, managing and measuring differently, and changing the constructs by which we’ve organized work, measured work, and in the overall Deloitte research for the human capital Trends report, a common theme was how the way we’ve organized and classified a lot of things is decoupling and changing. So the way we organized historically, in addition to now, the way we’re operating, is also changing. So you mentioned things like budgeting, things like cycles, things like cost centers, all these different things are now on the table to be reexamined and potentially redesigned to address the needs of a world that operates like the one you’re describing here. That’s right, that’s right.
Nate Paynter 23:52
Then the other one, Jason, to hit on with that to those exact points, right? I find it liberating. Some find it daunting. I find it liberating with the amount of opportunity it creates. But some of that is right. Also thinking about something you and I share, share real passion on, which is skills, and how can we really harness the skills that are there in the organization? And so, you know, the more that we can really kind of focus on addressing the half life of skills, but using those work experiences, using workforce planning to do that really becomes pretty massive. The other thing that I wanted to just highlight really quickly as we’re doing that planning is this focus on right? It’s not just about tech skills, but it is a marrying of tech skills and what we call kind of foundational human capabilities at Deloitte. What we actually did recently in a survey is we asked what were the most critical skills across the board that were going to drive your tech organization, and things like problem solving and business case development actually rose to the top. The only tech skill that was on the list was actually data and analytics. The critical thing is that’s not it doesn’t mean those tech skills are less important. It just means that you need workers in tech that can also bridge that gap and solve that connection with the business, which we see here is what C suite roles are really going to be looking for as well, which is they need to be well versed, and they need to be thinking more about, how can I bring some of the technology and marry it up with my business knowledge and my functional expertise that I’ve brought that’s helped me to accelerate my career to where I am today,
Jason Cerrato 25:28
I think, and I think that this is around the changing nature of the job descriptions and the changing nature of the work. You know, you may have a job title that stayed the same the actual work you’re doing, and if you were to describe your job description may look very different as a result of the tools, the capability, the automation, the incorporation of things like AI. You know, one of the one of the things that I think you just touched on is, you know, data analysis, and data analytics, for some of this that now is done, increasingly for us. You know, the work changes from data management to data governance, and then, as a result, it becomes critical thinking, right? And you amplify some of the human characteristics that sit on top of the technology. Because, you know, some of the turning of the wrench and the spreadsheet heroism goes away, but you know, you’re still in a very technical role. Just the nature of the work has changed. Yeah, yeah.
Jason Cerrato 26:25
The other thing I love about about this chart here is this movement around skills, especially in the C suite. You know, one of the things that we talk about with our technology is people that use talent, intelligence and skills for things like workforce planning, but even more specifically, succession planning. And when you think about how organizations have done it, even current day, there are still almost half the organizations we speak to are doing it in spreadsheets or doing it, you know, for the top 200 leaders in their organization, or still only doing it once a year or twice a year. In order to address emerging skills, you’re going to need to go deeper in the organization. In order to address the pace of change, you’re going to need to do it more frequently, if not continuously, and in order to prepare for the roles of the future. Increasingly, even at the C suite level, there are many C suite roles that never existed before, or even if they are similar titles, they’re being filled from people that are coming from outside the function with a hybrid of background, you know, these kind of T shaped leaders, kind of approach. So, you know, using skills a more continuous approach. And, you know, mixing all of these approaches to align kind of the HR approach with the change of technology are increasingly critical, especially for leading in this time of transformation.
Nate Paynter 27:58
Yeah, I think that’s that HR focus, too, that you’re talking about is really, I mean, it’s so powerful to understand what these real shifts are going to be. And honestly, it’s an area that I see a massive still need for HR in general, is thinking about and partnering with this tech organization. We see it within the tech companies that there’s a real investment in HR there, because we know that we need to help that tech organization grow the skills, and we also need to be really conversant on what’s happening in tech. Aside from that, right, we see kind of a mixed focus and a mixed amount of investment and where HR can really focus, because there’s so many other critical workforce segments within the organization. And so I really think there’s a huge opportunity for HR to continue to get smarter in this space. I mean, the stat shows that that HR is thinking about that, and CHROs are thinking about that, but there’s still a lot that I think we need to do in the HR space to help organizations to really make some of those pivots.
