Skills Management Technology Landscape: Lecture Notes

hi my name is Steve hunt I&#39;m the chief expert for working technology at sap and I&#39;m sharing a short recording well I don&#39;t know how short it&#39;s going to be hopefully not too long about based on a paper I recently released called the skills management technology landscape and this paper is the second in kind of a series of papers I&#39;ve been writing on skills management the other one looks more at the future of skills management particularly the impact of ontologies on the area of skills management but this one looks at the full range of skills Management Solutions available currently available in the market and what led the led me to write this paper was I went out to the sap app store which is a place where you can go and look at all the different solutions both provided by sap and our partners to address different business needs and I just typed on the word skills and I came back with 231 different results 231 different solutions from sap and our partners addressing skills after I went through and sort of C it down to ones that were specifically focused on kind of workforce management topics I still ended up with over 70 different solutions and I&#39;m like how can we make sense of this so what this presentation and this paper focus on is really getting an understanding of what the skills management solution technology landscape looks like what are the different solutions available and which ones would you want to use how do you want to sort of approach it if you&#39;re putting together a skills management technology strategy so in this presentation I&#39;m going to start with a quick overview of what is skills management what is driving the sort of skills crisis I think it&#39;s important to kind of put this stuff in context what is it that we&#39;re talking about and why does it matter I&#39;ll do that pretty quickly because that&#39;s talked about a lot out there then I&#39;m going to talk about skills versus companies and why skills management is so difficult and I think this is important you hear the differentiation skills and companies a lot but I&#39;m looking at it from the angle of why skills management is harder than competency management because a lot of companies have pretty established competency management practices but their skills management practices why every company does it very few companies do it well then I&#39;m going to talk about the skills Management Solutions that are available and this is going to be a bit of a laundry list there&#39;s no real we around it because there&#39;s so many I&#39;m not going to go through the specific Solutions if you want to see the actual examples of companies in the paper there are links to different partner Solutions and sap Solutions here I&#39;m just going to talk at a functionality level about what is it they do what is this technology actually doing in terms of supporting skills management and then end some thoughts about how the markets likely to evolve in some general thoughts about skills management in general and why it&#39;s really important not just for companies it&#39;s actually really important for our society overall so let me start with like you know the first of all what is skills management well skills management basically refers to methods to ensure a company&#39;s Workforce has the knowledge qualifications and Technical expertise to execute its strategy it&#39;s not a new thing if you think about the basic objective of skills management it&#39;s about to have people in jobs that know how to perform those jobs this has been around for a long time it is probably the most important thing in talent management you know do the people in our Workforce have the skills and cap abilities to do the work we&#39;re asking them to do companies have been doing this for 2500 years this picture is the Chinese Empire the Chinese government in you know 300 BC assessed people&#39;s skills to see if they can perform in government jobs so it&#39;s you know it&#39;s not new it&#39;s been around for a long time but it&#39;s very difficult to do well and it&#39;s becoming really really important in the moderate economy because something that is often referred to as the skills crisis so the skills crisis and I talk a lot about this in book I recently released called Talent tectonics it&#39;s it&#39;s a crisis in having enough people with the knowledge to do the work we need to get done in organizations and it&#39;s being driven by what I call two Talent tectonic forces and I use this sort of analogy to like plate tectonics where you know there&#39;s these underlying shifts that we can&#39;t see them we see the results of their action in like earthquakes and mountains you can look at work and workforces the same way there&#39;s two underlying shifts that are having a massive impact on both work and labor markets one is digital ization of everything technology permeating every aspect of our life and work and that&#39;s accelerating the rate of change in organizations it&#39;s also creating demand for very specialized skills at the same time it&#39;s making other skills become obsolete so I mean we&#39;re living right through this with generative AI you know we still really don&#39;t know the full impact of that don&#39;t want to get into that whole discussion but what we know for sure is suddenly skills that are really that were really important probably aren&#39;t as important as they used to be I&#39;m not saying they AR important at all as all but other skills that we had really thought about are suddenly be coming to the Forefront so it&#39;s this need for specialized skills but at the same time this is running headlong into another tectonic sh change related to demographics primarily that there&#39;s more people aging out of our labor markets and entering into them due to Decades of declining birth rates in many Industries now there are more experienc skilled Employees leaving then there are skilled employees coming into these workforces so this is creating skill shortages it&#39;s and it&#39;s not that we don&#39;t have enough people in society I always want to emphasize that we have enough people but we just haven&#39;t trained and developed all the people to have the skills we need them to have so we have to get a lot better at finding inclusive ways and effective ways to develop people to give them new skills that the organization needs so these two things are creating this sort of skills crisis that are making skills management absolutely critical I mean I work with a lot of companies and it&#39;s amazing how many companies like one company was talking about in manufacturing in the United States they said in certain industries we won&#39;t be able to run manufacturing plants if we don&#39;t figure out some way to develop the people we need with the skills to run these plants it&#39;s it&#39;s not just a business issue it&#39;s actually a societal issue so getting into skills in a little more detail skills are usually contrasted to competencies and the difference between competency and a skill skills are what you know know how to do competencies are how you apply that knowledge competencies focused on behaviors things like building relationships planning organizing driving for results stuff like that but your effectiveness at competencies is influenced heavily by what you know how to do now it&#39;s not the only thing you know it&#39;s like do you have certain knowledge and qualifications like python coding fluent in English do you have commercial driving license these things now these two things absolutely go hand inand you need both you need to know things you need to know how to do them but when it comes to managing them they&#39;re they&#39;re very different in terms of how we actually need to manage them first of all the nature of competencies people are effective or ineffective with competencies not something you know or don&#39;t know how to do like skills and a good little litmus test that I use to say is something a skill or a competency is if you can imagine somebody saying no I don&#39;t know how to do that it&#39;s probably a skill so like if you ask somebody do you know how to build relationships they&#39;re they&#39;re not going to say no they might say they&#39;re not really good at it but they&#39;re not going to say no however if you ask somebody do you know how to speak Japanese they might likely say no I don&#39;t know how to do that so if somebody if you can imagine somebody comfortably saying I don&#39;t know how to do it then it&#39;s probably a skill if it&#39;s more like you know well I&#39;m not that effective then it&#39;s probably more in the competing range now obviously there are different levels and proficiency levels and skills but that&#39;s kind of a general way to think about them now getting into the proficiency levels one of because skills are specific things they get into things we know or don&#39;t know how to do we have or do not have in terms of licenses we can measure them pretty objectively they&#39;re often measured through tests and people can usually pretty actively assess their own level of skills if you give them a clear definition for it in contrast competencies are much harder to assess because they&#39;re not what we know how to do they&#39;re how effectively we apply it and people struggle with evaluating their own performance when it comes to behavioral things whereas we&#39;re much more comfortable evaluating our knowledge we&#39;re okay saying I don&#39;t know how to do something we&#39;re not as okay Cas saying I&#39;m not good at doing something now where skill so far you might say wow skills sound easier to measure because they&#39;re objective and they&#39;re clearly defined but now we&#39;re getting to the part why they are much harder to manage the reason the skills are much harder to manage first of all is because we need so many of them in a large company you can usually to find all of the competencies that influence job for performance using fewer than 100 competencies sometimes it&#39;s a lot fewer than that depending on the kind of organization in contrast in large organizations they often need thousands and thousands of different skills across the different jobs they need different qualifications different technical areas of expertise and so right off the bat when it comes to skills management there&#39;s just a lot more stuff you have to keep track of on top of it skills change really really fast a skill you know you the example of generative AI again comes in but you can think of a lot of examples where usually a techn ology will come in and maybe one skill that was really important is no longer important but now we need new skills entirely new skills whereas competencies because they&#39;re more about behaviors they don&#39;t change that quickly um you may have shifts but in general the competencies in organization needs aren&#39;t going to radically change over night in contrast skills can very suddenly and the last thing has to do with how skills are developed versus competencies competencies are largely developed through increasing people&#39;s self-awareness and self- understanding and self-management now people struggle to develop competencies you know can take a long long time but it&#39;s done through on the job training and awareness and things like that in contrast skills require acquiring usually very specific knowledge or demonstrating very specific qualifications and so we need much more structured methods to develop skills you can with competencies you can kind of apply General leadership coaching programs and management coaching programs to develop a wide range of competencies in contrast skills you&#39;re going to need lots of training courses