Why skills strategies stall: The Skills Intelligence Report
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Ready on paper. Stuck in practice.
Three quarters of HR and L&D leaders say their organization is well prepared to reskill. Yet almost half can’t get skills onto leadership’s priority list. To understand that gap, we partnered with Docebo to survey 1,000+ HR and L&D leaders and interview 11 practitioners, analysts and academics.
- The barrier isn’t tooling. 45% name conflicting priorities as their top blocker, well ahead of tooling (25%) and governance (21%).
- The money doesn’t follow the gap. 53% call AI literacy their most critical skill gap, yet rank closing it fifth out of six investment priorities.
- The data is already out of date. 34% still track skills in spreadsheets, and 43% refresh that data only once a quarter.
The report shows where enterprise skills strategies break down, and the six-step blueprint the organizations pulling ahead used to get past it.
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HR owns the strategy. Not the budget.
63% of leaders say HR is primarily responsible for defining the skills strategy. Yet the learning budget sits fully within HR in only 43% of organizations. HR is expected to prove the strategy works without controlling the money that funds it.
That’s why the organizations pulling ahead treat skills the way they treat security or compliance:
- A mandate from the top. Budget, headcount and authority pointed in one direction, not negotiated project by project.
- Shared ownership. A governance framework run jointly by HR and L&D, so skills data informs business planning instead of describing it.
- KPIs agreed upfront. Progress tracked in stages, from adoption to real business impact.
From a skills tactic to a skills system.
A taxonomy in a spreadsheet describes your workforce. A skills system lets the business plan around it. Inside the report:
- Benchmark data on budget splits, ownership and measurement across 1,000+ organizations
- Three enterprise rollouts from Alstom, Veolia and Infinite Campus, including 55,000 employees mapped in nine weeks
- A six-step blueprint, from securing sponsorship to tracking impact, in the order each step needs to happen
- Expert perspectives from Merck, Lighthouse Research & Advisory, Nodes and The Learning Mindset Organization
365Talents’ skills intelligence engine keeps skills data current as roles shift and people move, so HR and L&D plan from where the workforce stands today, not where it stood last quarter.
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