Key Trend Three: Talent and Skills Strategies Emerge As Crucial Competitive Advantages

Editor’s Note: Once again, a huge “Thank You” to our expert contributors, Jen Kuzmick, Laura Hume, Brett Schaedler,  and John Huckle. 

This year is an interesting one. Current market conditions are asking leaders to fill dual and often competing priorities: To aggressively cut costs to hedge against a possible recession, while also immediately filling competitive high-value roles, while also educating teams on more agile work approaches, while also importantly diversifying their talent pools, while also hedging against an aging workforce, while also reminding exhausted teams to invest in self-care, while also maximizing productivity. Hmm…

To help leaders cope with all these evolving needs, many of the other (also excellent) HR trend articles coming out right now are recommending that leaders focus on a myriad of new programs, including: Employee well-being, more flexible work models, the reimagining of Corporate Training Academies, ESG as a function to attract talent, mitigating bias in hiring algorithms and advancing DEI initiatives, employee data privacy, helping GenZ work with other humans, and a blended workforce of humans and bots as evidenced by last week’s massive ChatGPT launch (which I, sadly, couldn’t get to write this article).

Is anyone else getting tired yet?

Good news for Skillcentrix’s Trend #3: Talent and Skills Become Critical Competitive Advantages, is that talent strategy influencers from Bersin, Gartner, and Forbes, are also imagining a host of new approaches to understanding skills – from management and soft skills to upskilling and a new approach to “quiet hiring” (which sounds to me an awful lot like upskilling and training – maybe without telling anyone about it?) 

Here’s why: To compete today, companies need a better way to actually understand the humans inside their organizations. By shifting your attention from job roles and org charts (the macro summary of job roles and how your company is organized) to people’s skills (what they do every day while at work), you’ve unearthed a whole new world of talent management.

Skills Strategy Defined

Skills strategy clicks one layer down into understanding your employees and workers. Both an HR vision and technology/data process, a skills-based talent approach, at a high level, gives you more insight into what makes people succeed in their roles. Pretty much everything you want to do with talent in your organization is made better by getting a clearer understanding of what capabilities your team has, and what gaps you need to find and grow.

Deploying this strategic vision are new advances in HRIS, including major advances in core HCM and talent systems such as Workday, as well as newer talent intelligence platforms like SkyHive. That’s because the Skills Cloud has also become the common thread and a foundational technical enablement needed to unlock Workday’s Talent architecture and Talent suite functionality and drive all your HR processes.

Using a skills lens, you can then get much more efficient and agile in hiring talent, mobilizing your workforce, and figuring out how to grow people into new roles – ultimately letting you execute a more comprehensive, thoughtful talent journey – more efficiently.

How? As you can see in the diagram below, Workday’s Skills Cloud touches all major Workday platform elements of Talent and Skills strategy your TA team uses to drive DE&I and other core initiatives.