you&#39;re going to need lots of different assignments there&#39;s so much more to keep track of when it comes to skills management that&#39;s probably the biggest difference between them why skills are so hard is because there&#39;s just so darn many of them and they change so quickly and we need such specialized tools to help people develop and acquire skills so you get a sense of why it&#39;s difficult and you&#39;re think well that&#39;s not difficult enough as it is I have to take a drink of water for the next level of difficulty the other thing that makes skills management really difficult is that it&#39;s a lot of different distinct activities Each of which can be complex and quite timec consuming when you look at skills management it starts with do we know what skills matter at all you can&#39;t manage skills if you don&#39;t understand what skills that matter but as there be thousands of different skills that matter some cases they may be really specialized you may only need two or three people in the company to have them but if they don&#39;t have them the company can&#39;t operate you know good example I mean healthcare for example if you don&#39;t have an anesthesiologist with certain skills at a certain time you can&#39;t run the whole organization you got to shut down the whole operation so you know keeping track of all the different skills that you need and this is like having tools to understand the skills that and on top of that as I said they&#39;re changing too so how can we understand the skills the company needs then how processes to understand what skills specific individuals have so we know the company needs but who has them who has them internally who has them externally who has them among contractors how do we get out and measure the skills people have and it&#39;s one thing to say you have a skill it&#39;s another thing to be effective at that skill how do we measure proficiency level and this is really important for certain jobs you know somebody comes in and say well yeah I I&#39;m uh I have experience at project management does that mean they&#39;re effective project manager do they have good project management skills how do we assess sort of proficiency levels in different skills then we don&#39;t Define skills and measure people&#39;s skills just to have that data we want to use that to match people to different jobs the biggest use of skills is linking people to career opportunities and that requires us not only to understand the skills required by the person or rather the skills that the person has it also requires us to understand the skills required by the job and defining jobs and job types and teams in terms of skills so that has all another level of complexity then you&#39;ve got confirmation in many jobs it is a legal requirement that you confirm not only that people have skills but they can demonstrate the effective use of those skills in the context of the job so for example they can effectively and safely use a machine so somebody might say I know how to drive a forklift but you may be required to have them demonstrate their Proficiency in driving that forklift in your Warehouse because the consequences of not doing it well are so high and so those example have tools that how we have tools to confirm and certify that people can effectively apply their skills on the job then we get into the course of what if people don&#39;t have skills and we want to help them develop them well the first thing is we have to help people understand what skills they need what skills would allow me to Advance my career what skills do I need to be more effective in my current job and where can I access resources to develop those skills whether that&#39;s training or coaching or other materials then we have to build those resources again whether training being the most common but also coaching and other things to help people learn skills build tools that allow us to teach people to do very specific things and this again there&#39;s so many skills you need lots of different tools to teach and train them and the skills are changing so we need to build new tools then for many jobs that are highly skill dependent require very specific skills there&#39;s a a lot of these jobs are Frontline roles where people are working different shifts on different lines and different assignments and so how do we make sure that we have people allocated to different shifts and different schedules and different projects based on their skills and we&#39;re making effective use of the skills in the workforce also how are we rewarding people for those skills the the greater the skill shortage the more there is competitive pressure for companies to hire employees away from each other that have in demand skills and so companies want to make sure that they&#39;re paying appropriately for the skills people have both so they can attract people with skills but also that if they develop people&#39;s skills they can retain those people as people build more skills they become more valuable in the labor market and companies should need to adjust that over time to incent people both to build skills but also to keep people once they have them so that gets into really a much more sophisticated way of doing compensation than your traditional you know annual Merit increase or hourly pay rate and the last one is data governance The More We Have Skills management tools the more important skills become the more data is going to be generated about skills and the skills people have the skills skills we need the training courses we&#39;ve got the jobs we have how we pay skills all this different stuff tools that allow us to manage this data in effective way to take it from one place move it get it to another place in a safe and secure manner because one of the things also about skills is a lot of this data actually is quite sensitive I know I know of companies that will not share their skills data externally because they&#39;re saying if you saw the data that we were looking at in terms of skills you could infer what our product strategy is similarly a lot of employees on the skills that are measured they may not necessarily want that shared publicly some of the data might be what they about what they don&#39;t know and people don&#39;t necessarily like to broadcast the things that they&#39;re not good at and so there&#39;s a whole area of employee confidentiality as well as just the desire to move data around more effectively so when you look at all of these things all of these are non-trivial and all of them are critical part of skills management which is why as I&#39;ll talk a little bit we&#39;re having all this technology that&#39;s being built to support report all these different things which also it should be no surprise there&#39;s no one solution that does every single one of things really well lots of solutions do multiple but we&#39;re seeing a whole explosion Innovation and companies finding new ways to support these things because not only are these things by themselves complicated you add to the fact that all these activities have to be performed in a world where the skills are constantly shifting the people that possess skills are evolving you know people develop skills that&#39;s one of the great things about people we learn over time so we have to keep track of what people have learned how to do but also certain skills might become obsolete or they may have forgotten how to do them we have to keep track of that too the skills available the company are moving that people are moving around in organizations and last the Technology Solutions are changing so there&#39;s all this stuff going on which is really why companies need to have good skills management strategies just so you can keep track of both what you&#39;re doing but also be aware of maybe what you aren&#39;t doing or you should be doing differently even if you can&#39;t change it now at least be aware of what you should change so let me talk a little bit about the skills Management Solutions themselves what is it the skills management technology actually does to enable us to do those 10 activities more effectively now if you want more detail and examples go into the paper there&#39;s links to different companies that do these different things so you can get a better sense of it but very at a high level I&#39;m just going to kind of hit on what is this technology actually doing and how&#39;s it changing how companies are able to perform different skills management activities starting with Workforce intelligence and skills intelligence skills intelligence is about understanding what what skills the company has what skills the company needs the most traditional way is Workforce analytics tools and these are getting really sophisticated where they can pull in skills data from a lot of different places from job assignments from employee profiles from training course requirements and they can help you sort of get a sense of what are the skills we have in the company where are they located where different people located in the organization with different skills how many of them do we have at a more sophisticated level though we&#39;re also seeing rapid use of what are called skills ontologies that do the same thing that Workforce analytics does at one level but they take it to a deeper level because often when you&#39;re looking at skills one of the challenges that skills they don&#39;t all have the same name or employees may not fully describe it so an employee for example might say I have Excel skills skills and Excel well if you have skills and Excel then you actually have spreadsheet management skills because Excel is a spreadsheet but you might not listen to spreadsheet management but if you know how to use Excel you could probably learn how to use other spreadsheet related tasks even if they weren&#39;t in Excel because you have an underlying skill associated with spreadsheet management the issue is with traditional like skills we don&#39;t match it at that level somebody says I have Excel and somebody says I need somebody has spreadsheet management experience it doesn&#39;t make that link whereas ontologies are able to infer to what&#39;s called natural link language processing they&#39;re able to infer different relationsships between skills if you know how to do this then you&#39;re likely know how to do that they can also look across the labor market they can look at job descriptions and they provide this really sophisticated way to better understand what skills are out there what skills does a company need so you get a better understand of sort of what what are the skills that matter to the organization when you get to description which is about understand skills individual people have the most traditional way to do this and there&#39;s you know increasingly sophisticated efficient tools for it is just self-report tools where you just ask people what skills do you have and you have them rate themselves and they&#39;re tools that are getting more sophisticated about asking them different skills based on different job types they have so employees aren&#39;t like just filling out massively long lists but the self-report profile is one way of doing it it&#39;s probably the most traditional there&#39;s also what are called inferred profiles and these are using again often ontology type tools where they look at data on employees like their past education past job experiences past assignments learning courses they&#39;ve taken and based on that they infer the skills they are likely to have based on the experiences that we&#39;re able to measure based on digital information about that employee then there&#39;s also aptitude profiles which don&#39;t measure skills so much as they measure people&#39;s capability to learn skills