Skills are coming up in boardrooms all over the world. CEOs are questioning whether their workforces have enough skills for now and the future. Indeed, over half of CEOs believe that skills shortages are going to impact their profitability within the next decade. They’re looking around for a solution. And L&D has it within its reach.
In many ways, L&D is the most critical component to do with skills because L&D is the builder of skills. The strength of your learning culture and infrastructure directly influences the health of your skills bench. On the flip side, measuring skills gives senior leadership a tangible way to track the business impact of learning initiatives. But how can you get started?
Let data inform your strategy
It all begins with skills data — and that may feel intimidating to some, given this data can exist in many different HR, learning, and recruiting systems. Having a system that plays nicely with other platforms can go a long way toward gathering data from different parts of the business. You can also use AI and automation to do a lot of the heavy lifting here to collect and consolidate that data into something usable. When you get to that point, that’s when the fun really begins.
Supporting your business strategy
You can use skills data to support your business strategy in three ways. The most common approach is reactive, where you have the skills and data to validate (prove right or wrong) the decisions you are making for your organization. Reports and dashboards can tell you if a particular skill is being built, for example, leadership or change management. It can also tell you whether the skills identified as “needed by the business” were, in fact, the right skills.
Proactive involves using skills data to guide decision-making in the business. A deeper understanding of the breadth and depth of skills across the workforce can tell you whether your business is ready to launch a new product or enter a new market. It allows you to prepare beforehand with targeted upskilling and reskilling initiatives.
The final approach is predictive. Here, you use the data to tell you whether there’s any potential disruption. For example, as people leave your workforce, you identify the business-critical skills they’re taking with them. It acts as a red flag, telling you that you need to upskill people in time to plug the emerging skills gap before it threatens performance and profitability. This predictive data can prove valuable in helping pivot your business strategy when headwinds arise.
A lot of the time, the value of data isn’t in the answers it gives you. It’s actually in the questions it forces you to ask. Looking at what the data is showing you, you begin to form hypotheses, and then you work to prove those hypotheses. You end up in a situation where you know what skills you have (and have had previously), the skills you’re building for the future, and the skills that move you toward your business goals. That gives you a clear path forward.
Keeping pace with changing markets
Yet the reality of business today is that things are constantly changing. So, you need your skills data to update and reflect that regularly. This is where learning really proves its worth. Although skills data exists in HR and recruiting systems, it often isn’t updated until someone seeks promotion or leaves a role. It might be updated during a performance review, but this is only once a year.
But by overlaying this data with insights from your learning system, you get more regular updates on your skills data. People learn every day, so if they’re logging this in their learning system, you get a more accurate and timely snapshot of your workforce’s skills.
Connecting with the business
As you gather your skills data, you’ll inevitably connect with peers from other parts of the business. HR and talent acquisition will play a part; people managers may also feed in information, and your senior leadership will likely be watching your progress. Therein lies another opportunity to show how learning impacts the business. By collaborating with colleagues across traditional functional silos, you’ll begin to connect the dots between learning initiatives and business successes like shorter sales cycles, increased customer satisfaction, and greater employee retention.
The path towards skills-based
At some point, you may very well find your organization transforming into a skills-first (otherwise known as a skills-based organization). A lot of organizations, including Unilever, W. L. Gore (the maker of Gore-Tex), and IBM, are already experimenting with skills-based approaches. But it all starts by gathering your skills data and understanding how to use it. Too many teams will fall at this first hurdle because they cannot get colleagues from other departments on board (to ‘give up’ their skills data) or because they get stuck in analysis paralysis and never take action.