Jason Cerrato 29:02
And I think you’ve touched on some of some of what’s depicted here on this slide, but this is an Eightfold slide that speaks to how we’re helping talent leaders think about this, or potentially think about this differently. And increasingly, it’s getting closer to the talent to understand the work that’s happening as the work is potentially changing more rapidly than the job classifications or the job descriptions have been organized, and this is increasingly this kind of decoupling, or rapid pace of change, but with the incorporation of AI and talent intelligence and taking a skills based approach. What this allows organizations to do is start to have a more dynamic understanding of how to address the organizational needs, especially as you mentioned at the beginning, to be more agile. Is it something that we’re going to invest in in house? Is it something that we’re going to use, you know, maybe external consultants or gig workers to help move a project forward or supplement our staff. Is it something where we’re redesigning the work, and maybe we want to look at automation? So what you can have is you can have the visibility to look at your organization based off of the skills and the work at hand, which potentially is different from how we’ve looked at this in the past. And then you can start to say, well, of the talent I have, how does that align to what the organization is asking for? And as it aligns to what the organization is asking for, some time, that alignment could result in a job, sometime that alignment could result in something that just takes the form of work, but maybe we’re able to achieve that because now we know who’s on our team in a more comprehensive way, and we’re tapping into what may have been previously untapped capability or untapped capacity on our team to now accomplish that work. Maybe we’re getting something done through the form of projects, which is increasingly happening in organizations. You know, for the last 1520, years, if you’ve been talking to anyone, especially people coming through universities, we’ve been talking about project based employment for years. Well, this is now a reality, as we talk about living in the future of work. And then you can also analyze tasks and start to break down these jobs and projects and work into tasks to even look at. Well, what are these tasks and how do we have some more agility among addressing them? So this gives you true recruit, retain, redeploy, redesign planning for that critical workforce planning or build by borrow bot, whichever alliteration you prefer. But this is really this granularity of visibility of data into your talent. Just try to get the nimbleness to address this changing world of work, especially in an increasingly continuous world as HR is supporting not only the CIO, but increasingly the other functions, which are increasingly becoming technology functions. And Jason, what I one of the things I’m sure this was in the past, has been to really do this right. It is, it is complex, and so you need ways that you can hit a little bit of an easy button, that you can make it easier for yourself, and that there are some mechanisms out there that help you to do it. And I think the power of, you know, Eightfold, and the power of kind of platforms to be able to help do that, as well as being able to kind of embed some of the AI components into how we sold for this is going to be a huge opportunity. Because if you go in HR and you say, I need 10 more people to do workforce planning effectively, that’s a pretty tough sell without building a full case around it. But if you can go, Hey, I’ve got a solution that’s going to help us to do this, and I could prove it with a couple of key pieces of an organization and bring it to life, and then talk about the value that I’m getting out of that it’s a game changer. So I love being able to have solutions that are not just the theoretical and the ways that we do this back at the napkin, but we really have to be intentional. We’ve got to got to make sure that we’re driving the right solutions and tools to make us successful in this planning effort.
Jason Cerrato 33:19
So with that, I think it’s time for another poll. So hopefully the folks are still close to their mouse or their device. This is the next poll question, how confident are you and your organization’s ability to track and understand the skills of its workforce? Kind of piggybacking on some of the themes we just talked about, I kind of want to get a pulse of the audience on this one. Nate and with the organizations that you’re either surveying or working with, I know in the past, this has always been top of the list on surveys of leaders how hard it is or how time consuming this has been in the past. Do you still see that as a theme?
Nate Paynter 33:56
Yeah, you know, I do, Jason, and that’s why part of where I was just going a little bit with that. Last point is, if I look at this more holistically across organizations, I would kind of expect to see more of a somewhat confident here, because I really do see that maybe we’ve got the idea, we’ve got a vision, we can understand the power and the value of starting to really look at skills, but really putting this into practice for a large organization that’s, you know, grown up for 100 years or less even, is really difficult, and so it becomes a pretty daunting task, at least from what I’m seeing with organizations, that either you’re fully committed or you’re looking for a faster path to get there. So I would expect maybe a little bit lower confidence here, but I’d be thrilled if it’s if it’s higher, and others are doing more in the space.