different skills and these are sort of typically psychometric instruments like personality tests and ability tests that give you a sense of okay this person probably is good at learning mechanical skills or this person have an aptitude for learning you know like designing or artistic skills they give you kind of insights into that so those are lots of interesting tools now like the personality toolss those have been around for a long time but companies are getting more sophisticated at linking the attributes and traits measured by personality and ability tests to the kind of skills that companies need in different jobs getting into the validation which is about saying well do people are people provision different skills obviously there&#39;s tests and test tests are getting more and more sophisticated too you know again something called computer adaptive testing that allows us to give very very precise tests get very specific measures on people in a minimal amount of time so there&#39;s much more sophisticated testing technology than maybe what you&#39;re aware of from the past also companies using simulations including virtual reality simulations to get a sense of people&#39;s skills level and sort of a niche thing but it&#39;s interesting is analytically inferred estimates it&#39;s what I call it I don&#39;t you know because it&#39;s so new there is a good name for it but basically it&#39;s looking at data for what people have done in the past so for example if there was a computer programmer you might look at the code that they had written and infer their proficiency level based on the code that they had written now this the ability to use these tools depends on the ability to get past samples of people&#39;s job you know tasks that people actually perform work before but it&#39;s interesting it&#39; be like looking at what somebody&#39;s written to infer their writing proficiency um so kind of a niche thing I kind of threw it in there because I only know a couple companies that actually do it but it&#39;s kind of cool so that&#39;s why I threw it in getting into matching and I split matching which is about matching People based on their skills to job opportunities I split it into two things first of all how they do it one there&#39;s tools that use tags you know basically when you post a job you tag the skills you need employees list their skills or the training course you tag the skills and it allows people to match up that way that&#39;s sort of the traditional way of doing it then there&#39;s these more complicated ontology based algorithms where they do the same thing as tags but they infer a lot more so they cast a wider net so like if a you know for example you said we have a job that requires somebody to have statistical analysis skills it might say well a candidate might say I&#39;m proficient in programming in SPSS which is a statistical analysis program they might not say I have statistical analysis skills but if you know how to program SPSS you probably have statistical analysis skills so these tools kind of can look one letter or Beyond they can interpret Beyond just the written word to kind of the underlying skills to make these matches then in terms of matching the what well the most common is full-time positions these tools are being used exess extensively for recruiting but they can also be used for Contracting which I think is really important because one of the main reasons companies employ contractors is to get people with highly specialized skills that the company may not have in the workforce they&#39;re also being used for internal projects so giving sort of that idea of gig worker Dynamic team so that we can get people certain skills they fit to different projects but also people that want to learn certain skills you can say this project is going to give you a chance to learn a certain skill so it&#39;s a way to promote internal Talent movement and through greater learning of skills through job assignments now getting on to the next one confirmation and this one&#39;s particularly relevant to what I called you know regulated Industries there&#39;s a lot of Industry like in healthc care and in manufacturing and in energy where there are a lot of requirements that people demonstrate proficiency at certain skills in order to perform them one of the ways to do this is what I call sort of checklist demonstrations where often the supervisor will have to watch somebody perform a task in the job and check that they did certain things appropriately but also there&#39;s validated learning or training which is making sure that people have taken training successfully completed training courses and a lot of these one of the things is not only do we need to make sure people have confirmed that they&#39;re proficient in certain skills before they go on the job in many jobs we need to do this every year or every six months you know basically to make sure is this person&#39;s are those person&#39;s skills up to date is their knowledge other qualifications up to date and so there&#39;s a lot of tools that help not just with the confirmation but keeping track that have we done it when we need to do it how we you know kept on track and I think one of the things that&#39;s really interesting in this particular one too is increasingly we&#39;re seeing these confirmation skills Management Solutions link out to operational Solutions so like an example imagine an employee has to have demonstrated their Proficiency in completing a forklift driving course before they&#39;re allowed to operate a forklift well companies might have a employee ID card that they need to scan to turn on a forklift but that card May T tie back to a skills management validated Learning System that says hey this employee their learning certification on driving a forklift is out of date they need to recertify by taking this test and then it can actually to have them deliver them the test to take right there in place so tying these confirmation solutions to sort of business management Sol I mean sorry business operations Solutions it&#39;s kind of interesting innovation in the use of this particular aspect of skills management then shifting from sort of checking whether people have skills to helping people develop skills you have solutions that focus on helping employees understand what skills will allow them to advance their careers move to New jobs or be more effective in their current role and then these are and then giving them a sense of where can I go to get training coaching or job assignments to get those skills so these are solutions that both give employees a sense of self-awareness but also a sense of guidance and Direction on how they can build their own skills over time related to these tools but it is different is not just saying hey here&#39;s the training you need or here&#39;s the mentoring you need and pointing them in the right direction it&#39;s actually building the training programs or building the mentoring programs and these are where you have some really interesting stuff in training where there&#39;s tools that are really speeding up the time that we can get training part of this is through something called social training or social learning where we take skilled employees and help those skilled employees get more effective at sharing their knowledge with other employees there&#39;s tools that take like I&#39;ve saw a tool that takes manuals and you can just feed the manual into the tool and it turns it into a micro learning course where that takes this big manual into small nudges that are delivered through texting there&#39;s really cool technology that&#39;s allowing us to do training of skills much more effectively much more embedded in the flow of work in the past there&#39;s also a lot of cool stuff around simulations that are very powerful for teaching certain kinds of skills so lots of stuff that&#39;s happening that&#39;s changing How We Do skills acquisition in terms of skills assignment and this I say this is really relevant to Frontline jobs in particular much more you know the more we have skill shortages the more we have to use the people&#39;s skills really effectively so much more sophisticated tools that allow you to make sure that you have the right people with the right skills and the right jobs at the right time making sure that you&#39;re not overworking certain people having excessive levels of overtime much more knowledge around you know managing the workforce and this is also really important because we&#39;re seeing a lot higher levels of turnover on a lot of Frontline manufacturing jobs as we&#39;re having higher levels of turnover that ability to keep track of who knows how to do what gets harder and harder for managers and shift supervisors and so tools that give them much greater knowledge and ability to manage the skills of the workforce to get the right people on the right shifts at the right time there&#39;s also tools that are focused more broadly on project management as opposed to shift Management in terms of evaluation the more we have skill shortages the more valuable people certain skills are going to be now historically companies it&#39;s not that they wouldn&#39;t pay for skills but it tended to be done maybe on an annual basis maybe we do salary adjustments and things like that making a move towards much more precise agile and ongoing Financial reward for skills now there could be a whole big discussion about whether or not you should or should not reward people for developing new skills I personally think that it makes a lot of sense um if you do it the right way because the more skills your employees have assuming they&#39;re getting their job relevant organizational relevant skills the more value they have the organization the more flexibility the company has the question is though if we&#39;re going to start rewarding people for skills development and More fine-tune Level we need better tools to keep track of the skills people have learned but then tie it to compensation decisions and rewards now an area of Technology that&#39;s really exploding recently sales performance management technology that is really about managing commission structures historically is now being used to manage not just whether or not people acquire skills but the performance of tasks in their jobs that they are performing certain tasks that require a higher level of skill therefore they&#39;re getting paid more for doing those tasks so what they&#39;re doing is they&#39;re indirectly rewarding skills development because they&#39;re not actually paying people for acquiring the skills they&#39;re paying people for performing the tasks but they couldn&#39;t perform the tasks if they didn&#39;t have the skills so a lot of really kind of interesting thing and I think this is an area where we&#39;re going to see a lot more Innovation and investment over the coming years but it&#39;s already starting to take off because the more there&#39;s a skill shortage the more valuable the skills the more valuable skills the more we need to make sure that we&#39;re compensating people so that we retain people not just so we hire them but if they develop skills we retain them as well and then the last one data governance there&#39;s two ways of managing skills data there&#39;re you know pretty Standalone platforms particularly ones that have ontologies do have a lot of sophisticated tools for managing skills data but it&#39;s not at the level that you find in core HR platforms and I really do think the future data governance is going to be core HR platforms like the talent intelligence Hub and sap is a really good example because you want some place to take data from maybe third-party applications you want to be able to clean up that data control it share it