In 2021, the HR research and analyst company RedThread Research released several podcast episodes under the series title “The Skills Obsession.” I can’t think of a more apt name to describe the state of talent development today.
The industry is indeed obsessed with skills, viewing them as a panacea that — once they’re all defined, articulated, cataloged, categorized and automated — will fix the talent problem for years to come, including the woes caused by digital transformations, automation and the war for talent.
But, as is often the case, the tail has begun to wag the dog.
Fixation on the more than 30,000 identifiable skills, as tallied up by Emsi, has allowed the industry to deprioritize other kinds of solutions and lose focus on related concerns that lie ahead.
To be clear, I’m not skeptical of skills themselves: They’re important units that can help us get closer to business and industry objectives. I’ve participated in the Open Skills Network, and I’ve called for wider adoption of skills-based hiring practices and continue to hold that belief.
There’s a problem with just focusing on skills, though. In most contexts, they don’t have clear definitions. Most of the time they serve as data points, with little clarification of what altitude they live at. In the rare times when companies do clearly define and map them, the endeavor ends up offering marginal insights. I’ve seen organization after organization sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into consulting and professional services to help implement modules and systems, create ontologies and taxonomies for skills, refine and define — only to ultimately continue to opine about the needs of the future.
The intent is admirable. I’m also optimistic enough to believe that the responsibility of skills mapping will someday fall on AI technology to output robust training profiles for employees, match talent with projects and new jobs, and provide entire organizations the agility they need for staffing and talent development. For now, though, I believe the emphasis the industry puts on individual skills identification should be scaled back. If we don’t, we risk losing sight of our ability to see people’s true potential to succeed.
The overengineering of skills mapping
The first misconception that companies have is that if every skill is mapped, the problems they are saddled with will somehow become easy and work themselves out. Unfortunately, what often becomes a problem is the overengineering that comes with skills mapping itself.
It’s true that having many tools in your toolbox is usually a great thing. But in the case of, say, nailing a picture to a wall, all you really need is a hammer and a nail. Bringing in dozens of other tools to the project will lead to an overengineering of sorts, and you may tangent toward so many other tasks that the picture never gets hung in the end.
The same logic applies to the workforce.
Instead of mapping the skills for the entire organization or an entire business unit, companies should focus on the most in-demand roles and then develop three to five pathways that connect to each. This results in building out skills across 15-20 roles. By focusing on roles that have the most critical needs, as well as the adjacent roles that require similar skill sets, companies can create pathways to jobs that will actually endure and cultivate a longer-lasting talent pipeline.
Recently, I interviewed an internal mobility leader from a financial services company. They found that almost all mobility in the company occurred from a series of gateway roles that were nestled in a few departments. Rather than mapping skills for every role in the company, they needed to focus on the handful of adjacent or foundational roles that had the most overlap with these gateway roles and treat these as feeders of talent. Likewise, those gateway roles created mobility within just a handful of roles in the company. To increase internal mobility, the company needed to map those skills gaps between the roles and accelerate the development of those skills for folks in gateway jobs. Doing this strategically across the organization can start mobilizing talent into roles that are hard to fill via recruiting efforts and create greater engagement and retention from those going through reskilling.
What lies beyond skills
Take a minute to think about your current resume and LinkedIn profile.
If you were to estimate how many of your skills are captured, what would the answer be? Maybe 75 percent, 60 percent, 40 percent? While there’s a high chance that the person reading this has a white-collar job or is an executive in corporate America, that doesn’t completely explain why your resume doesn’t capture all of what you do.
Titles and resumes are a very rough approximation of what you’ve done. They do an even lousier job of defining what you’re capable of doing.
Right now in your organization, there are people who are very similar to my brother, Josh.
He’s a plumber. He has a GED and has not attended a single day of college. He’s spent more days unclogging toilets than he’s ever spent in front of a computer. During the holidays last year, however, he handed his Android phone to me and showed me the three games he built and coded from scratch. He’s never owned a laptop in his life, but he learned to code by joining communities, hacking at GitHub repositories and watching YouTube videos. It blew me away.
Learning happens everywhere.
There are employees on their off-time producing and promoting YouTube, Instagram and TikTok content. They play Roblox and program with their nieces and nephews. They volunteer and run fundraising campaigns for PTAs and junior sports leagues. They project manage personal building projects. They coach teams and mentor members of their community.
They’re also languishing on your front lines.
They are the untapped potential that your 30,000 skills initiative is unlikely to identify and your HCM or LXP tools are unlikely to recommend. But with the right coach and keen management who ask them thoughtful questions and articulate the business value of hobbies, they could unlock all that your organization holds.
Perhaps you belong to an exceptional organization that has figured out the technology and invested in a skilling or training initiative that will yield unbelievable results. It’s much more likely, though, that this is probably not the case. Even if we are on the verge of a sea change when it comes to skills data and technology, the industry should never stop working on skills.
More than ever, it is time to see this as a “skills plus” problem. The employees in your organization would benefit much more from a more intentional skills mapping endeavor — one that focuses on where demand is greatest, increases mobility efforts where it can, and coaches employees to understand all the skills they possess that go far beyond a company’s systems and tagging.