Jason Cerrato 34:48
I just know, even today, I still hear from leaders who say, you know, we know more about people coming in the door than we do after they’ve been here for a year or two, and we have to go back and try to re examine who’s on the team, and it takes time to collect this information. So when we talk about being able to respond quickly to the needs of the business, the needs of our customers, the challenges or competition in the market, this continues to be a challenge, so it’ll be interesting to see the feedback from the audience here, but it’s captive data, right? I mean, if we if we can harness it, if we can use it, it is data that we have a unique access to to make better decisions with our people and on behalf of our people both.
Jason Cerrato 35:39
All right, let’s go ahead and see what the results are. I’m not sure if you led the witness here Nate, but here we go. 60% somewhat confident, only 3% very confident, 17% confident. So that lets us know there is still work to do, and that lets us know why so many people were interested in hearing the conversation today. But also there probably are some areas of the organization that are ahead in some areas of the organization that are behind. I always refer to this as islands of excellence and deserts of despair. It’s hard to do this at scale across very large enterprises, but in today’s world, you know that’s ultimately the goal.
Nate Paynter 36:21
Yeah, well, and I have to admit, Jason, I mean, the challenge is the tech organization, and I’ll go back to the IT centric, but like IT organizations are pretty complex to do this against, because of the dynamicism of those skills and roles. But the value you get by focusing in that space is pretty awesome as well. So I would encourage everyone who’s on the journey to at least to continue it and try to figure out ways to continue moving that forward. Glad to see that there’s a lot of people that are really continuing to make that that investment keep it as a focus. Jason, I’ll flip over. I’m gonna go to point number two, which goes right back to our skills conversation, right? So I talked a little bit around the second one, which is human capabilities, experience based learning is is kind of a key piece, though. Because 101, of the things that I really think is powerful is, if we have that planning capability, if we can build on that, we really can be focused on what experiences are going to drive that skill set. And this goes a little bit right. If I think about a lot of the other functions in an organization, I might get 10% of my workforce that I can deploy on more strategic things that are changing the game in an IT organization that might be 50, 60% of your workforce. And as we move to the cloud and are more dependent upon cloud for infrastructure and some of the backbone of our technologies, it actually increases the percentage even more. And so the ability that we can create these experiences that are really kind of aligned to learning to continue to advance our skills growth not stagnate, the people who are working and supporting parts of technology that might not be forward thinking, that might not be as part of that future skills portfolio is a powerful opportunity, but it all hinges on what we were just talking about, which is really embracing that skills focus. And I like to think about it as using skills as currency to an extent, right? How do we actually figure out, kind of how we can shift that from not? It doesn’t mean we’re going away from roles. We’re getting rid of roles, but it means that we’re actually thinking more granular about what some of those roles are. And just to bring that to life a little bit, you know, I think about this on the tech side, and I think about, you’ve got a workforce, and let’s say, you know, 200 engineers that have Java skills, and so they’re out able to kind of build out web based technologies. Well, what if you only have 50 of those that actually have Google platform skills, and you’re moving modernizing into a new Google marketing platform, where you’ve got to build custom technology, right? So now I’ve got 50 people that have that out of that are all the same role as the other 150 and then I take that even further, and I’ve got only got 20 that might know customer marketing. And so now same pool, I don’t really have that insight unless I’ve looked at their history or asked a lot of people, and then I take that even further and go, How many people have led pretty complex, challenging programs that require me to have multiple customer disciplines and bring that to life in Google using these Java skills. I mean, it’s fascinating. When you start to break this down and you go, Okay, I actually do likely have some of these very unique people. I like to think of those as the unicorns in the organization. I do have those, but I’ve got to filter through what I also think of as the horsepower of the organization, right? The real strength that I have in mass that’s brought kind of a big skill in engineering. And so I think there’s a lot that can be unlocked here, and a lot of companies that can be actually looking for that, with the right focus on skills, can actually find a lot more there. And usually, right now, a lot of organizations are looking at it, saying those those individuals are tied up, if I even know they exist. And so I’m going to go out to the market, I’m going to hire new people, and that’s a six month journey to find the right specific individual. I end up paying a premium for them. And so it creates a pretty massive dynamic that if I had this data, if I was thinking about it differently, I might be able to solve internally with a lot less headache. Yep, like, I won’t go through this too much, but it goes a little bit to at the end of the day right. In addition to having this real focus on on skills, we also want colleagues that also have skills, so being able to take it down to another level of detail, where I’m creating communities, and somebody’s helping me creating those create those communities where I have some unique intersections. And then the other one is these Taylor career models. And I hit on that briefly at the beginning, but we really do see like I think is a really powerful point. I actually am surprised. It’s not even a little bit higher of a number, but 1/3 of developers are interested in taking on manager responsibilities. What that really means is two thirds aren’t, and that’s the important piece. So we have two thirds of an organization that doesn’t fit the historical norms of I’m going to create career advancement and opportunities and try to create elevation and pay through the management structures that I create, and the number of organizations I work with to say you can never get to this level unless you move up from five direct reports to 10 reports underneath you, right? It’s embedded in the bylaws. It’s embedded in the way that we think about and now we’ve got a whole organization we’re dependent upon for the future that doesn’t want anything to do with that. So it’s, it’s fascinating that, you know, there’s some things we really need to listen to and unlock, and there’s some really good ways to do it. We won’t go through all of them here, but there’s some great accelerators to do that. So I know you all are thinking about that too, Jason.