with different applications so maybe take data from a skills intelligence solution clean it up feed it into the data you use for workforce planning maybe take that data that you use from a skills description solution about employees feed that into succession management data so a lot of ways that you can control this data I think as we see more and more skills Management Solutions more focus on skills management we&#39;re going to need much much better data governance and there is a lot of innovation in this area but I think the most powerful is coming from your Corr platforms and obviously I favor sap because that&#39;s how I work and we&#39;ve done a lot of really cool work on our talent intelligence Hub so if you&#39;re an sap customer and you haven&#39;t checked it out check it out so it gets to the next thing what skills Management Solutions should your company use well it&#39;s a long presentation I need water so one way to it start you know was looking how to answer this question well first of all I thought you know I&#39;ve looked at a lot of skills man Solutions and they do kind of fall into three broad categories there are specialized Solutions um that usually focus on one or two activities you know just for skills validation and testing or Solutions just for skills assignment and scheduling so you can have some really specialized Solutions some of these Solutions often can be up and running in under 3 weeks and they fall they solve very specific needs there&#39;s also what I call a class of what I call ontology based Solutions solutions that use these ontologies that are much more sophisticated and complicated they tend to support multiple things they tend to be focused on different areas like skills intelligence um matching and Staffing Learning and Development skills acquisition often they overlap um these to be take more of a lift to install into an organization to get up and running but they do provide a tremendous amount of power especially about really understanding the skills in your company and then there&#39;s the platform based Solutions like Talon intelligence Hub like in sap that really allow you to take a lot of data from different these first two hands of solutions and apply it in a lot of different ways within the organization so when you&#39;re looking at skills management technology strategies you&#39;re probably going to be looking at these three areas and kind of thinking well where do we want to go in different areas because obviously some are much bigger lift in terms of getting them implemented in organization and others but also you know the greater the implementation usually means much greater the value so you kind of have to balance that out in terms of the well where should you start obviously which solutions to use depend on the problems you&#39;re trying to solve and the big problems that you kind of fall into five areas if the problem is we don&#39;t know what skills we even need you&#39;re going to want to look at a skills intelligent solution of some sort if the issue is more like well we know the skills we need but we don&#39;t know if our Workforce has them then you&#39;re going to look at skills intelligence description validation and Confirmation type Solutions if you&#39;re like well we need to develop new skills in the workforce it&#39;s going to be about skills development and acquisition Solutions if you struggle to hire and retain skilled Talent it&#39;s more about skills matching and valuation and if you want to become more agile and effective at using Workforce skills in general it&#39;s going to be matching assignment and data governance although I would argue you want data governance under all of these it&#39;s particularly important when you&#39;re issues like we got a lot of skilled employees in the company with a lot of specialized moves we&#39;re trying to be much more agile and effective in using the count Talent we already have that&#39;s when data governments become really really important so the last thing I&#39;d say on this though is regardless of what route you go you&#39;re probably going to need multiple Solutions just because these Solutions are so different they do different things you want to pull them into a comprehensive strategy but why most skills management solution support more than one area of skills management I don&#39;t think anyone does everyone exceptionally well some do a few phenomenally well a lot do many quite well but nothing does everything um and so you&#39;re really going to think about how do we want to put together a suite and make sure that they work together in an effective manner which gets to my last slide which is how&#39;s the skills management landscape likely to evolve because you might thinking with all this Innovation where are we going and I&#39;m useing a form of two analogies an analogy to shoes and an analogy to airplanes one why are skills Management Solutions like shoes and the answer is because one type will never be enough I mean all shoes basically their function is to protect our feet yeah they do more than that but that&#39;s the basic function of them right but why do we need so many different kinds of shoes well because we have different situations different styles we want different shoes for different kinds of occasions it&#39;s the same thing with skills Management Solutions not only do they focus on the different areas I talked about many of these Solutions are designed for different kinds of employees some are really designed for contractors some are designed for certain specific Industries some are designed to work in certain countries and labor markets with certain kinds of regulations so we&#39;re always going to sort of need specialized skills management tools and will we see consolidation in the market absolutely we&#39;re going to see some of these these existing Solutions come together merge together collapse together but that&#39;s going to fuel innovation in other areas skills management it&#39;s much like per Performance Management it&#39;s something we&#39;re never going to master it&#39;s so complicated and difficult we can always do it better so as we solve one set of problems and consolidate that and certain Solutions become more commoditized you&#39;re going to see innovation in whole new types of solutions we haven&#39;t thought of yet so that&#39;s one side and kind of look at this how the market is likely to evolve the other thing in terms of how I see it evolving is the analogy of why are skills Management Solutions like airplanes we tend to talk about airplanes like being built by Boeing or being built by Airbus but in reality Boeing and Airbus they don&#39;t so much build airplanes as assemble them yes they do build certain major things like the fuselage or the wings but the wheels the engines the cockpit instrumentation that all comes from other vendors and what they do is they effectively provide a platform to bring all of these things together into a coherent ho that&#39;s really what I think is also going to happen in the future skills management is core HR platforms companies are going to need core HR platforms that are equipped to deal with increasingly complicated sophisticated levels of both skills management data and skills managed third party applications and so looking in your technology strategy not only what Solutions do we need on a point level how can we pull these together into a coherent whole so that our skills management strategy connects effectively with our broader talent management strategy things like succession compensation training things like that so in some I hope that you found this overview interesting um it&#39;s a lot to cover I tried to cover it as quickly as I could but it is a lot to cover I&#39;d say a closing thought though and going back to my book Talent tectonics I talked about earlier skills management is important for companies you know actually important actually becom super critical but it&#39;s also important for employees companies can&#39;t be successful if employees don&#39;t have the skills they need to support their strategies but employees can&#39;t be successful if they don&#39;t have the skills to BU build successful careers to perform their jobs it really is a great example of why employee experience and or company needs really balance each other in this area and when we look at technology companies tend to invest in technology one is to maximize human potential to get more people but also we do it to reduce Workforce costs and a lot of the changes in Technologies inevitably and it always has and it always Wills we get technology that&#39;s going to eliminate certain types of jobs and create new ones but technology particularly if you look at all this new skills management technology can also help people transition to new types of work we should take the cost efficiencies that we&#39;re getting from using technology to automate a lot of job tasks and reinvest it or at least a portion of it in technology to help employees develop skills for the next generation of jobs technolog is going to change the world of work and we kind of whether this change is a future of work that is utopian or dystopian though really it&#39;s about how we the technology that we&#39;re kind of going in two directions in our society right now One Direction is that we&#39;re moving a more skills-based world where people are constantly being hired to develop new capabilities and they&#39;re hired for their potential as much as what they already know and there&#39;s a lot of movement with fulfilling work that&#39;s one direction we are kind of going but we&#39;re also going another Direction where we&#39;re going to have two very distinct labor markets of Highly skilled probably well-paid but highly overworked people with special skills and people down in another labor market whose skills are no longer relevant to the modern world of work they struggle in a series of low underpaid jobs and precarious employment we don&#39;t want that split and this skills management technology that&#39;s being built can help companies not just make the organization more successful it can make people&#39;s careers more successful as we&#39;re going through this time of increasing turbulence and change brought upon largely by technology itself so in in some in some there are lots of things that you can do to improve skills management as far as what is something what is the thing that you should do right now it&#39;s going to depend on your company but I would say that every company should do something because it matters it matters for the company it matters for the employees and it matters more broadly to be honest about for our whole society so with that I hope that you&#39;re inspired to move forward if you want to get more details you can read the paper which does again have links to different examples of different solutions all from sap and the sap partner Community as well as another paper that I wrote that talks more broadly about skills ontologies and where we see that going over the future so thank you very much I hope you enjoyed this

