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Shifting to a skills-based organization has many different stages and each poses their own challenges. Yet, often the kick-off stage can be more complex and confusing than the other stages. So here’s how to jump those first hurdles and help accelerate momentum.
Some organizations start by considering what skills are needed. Others start by documenting their current employees’ skills. Workday’s recent Hiring and Talent Trends Report discusses how identifying, tapping into, and nurturing the skills of your existing workforce can create a more agile business and help fulfill a desire by workers to grow in their careers. Some use technology to help with it all, while others struggle to identify the right tech for them.
In short, every journey is different. But these five universal insights should help you refine your thinking and move ahead with confidence.
1. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress
It’s impossible to start with the perfect strategy and too many clients are being thwarted by analysis paralysis. Rather, start with a basic strategy and work to improve things along the way.
To help avoid this initial fear, ask guiding questions such as:
- What’s the overall goal for your organization?
- What skills are missing or what problems need solving immediately?
- What are your key objectives – acquisition, reskilling, upskilling?
Once there’s a basic goal in mind, you and your team can start identifying the right changes to your job architecture. From there you can create a roadmap that links in Workday Skills Cloud – building with a solid foundation and a clear direction to address your objectives.
2. Lay the cultural groundwork for change
It can be difficult to move forward without good communications and change management. So it’s important that stakeholders understand the meaning – and benefits – of a skills-first approach. They should also understand their role in supporting the business to drive the behavioral change required.
Some key considerations include:
- Confirming managers know what’s needed to move to a skills-first culture.
- Making sure employees are clear on the exciting potential impacts – such as more role flexibility and opportunities to upskill.
- Emphasizing that it’s everyone’s responsibility to tag their skills, which in turn helps drive business decision making.
- Deciding who will be responsible for governance, skills management, and maintenance.
- Defining some initial KPIs to track progress.
3. Switch on Workday Skills Cloud
But don't just ‘turn things on’ and hope for the best – make sure it’s being used. Machine learning depends on a breadth and depth of data to make effective recommendations. So the importance of data generation by your teams (as well as migrating your existing skills data) cannot be over-stressed.
The sooner you can start seeing that holistic view of skills within your organization, the sooner you can use AI to apply the data across your processes and initiatives – whether that’s recruiting, learning and development, talent management or mentoring. And as more data gets generated, the more visible the trends – letting you understand how to iterate your skills roadmap to help achieve those longer-term goals.
4. If in doubt, start small
Your initial goal should be simple: get people excited. You want them to start seeing the possibilities of leveraging Workday Skills Cloud to build traction across the business. With that in mind, look for quick wins.
For example, when PwC enabled Workday Skills Cloud and asked employees to tag their skills to their profiles, our recorded skills went up by 90% in a single year.
The addition of Workday Skills Cloud also improved our ability to identify non-technical skills in our employees. This laid the foundation for the next stage of our skills evolution – extending our Workday Skills Cloud to align our ontologies and taxonomies across applications.
5. Get ready for the next step: executing
Soon we’ll publish the next blog in this series, focusing on execution – how to help fast-track the benefits of Workday Skills Cloud and build skills in an effective way.
We’ll also cover vital areas such as your responsibility to help provide a valid and bias-free use of skills in your HR processes and functions. PwC is leading the way in Responsible AI and our alliance relationships are part of that journey. Similarly, Workday’s approach to AI and ML through responsible AI governance provides a solid foundation that is present at every step of development.
Watch PwC’s Chief Products and Technology Officer, Joe Atkinson, and Workday’s CTO, Jim Stratton discuss joint approaches to Responsible AI.
In the meantime, just build that momentum. We recognize first-hand that becoming a skills-based organization isn’t something you can do overnight. Our own skills journey continues to evolve and we’re excited to share our learnings and experiences to help clients reimagine their businesses.
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