Jason Cerrato 42:15
We’re thinking about it. We’re trying to provide visualizations of it, but we’re also working with organizations that are on the leading edge of that. So, for example, we were working with an organization recently that was coming to us to help them through a transformation where they were going from, you know, 14 levels of career ladders down to four, right? So if you’re increasingly shifting more towards project based or you’re removing 10 levels of hierarchy to try to try to move out bureaucracy or create agility and speed and efficiency. Well, all of a sudden, your requirements for career growth and promotability look very different, right? So, what you just said is kind of baked in all of a sudden, requires a different recipe, right? So now, what data do you use? How do you make those decisions? What criteria do you make? How do you tell that story to employees? How do you create that transparency? Those are the type of things we’re trying to enable. This next visual is one around trying to create that visualization, and how we do this with career paths with Eightfold this is a this is a graphic representation of it, but I’m going to steal shamelessly from something that you shared just a few minutes ago around everyone looking for the unicorns while you still have a lot of horses, right? And the thing about it is, is the except for the last five or 10% horses and unicorns are very similar. So one of the things that you can do is you can look at what are the skills they have in common, and then what are the adjacent skills, or the very learnable or capable skills that you can use to figure out how you can move a project forward, and then where and when to either identify and develop additional unicorns, or where and when to deploy identified unicorns. So this gives you a kind of a sense of common skills on the right that can be identified to then develop into specific role, specific skills in the middle to create three separate career paths to ultimately get to a manager of product design who could be a very integral leader for an organization in driving innovation and revenue, which ultimately could be that unicorn you’re trying to develop. But this is the way to go from who you have in the organization, and where is the common starting point to develop those points of not only development, but differentiation, to get that internal capability and build from within.
Nate Paynter 44:53
I love it. I love the notion of taking a even that a step further and saying, not just where do I have people with this skill set, but I might be missing a couple pieces of what an awesome opportunity to build it for the future. So I love that.
Jason Cerrato 45:10
And then just this, this next one is a nice visualization of upskilling from a declining role. So with skills intelligence, leveraging market insights. You can also look at what are declining roles and what are rising or emerging roles, and instead of potentially removing individuals from the organization and hiring from the outside, you can look at what are the adjacent roles, our skills, or what are the very learnable skills, and how much overlap is there to move someone from one area to an emerging or needed area. So in this example, you know, you can look at the evolution of some of these IT roles. And you know, a declining role could be a systems administrator, but they’re highly capable of learning six additional roles, and these are two different sets of six additional roles that could put them on the path of these emerging roles with a cloud engineer or a DevOps engineer. So instead of saying we don’t need this role over here, let’s remove them and hire from the outside. You start to look at the existing capability and the internal knowledge and with a few additional strategies around training or development or projects or exposure, you very quickly can build from within for these emerging needs and redeploy and reskill existing talent. But this is through this kind of understanding of overlap and skill adjacencies, but not just adjacencies. One step further what is easily or more readily learnable and capable to adopt relatively quickly.