hi my name is Steve hunt I&amp;#39;m the chief expert for working technology at sap and I&amp;#39;m sharing a short recording well I don&amp;#39;t know how short it&amp;#39;s going to be hopefully not too long about based on a paper I recently released called the skills management technology landscape and this paper is the second in kind of a series of papers I&amp;#39;ve been writing on skills management the other one looks more at the future of skills management particularly the impact of ontologies on the area of skills management but this one looks at the full range of skills Management Solutions available currently available in the market and what led the led me to write this paper was I went out to the sap app store which is a place where you can go and look at all the different solutions both provided by sap and our partners to address different business needs and I just typed on the word skills and I came back with 231 different results 231 different solutions from sap and our partners addressing skills after I went through and sort of C it down to ones that were specifically focused on kind of workforce management topics I still ended up with over 70 different solutions and I&amp;#39;m like how can we make sense of this so what this presentation and this paper focus on is really getting an understanding of what the skills management solution technology landscape looks like what are the different solutions available and which ones would you want to use how do you want to sort of approach it if you&amp;#39;re putting together a skills management technology strategy so in this presentation I&amp;#39;m going to start with a quick overview of what is skills management what is driving the sort of skills crisis I think it&amp;#39;s important to kind of put this stuff in context what is it that we&amp;#39;re talking about and why does it matter I&amp;#39;ll do that pretty quickly because that&amp;#39;s talked about a lot out there then I&amp;#39;m going to talk about skills versus companies and why skills management is so difficult and I think this is important you hear the differentiation skills and companies a lot but I&amp;#39;m looking at it from the angle of why skills management is harder than competency management because a lot of companies have pretty established competency management practices but their skills management practices why every company does it very few companies do it well then I&amp;#39;m going to talk about the skills Management Solutions that are available and this is going to be a bit of a laundry list there&amp;#39;s no real we around it because there&amp;#39;s so many I&amp;#39;m not going to go through the specific Solutions if you want to see the actual examples of companies in the paper there are links to different partner Solutions and sap Solutions here I&amp;#39;m just going to talk at a functionality level about what is it they do what is this technology actually doing in terms of supporting skills management and then end some thoughts about how the markets likely to evolve in some general thoughts about skills management in general and why it&amp;#39;s really important not just for companies it&amp;#39;s actually really important for our society overall so let me start with like you know the first of all what is skills management well skills management basically refers to methods to ensure a company&amp;#39;s Workforce has the knowledge qualifications and Technical expertise to execute its strategy it&amp;#39;s not a new thing if you think about the basic objective of skills management it&amp;#39;s about to have people in jobs that know how to perform those jobs this has been around for a long time it is probably the most important thing in talent management you know do the people in our Workforce have the skills and cap abilities to do the work we&amp;#39;re asking them to do companies have been doing this for 2500 years this picture is the Chinese Empire the Chinese government in you know 300 BC assessed people&amp;#39;s skills to see if they can perform in government jobs so it&amp;#39;s you know it&amp;#39;s not new it&amp;#39;s been around for a long time but it&amp;#39;s very difficult to do well and it&amp;#39;s becoming really really important in the moderate economy because something that is often referred to as the skills crisis so the skills crisis and I talk a lot about this in book I recently released called Talent tectonics it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a crisis in having enough people with the knowledge to do the work we need to get done in organizations and it&amp;#39;s being driven by what I call two Talent tectonic forces and I use this sort of analogy to like plate tectonics where you know there&amp;#39;s these underlying shifts that we can&amp;#39;t see them we see the results of their action in like earthquakes and mountains you can look at work and workforces the same way there&amp;#39;s two underlying shifts that are having a massive impact on both work and labor markets one is digital ization of everything technology permeating every aspect of our life and work and that&amp;#39;s accelerating the rate of change in organizations it&amp;#39;s also creating demand for very specialized skills at the same time it&amp;#39;s making other skills become obsolete so I mean we&amp;#39;re living right through this with generative AI you know we still really don&amp;#39;t know the full impact of that don&amp;#39;t want to get into that whole discussion but what we know for sure is suddenly skills that are really that were really important probably aren&amp;#39;t as important as they used to be I&amp;#39;m not saying they AR important at all as all but other skills that we had really thought about are suddenly be coming to the Forefront so it&amp;#39;s this need for specialized skills but at the same time this is running headlong into another tectonic sh change related to demographics primarily that there&amp;#39;s more people aging out of our labor markets and entering into them due to Decades of declining birth rates in many Industries now there are more experienc skilled Employees leaving then there are skilled employees coming into these workforces so this is creating skill shortages it&amp;#39;s and it&amp;#39;s not that we don&amp;#39;t have enough people in society I always want to emphasize that we have enough people but we just haven&amp;#39;t trained and developed all the people to have the skills we need them to have so we have to get a lot better at finding inclusive ways and effective ways to develop people to give them new skills that the organization needs so these two things are creating this sort of skills crisis that are making skills management absolutely critical I mean I work with a lot of companies and it&amp;#39;s amazing how many companies like one company was talking about in manufacturing in the United States they said in certain industries we won&amp;#39;t be able to run manufacturing plants if we don&amp;#39;t figure out some way to develop the people we need with the skills to run these plants it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s not just a business issue it&amp;#39;s actually a societal issue so getting into skills in a little more detail skills are usually contrasted to competencies and the difference between competency and a skill skills are what you know know how to do competencies are how you apply that knowledge competencies focused on behaviors things like building relationships planning organizing driving for results stuff like that but your effectiveness at competencies is influenced heavily by what you know how to do now it&amp;#39;s not the only thing you know it&amp;#39;s like do you have certain knowledge and qualifications like python coding fluent in English do you have commercial driving license these things now these two things absolutely go hand inand you need both you need to know things you need to know how to do them but when it comes to managing them they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re very different in terms of how we actually need to manage them first of all the nature of competencies people are effective or ineffective with competencies not something you know or don&amp;#39;t know how to do like skills and a good little litmus test that I use to say is something a skill or a competency is if you can imagine somebody saying no I don&amp;#39;t know how to do that it&amp;#39;s probably a skill so like if you ask somebody do you know how to build relationships they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re not going to say no they might say they&amp;#39;re not really good at it but they&amp;#39;re not going to say no however if you ask somebody do you know how to speak Japanese they might likely say no I don&amp;#39;t know how to do that so if somebody if you can imagine somebody comfortably saying I don&amp;#39;t know how to do it then it&amp;#39;s probably a skill if it&amp;#39;s more like you know well I&amp;#39;m not that effective then it&amp;#39;s probably more in the competing range now obviously there are different levels and proficiency levels and skills but that&amp;#39;s kind of a general way to think about them now getting into the proficiency levels one of because skills are specific things they get into things we know or don&amp;#39;t know how to do we have or do not have in terms of licenses we can measure them pretty objectively they&amp;#39;re often measured through tests and people can usually pretty actively assess their own level of skills if you give them a clear definition for it in contrast competencies are much harder to assess because they&amp;#39;re not what we know how to do they&amp;#39;re how effectively we apply it and people struggle with evaluating their own performance when it comes to behavioral things whereas we&amp;#39;re much more comfortable evaluating our knowledge we&amp;#39;re okay saying I don&amp;#39;t know how to do something we&amp;#39;re not as okay Cas saying I&amp;#39;m not good at doing something now where skill so far you might say wow skills sound easier to measure because they&amp;#39;re objective and they&amp;#39;re clearly defined but now we&amp;#39;re getting to the part why they are much harder to manage the reason the skills are much harder to manage first of all is because we need so many of them in a large company you can usually to find all of the competencies that influence job for performance using fewer than 100 competencies sometimes it&amp;#39;s a lot fewer than that depending on the kind of organization in contrast in large organizations they often need thousands and thousands of different skills across the different jobs they need different qualifications different technical areas of expertise and so right off the bat when it comes to skills management there&amp;#39;s just a lot more stuff you have to keep track of on top of it skills change really really fast a skill you know you the example of generative AI again comes in but you can think of a lot of examples where usually a techn ology will come in and maybe one skill that was really important is no longer important but now we need new skills entirely new skills whereas competencies because they&amp;#39;re more about behaviors they don&amp;#39;t change that quickly um you may have shifts but in general the competencies in organization needs aren&amp;#39;t going to radically change over night in contrast skills can very suddenly and the last thing has to do with how skills are developed versus competencies competencies are largely developed through increasing people&amp;#39;s self-awareness and self- understanding and self-management now people struggle to develop competencies you know can take a long long time but it&amp;#39;s done through on the job training and awareness and things like that in contrast skills require acquiring usually very specific knowledge or demonstrating very specific qualifications and so we need much more structured methods to develop skills you can with competencies you can kind of apply General leadership coaching programs and management coaching programs to develop a wide range of competencies in contrast skills you&amp;#39;re going to need lots of training courses you&amp;#39;re going to need lots of different assignments there&amp;#39;s so much more to keep track of when it comes to skills management that&amp;#39;s probably the biggest difference between them why skills are so hard is because there&amp;#39;s just