5 key benefits of skills-based organizations
At its core, being a skills-based organization means going from a role or job-driven HR policy to a skills-based HR policy. But on a philosophical level, it means that HR and managers understand that any individual in your organization is not just connected to one role and one particular position at a time, but is the master of a set of skills that are in constant real-time evolution and application. Skills-based organizations recognize that everyone is a talent by nature and everyone has the capacity to gain new potential, new skills and new competencies every day.
The combination of these two principles means that HR leaders of skills-based organizations understand that skills can come from anywhere, from anyone, in any situation, at any time. HR at skills-based organizations thus place skills at the center of talent management and talent experience. But this also means that being a skills-based organization means most HR departments need to transform their processes to include more contact points and respond better to strategic insights on the business.
What are the main benefits of being a skills-based organization?
1. Employee engagement and retention
Skills-based organizations allow HR departments to improve engagement and retention by creating a new way of capturing information and understanding. People are seen as multi-layered and multi-faced assets – not only as one person in one role. Being skills-based allows HR to provide more opportunities in a more dynamic way. Employees benefit from access to information and opportunities that open their eyes and help them chart their professional paths.
Moreover, employees need this visibility on their skills and potential future as an individual at your organization. They need to be able to see the paths they have access to in the company. And at the same time, your organization benefits from greater visibility on this person because this person has more to offer than you would know just from their job title.
2. Internal mobility
Driven by the same visibility that boosts retention and keeps your people engaged and growing at your company, a skills-based organization benefits from increased internal mobility.
Plus, when you hire someone internally, it costs less than externally, so the company immediately sees bottom-line benefits as well.
3. Talent marketplace approach
Skills-based organizations benefit from more effective talent marketplaces for agile gig and project staffing. When you staff internally, you aren’t using external resources that usually cost more than the internal resources so you optimize both your efficiency and your productivity.
4. HR efficiency
Skills-based organizations make use of skills data, which provides a better understanding of the potential profiles for any of your opportunities. Leveraging AI can make a difference as well for preparing people reviews, strategic workforce planning tasks and assignments in the company or recruitment. Skills-specialized AI tools can decrease the time needed to prepare for these touch points or tasks and increase HR efficiency.
5. Learning and development
When you have more precise knowledge of the skills and the competencies of your people and the skills and competencies in your learning and development catalog, you can benefit from better matching between the supply and demand of learning and upskilling opportunities. This allows you to optimize your learning budget and track the use of your learning content for significant savings in your tools and content learning budgets.
At 365Talents, we start with the skills transformation with skills intelligence. We invite our partners to bring the data and the sources of information they have or think they have, as well as a list of what they don't have.
The degree of skills data you have doesn’t matter as much as your clarity of mission. Some of our partners say, “This is our existing framework and this is how it works in our company. Tell us how to put that into a dynamic mode, in real-time mode using a decentralized approach.” But about 50% come and tell us, “We don't have anything. We don't have any skills frameworks, we don't have skills data. Please help us build from scratch something that will help us to have a skills intelligence engine at the center of what we want to change.”
No matter the depth of pre-existing materials, 365Talents then contributes our own skills intelligence and frameworks, with external data and benchmark data, and a technology that is able to infer skills and to cluster and structure this information across different 45+ languages. We combine and adapt our resources and capabilities to what the client has (or doesn’t have). In either case, this adapting phase is really essential to creating something strong.
When we talk to a partner, we say, come and we'll spend one hour talking about the ontology and how it works in our platform and with our technology. If the partner is prepared and knows what data they have and what results they want to see, in one hour of conversation, we already know where to start and what the first steps are in this skills approach, moving us faster to discussing the ROI they can attain with such a transformation. And finally, we talk about the project and implementation and the resources they need to allocate to launch.
To learn more about how 365Talents supports skills-based organizations or to schedule your first consultation, reach out to our team today.
Uncover more HR insights
