What is Skills-based Work?
For as long as organizations have existed job titles, qualifications and experience have been the essential measures of value, and the structures around which work has been organized. However, as technology has transformed the pace of change, a more agile approach to work design and talent deployment is crucial.
Skills-based organizations (SBO) deconstruct work into the skills required for specific tasks and elevate those as the organizational principles to identify, assess, develop, and deploy talent. By taking this approach work is transformed through a skill-centric approach to all aspects of the talent strategy.
The Impact of Skills-based work
The effective design of work has been studied and practiced for hundreds of years. Work that is designed around specific tasks that require clearly defined skills can lead to a significant increase in the level of employee agency and engagement in work. Organizations benefit from improved agility and the ability to develop skill specific development paths for their workforce.
Our Approach to Skills-Based Transformations
Our approach to Skills-based work is a partnership that helps our clients to understand the various skills that will drive their business into the future. Using our quadrant approach to skills identification we are able to support clients to understand the intersection of various types of skill and how those contribute to clearly defined work.
- Foundational: critical skills that help the acquisition of more complex skills for work.
- Technical: hard skills that are specific to tasks and functions in the workforce.
- Personal: human and interpersonal skills that allow for collaboration and adaptability.
- Transformational: emerging skills that are valuable for a changed future of work.
Key Outcomes
What are the practical outcomes you should expect from transforming to a skill-based approach?
- A skills framework establishing a taxonomy, skills library, and assessment approach
- A skills-based workforce strategy, covering hiring, development, reward, and mobility.
- A skills-based technology which uses data to identify, assess, match and deploy skills to work.
- Organizational capabilities to engage in continual improvement of skills frameworks and strategies