so darn many of them and they change so quickly and we need such specialized tools to help people develop and acquire skills so you get a sense of why it&amp;#39;s difficult and you&amp;#39;re think well that&amp;#39;s not difficult enough as it is I have to take a drink of water for the next level of difficulty the other thing that makes skills management really difficult is that it&amp;#39;s a lot of different distinct activities Each of which can be complex and quite timec consuming when you look at skills management it starts with do we know what skills matter at all you can&amp;#39;t manage skills if you don&amp;#39;t understand what skills that matter but as there be thousands of different skills that matter some cases they may be really specialized you may only need two or three people in the company to have them but if they don&amp;#39;t have them the company can&amp;#39;t operate you know good example I mean healthcare for example if you don&amp;#39;t have an anesthesiologist with certain skills at a certain time you can&amp;#39;t run the whole organization you got to shut down the whole operation so you know keeping track of all the different skills that you need and this is like having tools to understand the skills that and on top of that as I said they&amp;#39;re changing too so how can we understand the skills the company needs then how processes to understand what skills specific individuals have so we know the company needs but who has them who has them internally who has them externally who has them among contractors how do we get out and measure the skills people have and it&amp;#39;s one thing to say you have a skill it&amp;#39;s another thing to be effective at that skill how do we measure proficiency level and this is really important for certain jobs you know somebody comes in and say well yeah I I&amp;#39;m uh I have experience at project management does that mean they&amp;#39;re effective project manager do they have good project management skills how do we assess sort of proficiency levels in different skills then we don&amp;#39;t Define skills and measure people&amp;#39;s skills just to have that data we want to use that to match people to different jobs the biggest use of skills is linking people to career opportunities and that requires us not only to understand the skills required by the person or rather the skills that the person has it also requires us to understand the skills required by the job and defining jobs and job types and teams in terms of skills so that has all another level of complexity then you&amp;#39;ve got confirmation in many jobs it is a legal requirement that you confirm not only that people have skills but they can demonstrate the effective use of those skills in the context of the job so for example they can effectively and safely use a machine so somebody might say I know how to drive a forklift but you may be required to have them demonstrate their Proficiency in driving that forklift in your Warehouse because the consequences of not doing it well are so high and so those example have tools that how we have tools to confirm and certify that people can effectively apply their skills on the job then we get into the course of what if people don&amp;#39;t have skills and we want to help them develop them well the first thing is we have to help people understand what skills they need what skills would allow me to Advance my career what skills do I need to be more effective in my current job and where can I access resources to develop those skills whether that&amp;#39;s training or coaching or other materials then we have to build those resources again whether training being the most common but also coaching and other things to help people learn skills build tools that allow us to teach people to do very specific things and this again there&amp;#39;s so many skills you need lots of different tools to teach and train them and the skills are changing so we need to build new tools then for many jobs that are highly skill dependent require very specific skills there&amp;#39;s a a lot of these jobs are Frontline roles where people are working different shifts on different lines and different assignments and so how do we make sure that we have people allocated to different shifts and different schedules and different projects based on their skills and we&amp;#39;re making effective use of the skills in the workforce also how are we rewarding people for those skills the the greater the skill shortage the more there is competitive pressure for companies to hire employees away from each other that have in demand skills and so companies want to make sure that they&amp;#39;re paying appropriately for the skills people have both so they can attract people with skills but also that if they develop people&amp;#39;s skills they can retain those people as people build more skills they become more valuable in the labor market and companies should need to adjust that over time to incent people both to build skills but also to keep people once they have them so that gets into really a much more sophisticated way of doing compensation than your traditional you know annual Merit increase or hourly pay rate and the last one is data governance The More We Have Skills management tools the more important skills become the more data is going to be generated about skills and the skills people have the skills skills we need the training courses we&amp;#39;ve got the jobs we have how we pay skills all this different stuff tools that allow us to manage this data in effective way to take it from one place move it get it to another place in a safe and secure manner because one of the things also about skills is a lot of this data actually is quite sensitive I know I know of companies that will not share their skills data externally because they&amp;#39;re saying if you saw the data that we were looking at in terms of skills you could infer what our product strategy is similarly a lot of employees on the skills that are measured they may not necessarily want that shared publicly some of the data might be what they about what they don&amp;#39;t know and people don&amp;#39;t necessarily like to broadcast the things that they&amp;#39;re not good at and so there&amp;#39;s a whole area of employee confidentiality as well as just the desire to move data around more effectively so when you look at all of these things all of these are non-trivial and all of them are critical part of skills management which is why as I&amp;#39;ll talk a little bit we&amp;#39;re having all this technology that&amp;#39;s being built to support report all these different things which also it should be no surprise there&amp;#39;s no one solution that does every single one of things really well lots of solutions do multiple but we&amp;#39;re seeing a whole explosion Innovation and companies finding new ways to support these things because not only are these things by themselves complicated you add to the fact that all these activities have to be performed in a world where the skills are constantly shifting the people that possess skills are evolving you know people develop skills that&amp;#39;s one of the great things about people we learn over time so we have to keep track of what people have learned how to do but also certain skills might become obsolete or they may have forgotten how to do them we have to keep track of that too the skills available the company are moving that people are moving around in organizations and last the Technology Solutions are changing so there&amp;#39;s all this stuff going on which is really why companies need to have good skills management strategies just so you can keep track of both what you&amp;#39;re doing but also be aware of maybe what you aren&amp;#39;t doing or you should be doing differently even if you can&amp;#39;t change it now at least be aware of what you should change so let me talk a little bit about the skills Management Solutions themselves what is it the skills management technology actually does to enable us to do those 10 activities more effectively now if you want more detail and examples go into the paper there&amp;#39;s links to different companies that do these different things so you can get a better sense of it but very at a high level I&amp;#39;m just going to kind of hit on what is this technology actually doing and how&amp;#39;s it changing how companies are able to perform different skills management activities starting with Workforce intelligence and skills intelligence skills intelligence is about understanding what what skills the company has what skills the company needs the most traditional way is Workforce analytics tools and these are getting really sophisticated where they can pull in skills data from a lot of different places from job assignments from employee profiles from training course requirements and they can help you sort of get a sense of what are the skills we have in the company where are they located where different people located in the organization with different skills how many of them do we have at a more sophisticated level though we&amp;#39;re also seeing rapid use of what are called skills ontologies that do the same thing that Workforce analytics does at one level but they take it to a deeper level because often when you&amp;#39;re looking at skills one of the challenges that skills they don&amp;#39;t all have the same name or employees may not fully describe it so an employee for example might say I have Excel skills skills and Excel well if you have skills and Excel then you actually have spreadsheet management skills because Excel is a spreadsheet but you might not listen to spreadsheet management but if you know how to use Excel you could probably learn how to use other spreadsheet related tasks even if they weren&amp;#39;t in Excel because you have an underlying skill associated with spreadsheet management the issue is with traditional like skills we don&amp;#39;t match it at that level somebody says I have Excel and somebody says I need somebody has spreadsheet management experience it doesn&amp;#39;t make that link whereas ontologies are able to infer to what&amp;#39;s called natural link language processing they&amp;#39;re able to infer different relationsships between skills if you know how to do this then you&amp;#39;re likely know how to do that they can also look across the labor market they can look at job descriptions and they provide this really sophisticated way to better understand what skills are out there what skills does a company need so you get a better understand of sort of what what are the skills that matter to the organization when you get to description which is about understand skills individual people have the most traditional way to do this and there&amp;#39;s you know increasingly sophisticated efficient tools for it is just self-report tools where you just ask people what skills do you have and you have them rate themselves and they&amp;#39;re tools that are getting more sophisticated about asking them different skills based on different job types they have so employees aren&amp;#39;t like just filling out massively long lists but the self-report profile is one way of doing it it&amp;#39;s probably the most traditional there&amp;#39;s also what are called inferred profiles and these are using again often ontology type tools where they look at data on employees like their past education past job experiences past assignments learning courses they&amp;#39;ve taken and based on that they infer the skills they are likely to have based on the experiences that we&amp;#39;re able to measure based on digital information about that employee then there&amp;#39;s also aptitude profiles which don&amp;#39;t measure skills so much as they measure people&amp;#39;s capability