Nate Paynter 46:46
Jason, we’re starting to look at some of that just from an outside market perspective too, which is great. Which is where, if people are unhappy, if you had system as systems administrators, right? Some organizations would look at that and say, okay, don’t need as many of people in that role anymore. We’re able to look now and see, okay, where did they go? If, right, those people still have a really strong marketable skill, and most of them, to your point, are going into these more advanced roles. So we’re able to kind of start looking at that data. It’s really fun to see as to what those shifts are happening in the in the open, kind of public market of talent,
Jason Cerrato 47:24
and this is, you know, taking some of that capability and putting it into real life. So Vodafone is an organization that we partner with, and they use Eightfold in this skills based approach to help with some of this kind of pivoting and disruption going from a traditional kind of telecom organization to a more digital organization. And as they were doing this, they were taking this skills based approach, both for acquiring talent, but also understanding their existing talent, and developing from within and training and reskilling and career pathing, and as a result, have driven some incredible outcomes that they may not have been able to achieve otherwise. So, for example, by leveraging a more comprehensive talent profile, looking at what are the complete skills of an individual, not just the skills they’ve held in the roles that we’ve had them in, they were able to identify 15,000 additional skills through a talent community in a way that you know they never had visibility to before. So you know, we’ve come to kind of coin that as free agent skills that they weren’t fully aware of or capitalizing on. And this was internal capability. So as the world of work makes itself known. And these new requirements, these new roles, these new ways to deliver to customers start to surface instead of going outside and creating a wreck every time you now know what capability you already have in house to start to address it. And sometimes those people get moved into a role. Sometimes they just get put on a project. Sometimes it’s just work that can be done on your team. But as a result of that, they were also using a skills based approach to hire people. But also potentially, they’re removing some of the need for additional requisitions from the process. And as a result of that, have been able to decrease their time to hire by 56% so they’re removing stress and strain from the system. Because if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you don’t know what you have in house, the answer is, always, will create a wreck, and you end up over hiring. And then, you know, you have that issue. So this creates this capability of, you know, understanding, who do we have in house that could potentially be redeployed or be reskilled, or is already in place? We just didn’t know the data in a way that made it serviceable and actionable for us. And then, as a result, there’s also this understanding of, I’m an employee, how do my skills map through some of these career paths. What are these adjacencies? What are these learnability? And when you start to put it in career path and capability, it creates a what’s in it for me to actually see the transparency of what I can do and what the business needs. And there’s been a 67% increase in learning hours per employee. So again, trying to bring some of these concepts and some of the theory into the real world and show some of these outcomes in action.
Nate Paynter 50:26
It’s amazing. That’s always amazing, Jason, it is.
Jason Cerrato 50:30
So with that, I think this trans, this transitions well into your next section here. I think so. I’m going to go through it pretty quickly, because I’m looking at time, and I want to make sure that we also kind of keep people, stay honest with everyone. So you know, we’d love to hear as we go through if there’s topics like this that this group would like to hear more about. Would of course, love to partner with you again, or find ways we can bring this back to the group. But just really quick, a couple of quick items I hit on this workforce ecosystem, using external talent, thinking about talent more dynamically and right, the way that I really look at it is we’ve got to figure out how to use external talent, not just to be either individual contractors, which have an individual relationship with one person, or broad external parties that are managed by contracts like we’ve got to figure out how to build and drive better connectivity. There’s great market stories of how this is happening, and there’s some really strong accelerators to do it. And I know you’re doing some some great things in that space to look more holistically across the workforce, but I would encourage those that are on this call to be continuing to think about that and how we evolve it, and there’s some fundamental blockers, right? So there’s kind of a historical norm of we’ve got our own internal organization, and then there’s an external group that’s here to support us and supply us when we need and pay for it. But there’s if we can think about that as where is the right talent, who has the advantage, and how do I create the partnerships with those companies? It really is a pretty massive differentiator for us, and we think about like Google and GCP and Amazon and AWS. Think about Azure as Microsoft and among a number of others, building advanced solutions. And part of this is, how do I work with those workforces to build solutions that are actually gonna best fit my company, and then how do I integrate with them? Right? Because sometimes there’s a lot of great stuff that you can tap into, if you think about that as part of your workforce helping to drive your mission, and not just an external party that’s in it for themselves. And I think there’s a lot of companies out there that also want to drive that in parallel. But one of the big blockers is HR procurement. We’ve got to get beyond the border of just HR owns internal it doesn’t talk to procurement. Procurements off on an island, kind of developing the overall sourcing strategy. Got to find better integration points around the planning, and then we’ve got to integrate the talent, once we have them, and turn it more into a good working relationship, which we see in pockets, we see in teams, but we don’t always see holistically across the organization. I could go on this topic for a couple hours, so I’ll keep us moving, Jason, but I think it is,
