Skills Transformation Leader Series from SkyHive by Cornerstone
In the first article in this series, we cover five important milestones for your organization’s skills transformation journey:
1. Define your driving purpose
2. Build on top of a modern, flexible job architecture
3. Use responsible AI to minimize manual work
4. Evolve your organization’s skills maturity
5. Engage your workforce in the skills vision
This second article in the Skills Transformation Leader Series delves into the benefits and migration steps to upgrade to a modern job architecture.
Creating a flexible, data-powered job architecture is a foundational step to becoming a skills-based organization.
By adopting a trusted skills intelligence platform such as SkyHive by Cornerstone, your agile job architecture provides a consistent and transparent framework for development activities and career paths for all employees in your organization.
Mercer notes that for HR practitioners “the greatest value from job architecture are the insights that it provides” including data to inform your organization’s:
- Critical skills investment and experiences, both vertically and horizontally across your organization
- Employee career paths
- Size and shape of the workforce
- Steps to alleviate the scarcity of critical capabilities and skills
- Talent initiatives investment
- Upskilling and reskilling opportunities
- When to build, buy, or borrow talent
A modern job architecture incorporates external skills data from the labor market. Using Responsible AI, it automates the creation of job descriptions and skill requirements.
Human Resource Executive interviewed Travis Windling, director and head of talent acquisition at financial services and insurance provider Manulife, about their skills transformation. Many organizations move forward with talent marketplaces or other initiatives without undertaking “this important work upfront” to understand what their workforce really looks like.
Combining SkyHive data with discussions with Manulife employees around the world, Manulife fit 1,700 job titles into about 40 roles which were grouped into job families. Manulife worked with SkyHive to map all of its internal jobs to the external labor market.
This effort produced important insights. “As it redefined roles, Manulife ultimately determined it had approximately 100 true engineers — and wanted to scale that up to 1,000, through external hires and upskilling of the current workforce.” (Human Resource Executive, March 2023).
Watch the SkyHive Job Architecture Video
This video shows how SkyHive supports you and your colleagues to build and enrich a modern, flexible job architecture for your organization.
Previous Generation Static, Manual Job Frameworks
In theory, job architecture maps from organizational strategy and required skills to hiring and retraining. But if we’re honest, in the past this hasn’t been the case.
Previous generation job frameworks rely on job descriptions, resumes, CVs, and LinkedIn profiles to the neglect of important skills not covered in these traditional sources.
In many organizations, the HR team and consultants spend months to build a skills inventory spreadsheet or database. They waste too many hours and dollars on tedious manual work.
These static job frameworks then quickly become out of date. They miss emerging new skills becoming in demand as the business and external talent market evolve.
“To support our transformation agenda”, Baker Hughes former CTO Elie Alam explains that “this is not something that could be solved using Excel spreadsheets or tribal knowledge of who has which skills and who we could bring for a new project.” (SkyHive video, “Why Baker Hughes is Emphasizing Skills with SkyHive”.)
Figure: Example of a Manually Built Job Architecture Spreadsheet
Image source: https://www.jemata.com/work-1/job-architecture
Forrester Principal Analyst Betsy Summers describes the challenges with skills based transformation prior to the advent of AI-powered workforce management software such as SkyHive.
In her research ”You Need Skills Intelligence Technology To Master A Skills-Based Talent Practice” (June 26, 2023), Summers writes that “The old way of managing skills and competencies can’t keep up with humans who are always learning and growing, nor with leaders who need to anticipate what’s next and recompose their workforce accordingly. Leaders need new AI-powered skills intelligence technology to enable their adaptive workforce.”
Struggling to solve their talent challenges, some organizations have tried to “throw AI at the problem". They rush to buy HR Tech that will go find job applicants or existing employees with in-demand skills. They still face skills challenges. And they are unable to solve internal mobility or conduct through workforce planning.
Adopting an Agile Job Architecture
SkyHive has partnered with over 100 large enterprises and government agencies on skills transformations.
If you’ve not seen the previous article in this series, take a look at Five MileStones to Achieving Success as a Skills Transformation Leader.
A flexible, modern job architecture powered by a partner like SkyHive provides immediate ROI in mapping the skills your workforce already has and the adjacent skills your employees can learn to the skills your organization needs today and in the future.
SkyHive Responsible AI generates skills and descriptions with identified job profiles.
SkyHive maps job titles, job hierarchies, and required skills to create your new skills-based job architecture.
Working with SkyHive, it’s not uncommon to transform 35,000 job descriptions into 150 clusters.
With SkyHive, real-time data from the global talent market informs your talent management system, employee engagement strategies, and learning programs to upskill or reskill your workforce.
Figure: SkyHive Labor Market Intelligence
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The SkyHive AI engine then does the heavy lifting to integrate data from your HR, human capital management (HCP), talent management software, ERP, and other systems into your unique skills master view.
The benefits of your new agile job architecture are significant:
- Identify skill gaps, forecasting future skill needs, and proactively addressing talent shortages or surpluses.
- Match employees and candidates to current or emerging roles based on their skills vs. relying on traditional job descriptions
- Adapt to market changes, innovate, and stay ahead of competitors.
Let's say there is a certain skill that’s becoming more common among customer-service managers. You and your team will receive suggestions to add that skill to the associated job profile.
Say a new computer language or open source project is becoming more common among software developers in your industry. SkyHive will prompt you to add this new skill for those roles.
Meanwhile, your employees see career choices for internal mobility that help them think laterally as well as vertically. And they see available resources to learn and apply adjacent skills.
Figure: SkyHive Career Path Explorer
Now you can build personal learning paths for each member of your workforce to develop new skills and meet their career goals. You can better match people to gigs and projects. You can accurately conduct workforce planning based on skills and potential.
In awarding SkyHive one of the “Next Big Technologies Working for Social Good in 2023”, Fast Company explains that SkyHive “uses AI to match people to jobs they might not have thought were a fit but that they actually have the transferable skills for…. and it even shows learning opportunities that could help bridge a skill gap to enter a new career.”
A modern skills-based job architecture provides the foundation to improve talent acquisition, talent management, employee training, career development, employee retention, and the employee experience.
You see success in retaining top talent and high performers while supporting career development plans and lowering the attrition rate.
Contact SkyHive today to learn how SkyHive supports you and your organization to adopt a modern, flexible job architecture.
About SkyHive by Cornerstone
Recognized by the World Economic Forum and Gartner for our contributions to the future of work, SkyHive enables organizations and communities worldwide from Best Buy, the Government of Canada, and Collège La Cité to Unilever and Zinnia transition from jobs to skills, backed by partnerships including Accenture, SAP, and Workday and non-profits Opportunity@Work and JobsFirstNYC. Learn more about how to unleash human potential at skyhive.ai.
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. acquired SkyHive on May 22, 2024. See the press release for the exciting news. Cornerstone Galaxy, the complete AI-powered Workforce Agility platform, allows organizations to identify skills gaps and development opportunities, retain and engage top talent, and provide multi-modal learning experiences to meet the diverse needs of the modern workforce. Learn more at csod.com.
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