to learn skills different skills and these are sort of typically psychometric instruments like personality tests and ability tests that give you a sense of okay this person probably is good at learning mechanical skills or this person have an aptitude for learning you know like designing or artistic skills they give you kind of insights into that so those are lots of interesting tools now like the personality toolss those have been around for a long time but companies are getting more sophisticated at linking the attributes and traits measured by personality and ability tests to the kind of skills that companies need in different jobs getting into the validation which is about saying well do people are people provision different skills obviously there&amp;#39;s tests and test tests are getting more and more sophisticated too you know again something called computer adaptive testing that allows us to give very very precise tests get very specific measures on people in a minimal amount of time so there&amp;#39;s much more sophisticated testing technology than maybe what you&amp;#39;re aware of from the past also companies using simulations including virtual reality simulations to get a sense of people&amp;#39;s skills level and sort of a niche thing but it&amp;#39;s interesting is analytically inferred estimates it&amp;#39;s what I call it I don&amp;#39;t you know because it&amp;#39;s so new there is a good name for it but basically it&amp;#39;s looking at data for what people have done in the past so for example if there was a computer programmer you might look at the code that they had written and infer their proficiency level based on the code that they had written now this the ability to use these tools depends on the ability to get past samples of people&amp;#39;s job you know tasks that people actually perform work before but it&amp;#39;s interesting it&amp;#39; be like looking at what somebody&amp;#39;s written to infer their writing proficiency um so kind of a niche thing I kind of threw it in there because I only know a couple companies that actually do it but it&amp;#39;s kind of cool so that&amp;#39;s why I threw it in getting into matching and I split matching which is about matching People based on their skills to job opportunities I split it into two things first of all how they do it one there&amp;#39;s tools that use tags you know basically when you post a job you tag the skills you need employees list their skills or the training course you tag the skills and it allows people to match up that way that&amp;#39;s sort of the traditional way of doing it then there&amp;#39;s these more complicated ontology based algorithms where they do the same thing as tags but they infer a lot more so they cast a wider net so like if a you know for example you said we have a job that requires somebody to have statistical analysis skills it might say well a candidate might say I&amp;#39;m proficient in programming in SPSS which is a statistical analysis program they might not say I have statistical analysis skills but if you know how to program SPSS you probably have statistical analysis skills so these tools kind of can look one letter or Beyond they can interpret Beyond just the written word to kind of the underlying skills to make these matches then in terms of matching the what well the most common is full-time positions these tools are being used exess extensively for recruiting but they can also be used for Contracting which I think is really important because one of the main reasons companies employ contractors is to get people with highly specialized skills that the company may not have in the workforce they&amp;#39;re also being used for internal projects so giving sort of that idea of gig worker Dynamic team so that we can get people certain skills they fit to different projects but also people that want to learn certain skills you can say this project is going to give you a chance to learn a certain skill so it&amp;#39;s a way to promote internal Talent movement and through greater learning of skills through job assignments now getting on to the next one confirmation and this one&amp;#39;s particularly relevant to what I called you know regulated Industries there&amp;#39;s a lot of Industry like in healthc care and in manufacturing and in energy where there are a lot of requirements that people demonstrate proficiency at certain skills in order to perform them one of the ways to do this is what I call sort of checklist demonstrations where often the supervisor will have to watch somebody perform a task in the job and check that they did certain things appropriately but also there&amp;#39;s validated learning or training which is making sure that people have taken training successfully completed training courses and a lot of these one of the things is not only do we need to make sure people have confirmed that they&amp;#39;re proficient in certain skills before they go on the job in many jobs we need to do this every year or every six months you know basically to make sure is this person&amp;#39;s are those person&amp;#39;s skills up to date is their knowledge other qualifications up to date and so there&amp;#39;s a lot of tools that help not just with the confirmation but keeping track that have we done it when we need to do it how we you know kept on track and I think one of the things that&amp;#39;s really interesting in this particular one too is increasingly we&amp;#39;re seeing these confirmation skills Management Solutions link out to operational Solutions so like an example imagine an employee has to have demonstrated their Proficiency in completing a forklift driving course before they&amp;#39;re allowed to operate a forklift well companies might have a employee ID card that they need to scan to turn on a forklift but that card May T tie back to a skills management validated Learning System that says hey this employee their learning certification on driving a forklift is out of date they need to recertify by taking this test and then it can actually to have them deliver them the test to take right there in place so tying these confirmation solutions to sort of business management Sol I mean sorry business operations Solutions it&amp;#39;s kind of interesting innovation in the use of this particular aspect of skills management then shifting from sort of checking whether people have skills to helping people develop skills you have solutions that focus on helping employees understand what skills will allow them to advance their careers move to New jobs or be more effective in their current role and then these are and then giving them a sense of where can I go to get training coaching or job assignments to get those skills so these are solutions that both give employees a sense of self-awareness but also a sense of guidance and Direction on how they can build their own skills over time related to these tools but it is different is not just saying hey here&amp;#39;s the training you need or here&amp;#39;s the mentoring you need and pointing them in the right direction it&amp;#39;s actually building the training programs or building the mentoring programs and these are where you have some really interesting stuff in training where there&amp;#39;s tools that are really speeding up the time that we can get training part of this is through something called social training or social learning where we take skilled employees and help those skilled employees get more effective at sharing their knowledge with other employees there&amp;#39;s tools that take like I&amp;#39;ve saw a tool that takes manuals and you can just feed the manual into the tool and it turns it into a micro learning course where that takes this big manual into small nudges that are delivered through texting there&amp;#39;s really cool technology that&amp;#39;s allowing us to do training of skills much more effectively much more embedded in the flow of work in the past there&amp;#39;s also a lot of cool stuff around simulations that are very powerful for teaching certain kinds of skills so lots of stuff that&amp;#39;s happening that&amp;#39;s changing How We Do skills acquisition in terms of skills assignment and this I say this is really relevant to Frontline jobs in particular much more you know the more we have skill shortages the more we have to use the people&amp;#39;s skills really effectively so much more sophisticated tools that allow you to make sure that you have the right people with the right skills and the right jobs at the right time making sure that you&amp;#39;re not overworking certain people having excessive levels of overtime much more knowledge around you know managing the workforce and this is also really important because we&amp;#39;re seeing a lot higher levels of turnover on a lot of Frontline manufacturing jobs as we&amp;#39;re having higher levels of turnover that ability to keep track of who knows how to do what gets harder and harder for managers and shift supervisors and so tools that give them much greater knowledge and ability to manage the skills of the workforce to get the right people on the right shifts at the right time there&amp;#39;s also tools that are focused more broadly on project management as opposed to shift Management in terms of evaluation the more we have skill shortages the more valuable people certain skills are going to be now historically companies it&amp;#39;s not that they wouldn&amp;#39;t pay for skills but it tended to be done maybe on an annual basis maybe we do salary adjustments and things like that making a move towards much more precise agile and ongoing Financial reward for skills now there could be a whole big discussion about whether or not you should or should not reward people for developing new skills I personally think that it makes a lot of sense um if you do it the right way because the more skills your employees have assuming they&amp;#39;re getting their job relevant organizational relevant skills the more value they have the organization the more flexibility the company has the question is though if we&amp;#39;re going to start rewarding people for skills development and More fine-tune Level we need better tools to keep track of the skills people have learned but then tie it to compensation decisions and rewards now an area of Technology that&amp;#39;s really exploding recently sales performance management technology that is really about managing commission structures historically is now being used to manage not just whether or not people acquire skills but the performance of tasks in their jobs that they are performing certain tasks that require a higher level of skill therefore they&amp;#39;re getting paid more for doing those tasks so what they&amp;#39;re doing is they&amp;#39;re indirectly rewarding skills development because they&amp;#39;re not actually paying people for acquiring the skills they&amp;#39;re paying people for performing the tasks but they couldn&amp;#39;t perform the tasks if they didn&amp;#39;t have the skills so a lot of really kind of interesting thing and I think this is an area where we&amp;#39;re going to see a lot more Innovation and investment over the coming years but it&amp;#39;s already starting to take off because the more there&amp;#39;s a skill shortage the more valuable the skills the more valuable skills the more we need to make sure that we&amp;#39;re compensating people so that we retain people not just so we hire them but if they develop skills we retain them as well and then the last one data governance there&amp;#39;s two ways of managing skills data there&amp;#39;re you know pretty Standalone platforms particularly ones that have ontologies do have a lot of sophisticated tools for managing skills data but it&amp;#39;s not at the level that you find in core HR platforms and