Jason Cerrato 53:14
and I think for us, you know, the organizations that we partner with are trying to do that as well, and they’ve started to coin their own phrase of building an agile talent ecosystem. So for us, you know, they’re addressing employees and applicants, but also using our technology. Have folded in, you know, the kind of the contractor and gig worker and contractor landscape for more of a total talent approach. But even beyond that, we have an offering called Workforce Exchange, which is more of a public facing marketplace, and they’re opening this up to citizens and to society and to the supply chain and to an ecosystem. So you know, if they if they provide a certain technology or a certain software, if they have people that are trained and certified, that are delivering to their customers or their partners, they are now getting visibility and access to those people, and looking that, looking at this as a more comprehensive ecosystem of talent and an audience, to then be able to look at this for a variety of options in the future, to not only service themselves, but potentially surface service their entire ecosystem. For the sake of time, we had one more poll, but I’m going to skip it and jump ahead to the fourth option here. So let me go to the fourth option here and talk about the next section. So here you Yeah,
Nate Paynter 54:33
that’s great. And this piece I hit on briefly before Jason again, I’ll move to it quickly in the interest of time, but the way we’re really thinking about this is right? We see some pretty dynamic micro cultures within tech and so we see tech workers that want to work with tech workers. We see engineers that want to do advanced engineering, and we see engineers that are not as advanced, that want to continue to hang out with the engineers that are doing advanced engineering. We see those that are really kind of in enabling services and platforms, SAP Oracle and others that really want to figure out how to build a better relationship with their functional leaders. And so there are these different micro cultures that we can really lean on right cybers guided to a micro culture when done well around securing the organization and stabilizing while is still empowering tech workers to get done what they want. And so this whole focus on micro cultures becomes really an amazing opportunity for companies to think about, you know, what they can do to retain people, continue to keep people motivated within that right? We’ve talked about career growth models and career shifting, kind of the career models and creating more flexibility that allows people to kind of navigate some great examples that I know we’ve developed you’ve developed as well on how.
Nate Paynter 1:00:00
To give you an example: There are actually a ton of solutions out there to solve for some of these challenges. And so I would actually encourage, and I think one of the big shifts is encouraging leaders to embrace that complexity and see it as opportunity. And I know it’s it’s probably easier said than done for a lot of people, but it really is a tremendous opportunity with a lot of value, if you can see it that way. Second piece is the workforce planning, and starting to figure out, incorporate workforce planning, continuous planning, and open a little bit of the your eyes around. How can you find even small pockets you can plan and replan and use that as a baseline to build from. It doesn’t always have to be the whole thing at scale, but I think what you find is once you do it, once or twice, you want to move it to scale as quickly as possible, because you see the value. The third one, continue looking for partnerships and ways that you can partner externally, winning with that as a first strategy at times, not always having to feel like you have to do it internally. And then the last one is really a critical one. We didn’t give this any publicity today, we didn’t really cover it, but the power of managers, and so I know one of the polls we were going to talk about was how important managers are on this journey, and this is kind of middle management leaders, tremendous need for those managers as to get the focus, because they’re so critical In the micro cultures. Their critical and transformation, and they really end up having more and more and more and more on their plate, especially in the tech space, as we think about new priorities, new partners, new missions, changing and shifting priorities, changing and shifting budgets, skills, roles. What tech do I need? It’s a massive role, and I think often it gets underplayed, and we see more and more managers that really don’t want to be doing it because it’s pretty daunting. So we can have a whole session on that as well. So look forward to more opportunities as always, to connect with you. Jason, thanks, yeah, I had a wonderful conversation.
Jason Cerrato 1:01:54
I definitely think this tees us up for part two. So again, Nate for joining us. Thank you to everyone that attended. Appreciate HR Executive for giving us the forum. And with that I’ll hand it back over to.
