the speed at which you can upskill current talent for new or critical skill domains.
4.Use digital horsepower—through human-machine collaboration via predictive analytics, machine learning (ML), and automation—to accurately and efficiently match and deploy that talent to the right work, at the right time, at the right cost.
MORE THAN A JOB TITLE
It’s often overlooked that before taking up their current positions, people had other roles, industry experiences, skills and interests. Most human capital management (HCM) systems categorize employees by job titles, not skills, though many systems link static job descriptions with requisite skills for those job titles. Even this simple organizing system is flawed because quite often employees can customize their job titles for niches they’re in, thus making common jobs difficult to compare from a systems perspective. For example, a sales manager becomes a “fine wines sales manager,” and a software developer becomes a “hacker” or “QuickBooks guru.”
This difficulty aside, most employees are much more than their job titles. They bring past experiences and current passions that reflect different skills and abilities they can contribute to their organizations, even if those skills aren’t applicable in their current role. For instance, to determine how many web designers a company might have, you would have to get beyond those individuals with “web designer” in their job titles. Some people are self-taught web designers and design websites as a hobby or for personal projects. To answer this question, you would need to survey the skills of these employees to know what talents they possess, regardless of the positions they have today.
Another common example is an employee, let’s call her Kathy, who has a degree in engineering. Kathy’s first job out of school was as a product marketing engineer. She realized she had a knack for understanding the importance of product features and benefits and communicating them to others. As a result, she followed a marketing path rather than an engineering one. However, at Kathy’s core is her love of engineering; it was just that the opportunities in marketing at the time were interesting and challenging. She could have uniquely contributed to projects based on both her engineering and marketing expertise. But as her time with the company progressed, she remained a marketer, and no one considered asking her to participate in a project that required engineering abilities. Consequently, Kathy now feels that her skills are underutilized by her employer. She is more than her current job title and could offer far more to her employer if the organization thought of her as a whole person.
MAKING TALENT VISIBLE
If employees are more than their job titles, how do you improve the visibility of your company’s talents and what can you do with this increased visibility? What can you learn from the gig economy and how can you apply some of that knowledge to your company? Most gig workers find their work on talent platforms (Upwork, Toptal, Guru, Fiverr, etc.) where those looking to hire an individual search a database of people who have specific skills for certain projects. The gig workers on the platform enter their skills and interests into the database. The talent platform then matches gig workers with opportunity providers. By mirroring such a system internally, organizations can gain greater visibility into their own talent.
In today’s constantly changing business environment, organizations need to gain an in-depth understanding of the talent they have to both leverage the skills inside their companies and create strategies to transition employees to new kinds of work. Let’s start with the first goal—better leveraging the talent you already have. Chapter 1 presents a new talent operating model; we expand on this model in Part Three: How to Make It Work. The new talent operating model is a way for organizations to identify and analyze talent based on skills, not job titles. This gives more insight into the complete set of capabilities within the organization beyond the bounds of job titles or résumés.
If Kathy’s organization were to reduce its investment in marketing and shift more resources into innovation through its engineering team, her company could possibly avoid laying her off and she could pivot to an engineering role. Or a short-term project might arise that requires her engineering talent, when most of the existing engineering staff are overcommitted already. Kathy might enjoy a short-term, part-time project to use her engineering skills in addition to furthering the marketing expertise she gains in her current role.
Now let’s address the need for strategies to transition employees to new kinds of work. Every day we’re inundated with articles addressing the shifting business landscape and the quandary many organizations face of what to do with their current workforces when, because of technological advancements in the workplace, existing skills become obsolete and new skills are needed. When a company is undergoing significant strategic shifts, it is particularly important to gain greater insight into all of the skills in the company.
For example, in 2015 John Chambers, at the time CEO of Cisco Systems, wrote about his company’s shift from routers and switches to cloud computing and the IoT.2 In February 2017, we interviewed Ian Bailie, who was then senior director, talent acquisition and people planning operations, at Cisco. He spoke about the importance of gaining visibility of the company’s talent during its transition to the IoT. Bailie told us: “We needed to gain a better idea of the skills, knowledge and expertise of our employees. Cisco is going through a big transformation, and we are moving away from our core expertise. When we look at the external labor market, there are not enough of the skills we need to succeed in our move toward the Internet of Things. The idea of laying off people with the old skills and hiring people with the new skills we need is not really a viable option. We needed to minimize laying off talent by reskilling people for the future of work.” Gaining visibility into the skills Cisco currently had gave the company insight into who might be able to make the transition to the newly required skill sets, and thus whom the company should focus on first for reskilling to grow the talent needed within the organization.
Cisco is a specific example of a company moving away from its core expertise to a new area of focus. But it is more and more common for organizations to experience shifting technologies, platforms and areas of attention based on evolving business needs and new strategic priorities. Many employees’ future roles haven’t been invented yet, an indication of how quickly the workplace is evolving. Companies can’t assume they can lay off employees who possess an old set of skills and then hire employees with the necessary new skills. There are not enough people with those hot, in-demand skill sets available to satisfy all companies as they move to big-data analytics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI) and so on.
Given this talent shortage, firms need to figure out how to build their own talent. Furthermore, reskilling the company’s employees for the future of work is one tangible example of the Business Roundtable’s redefinition of the purpose of a corporation, which expands the definition beyond serving only shareholders to also include serving customers, employees, suppliers and communities. Investing in employees and the communities a business serves is critical to its long-term success. When skills become visible, any organization can then manage both its supply as well as the demand for such talent through requests on projects or open requisitions. Armed with this information, an organization can create talent strategies to close the supply-demand gap and prepare for future strategic shifts.
By gaining visibility into the hidden skills, capabilities and aspirations of their employees, organizations can more rapidly and cost-effectively match the right talent to solve real-time business challenges. They can also tap into discretionary effort from a highly engaged workforce by allowing employees to work on those projects that best match their skills and interests. The future is about connecting people with opportunities for micro-learning, personal growth and fully leveraging all of their capabilities so that they can lead more fulfilling careers and companies can maximize their investment in talent.