I really do think the future data governance is going to be core HR platforms like the talent intelligence Hub and sap is a really good example because you want some place to take data from maybe third-party applications you want to be able to clean up that data control it share it with different applications so maybe take data from a skills intelligence solution clean it up feed it into the data you use for workforce planning maybe take that data that you use from a skills description solution about employees feed that into succession management data so a lot of ways that you can control this data I think as we see more and more skills Management Solutions more focus on skills management we&amp;#39;re going to need much much better data governance and there is a lot of innovation in this area but I think the most powerful is coming from your Corr platforms and obviously I favor sap because that&amp;#39;s how I work and we&amp;#39;ve done a lot of really cool work on our talent intelligence Hub so if you&amp;#39;re an sap customer and you haven&amp;#39;t checked it out check it out so it gets to the next thing what skills Management Solutions should your company use well it&amp;#39;s a long presentation I need water so one way to it start you know was looking how to answer this question well first of all I thought you know I&amp;#39;ve looked at a lot of skills man Solutions and they do kind of fall into three broad categories there are specialized Solutions um that usually focus on one or two activities you know just for skills validation and testing or Solutions just for skills assignment and scheduling so you can have some really specialized Solutions some of these Solutions often can be up and running in under 3 weeks and they fall they solve very specific needs there&amp;#39;s also what I call a class of what I call ontology based Solutions solutions that use these ontologies that are much more sophisticated and complicated they tend to support multiple things they tend to be focused on different areas like skills intelligence um matching and Staffing Learning and Development skills acquisition often they overlap um these to be take more of a lift to install into an organization to get up and running but they do provide a tremendous amount of power especially about really understanding the skills in your company and then there&amp;#39;s the platform based Solutions like Talon intelligence Hub like in sap that really allow you to take a lot of data from different these first two hands of solutions and apply it in a lot of different ways within the organization so when you&amp;#39;re looking at skills management technology strategies you&amp;#39;re probably going to be looking at these three areas and kind of thinking well where do we want to go in different areas because obviously some are much bigger lift in terms of getting them implemented in organization and others but also you know the greater the implementation usually means much greater the value so you kind of have to balance that out in terms of the well where should you start obviously which solutions to use depend on the problems you&amp;#39;re trying to solve and the big problems that you kind of fall into five areas if the problem is we don&amp;#39;t know what skills we even need you&amp;#39;re going to want to look at a skills intelligent solution of some sort if the issue is more like well we know the skills we need but we don&amp;#39;t know if our Workforce has them then you&amp;#39;re going to look at skills intelligence description validation and Confirmation type Solutions if you&amp;#39;re like well we need to develop new skills in the workforce it&amp;#39;s going to be about skills development and acquisition Solutions if you struggle to hire and retain skilled Talent it&amp;#39;s more about skills matching and valuation and if you want to become more agile and effective at using Workforce skills in general it&amp;#39;s going to be matching assignment and data governance although I would argue you want data governance under all of these it&amp;#39;s particularly important when you&amp;#39;re issues like we got a lot of skilled employees in the company with a lot of specialized moves we&amp;#39;re trying to be much more agile and effective in using the count Talent we already have that&amp;#39;s when data governments become really really important so the last thing I&amp;#39;d say on this though is regardless of what route you go you&amp;#39;re probably going to need multiple Solutions just because these Solutions are so different they do different things you want to pull them into a comprehensive strategy but why most skills management solution support more than one area of skills management I don&amp;#39;t think anyone does everyone exceptionally well some do a few phenomenally well a lot do many quite well but nothing does everything um and so you&amp;#39;re really going to think about how do we want to put together a suite and make sure that they work together in an effective manner which gets to my last slide which is how&amp;#39;s the skills management landscape likely to evolve because you might thinking with all this Innovation where are we going and I&amp;#39;m useing a form of two analogies an analogy to shoes and an analogy to airplanes one why are skills Management Solutions like shoes and the answer is because one type will never be enough I mean all shoes basically their function is to protect our feet yeah they do more than that but that&amp;#39;s the basic function of them right but why do we need so many different kinds of shoes well because we have different situations different styles we want different shoes for different kinds of occasions it&amp;#39;s the same thing with skills Management Solutions not only do they focus on the different areas I talked about many of these Solutions are designed for different kinds of employees some are really designed for contractors some are designed for certain specific Industries some are designed to work in certain countries and labor markets with certain kinds of regulations so we&amp;#39;re always going to sort of need specialized skills management tools and will we see consolidation in the market absolutely we&amp;#39;re going to see some of these these existing Solutions come together merge together collapse together but that&amp;#39;s going to fuel innovation in other areas skills management it&amp;#39;s much like per Performance Management it&amp;#39;s something we&amp;#39;re never going to master it&amp;#39;s so complicated and difficult we can always do it better so as we solve one set of problems and consolidate that and certain Solutions become more commoditized you&amp;#39;re going to see innovation in whole new types of solutions we haven&amp;#39;t thought of yet so that&amp;#39;s one side and kind of look at this how the market is likely to evolve the other thing in terms of how I see it evolving is the analogy of why are skills Management Solutions like airplanes we tend to talk about airplanes like being built by Boeing or being built by Airbus but in reality Boeing and Airbus they don&amp;#39;t so much build airplanes as assemble them yes they do build certain major things like the fuselage or the wings but the wheels the engines the cockpit instrumentation that all comes from other vendors and what they do is they effectively provide a platform to bring all of these things together into a coherent ho that&amp;#39;s really what I think is also going to happen in the future skills management is core HR platforms companies are going to need core HR platforms that are equipped to deal with increasingly complicated sophisticated levels of both skills management data and skills managed third party applications and so looking in your technology strategy not only what Solutions do we need on a point level how can we pull these together into a coherent whole so that our skills management strategy connects effectively with our broader talent management strategy things like succession compensation training things like that so in some I hope that you found this overview interesting um it&amp;#39;s a lot to cover I tried to cover it as quickly as I could but it is a lot to cover I&amp;#39;d say a closing thought though and going back to my book Talent tectonics I talked about earlier skills management is important for companies you know actually important actually becom super critical but it&amp;#39;s also important for employees companies can&amp;#39;t be successful if employees don&amp;#39;t have the skills they need to support their strategies but employees can&amp;#39;t be successful if they don&amp;#39;t have the skills to BU build successful careers to perform their jobs it really is a great example of why employee experience and or company needs really balance each other in this area and when we look at technology companies tend to invest in technology one is to maximize human potential to get more people but also we do it to reduce Workforce costs and a lot of the changes in Technologies inevitably and it always has and it always Wills we get technology that&amp;#39;s going to eliminate certain types of jobs and create new ones but technology particularly if you look at all this new skills management technology can also help people transition to new types of work we should take the cost efficiencies that we&amp;#39;re getting from using technology to automate a lot of job tasks and reinvest it or at least a portion of it in technology to help employees develop skills for the next generation of jobs technolog is going to change the world of work and we kind of whether this change is a future of work that is utopian or dystopian though really it&amp;#39;s about how we the technology that we&amp;#39;re kind of going in two directions in our society right now One Direction is that we&amp;#39;re moving a more skills-based world where people are constantly being hired to develop new capabilities and they&amp;#39;re hired for their potential as much as what they already know and there&amp;#39;s a lot of movement with fulfilling work that&amp;#39;s one direction we are kind of going but we&amp;#39;re also going another Direction where we&amp;#39;re going to have two very distinct labor markets of Highly skilled probably well-paid but highly overworked people with special skills and people down in another labor market whose skills are no longer relevant to the modern world of work they struggle in a series of low underpaid jobs and precarious employment we don&amp;#39;t want that split and this skills management technology that&amp;#39;s being built can help companies not just make the organization more successful it can make people&amp;#39;s careers more successful as we&amp;#39;re going through this time of increasing turbulence and change brought upon largely by technology itself so in in some in some there are lots of things that you can do to improve skills management as far as what is something what is the thing that you should do right now it&amp;#39;s going to depend on your company but I would say that every company should do something because it matters it matters for the company it matters for the employees and it matters more broadly to be honest about for our whole society so with that I hope that you&amp;#39;re inspired to move forward if you want to get more details you can read the paper which does again have links to different examples of different solutions all from sap and the sap partner Community as well as another paper that I wrote that talks more broadly about skills ontologies and where we see that going over the future so thank you very much I hope you enjoyed this

Transcript for:Skills Management Technology Landscape: Lecture Notes

Transcript for:
Skills Management Technology Landscape: Lecture Notes