Skills is one of the hottest topics in HR strategy and HR tech today.  

It’s difficult not to hear about it from buyers and suppliers alike, almost as much as AI and analytics. And with good cause. Consistently over the past five years HR professionals have been telling us through our HR Realities Research that the availability of talent is their organisation’s number one priority, ahead of profitability, business agility and customer satisfaction. And the scale of the challenge of having the best people, doing the right work at the right time is truly significant.  

77% of organisations report significant skills gaps

These gaps are truly debilitating, Inhibiting and constraining the opportunity to embrace new markets, new products, solutions and business models. Little surprise then that in their 27^th CEO Survey PWC found that 45% of CEO’s believe their company will not be viable in 10 years if it continues its current path.  

Skills gaps extend project and problem resolution times, increase operating costs, reduce customer satisfaction and revenue, and increase the stress on employees.

Key to changing path is the capability of our people to be doing the work required in a rapidly evolving world - and the world is moving fast. In LinkedIn’s Future of Skills report based on their 800 million worldwide members they found that the skills needed to thrive in your current role have shifted by up to 44% over the past 10 years.

At a time when agility and new capabilities are key, skills have emerged as the linking strategy that connects every stage of the employee lifecycle.  

From Fosway Group’s HR Realities Research last year only 5% of HR leaders think that skills does not underpin a great employee experience.  

Skills is becoming THE lens that’s being used to view the roles, jobs and people we look to hire as the foundation of strategic workforce planning. It’s being used to identify, filter and assess candidates’ suitability for the jobs of today and tomorrow. And day by day it looks as though skills underpins almost all aspects of the employee experience by capturing and connecting people’s aspirations and desires for their career and future employability. This is through personalised learning, feedback and performance review, performance development, as well as more agile resourcing of roles, projects and gigs.  In some organisations managers only get access to some of their manager bonus if they can prove their people have built their skills and capability.  

Skills has become the currency of work and the measure of the value of our people. It is the single thread that sews people and work all together. And for some that is driving huge benefits in resourcing work, mobilising employees around the future of work and the need to change, driving better manager worker conversations about improving work and performance and building the capabilities needed to thrive.

BUT, and it’s a big BUT, the challenge for us all is to remember that when we work, we don’t complete skills - we complete tasks. We don’t get skills done when we work. We get tasks done.  And in completing work, the devil is in the detail. We typically apply a number of skills, a selection of knowledge and behaviours and motivations to tasks to get work done. Today, our current approach to skills-based organisations is missing that critical link to tasks. Skills is close – but we are still one step away from the real nature of work.  

Is that a problem? Possibly not, but it is for me because I don’t like the gap we have between skills and work by leaving tasks out of the equation. It feels like there’s a broken step or a weak link.  

Don’t get me wrong, the work that is happening around skills is a momentous and gargantuan leap from where we were. It is at the bleeding edge of creating transparency, proactive inclusion and empowering our people to connect with opportunities, to grow, be mentored, increase their employability and earning power and deliver the transformation organisations need to thrive. But, and I can’t stop using the word BUT… I don’t see skills-based organisations as a destination. For me it’s a super leap in evolution, but not the end.  

Here's why; to paraphrase one of my old bosses - the revolution that is coming to our work from AI happens because AI takes away tasks, and parts of tasks. AI changes work by doing tasks faster, better and more accurately.  So, in planning the future of work we need to understand task-based work.

What does that mean for HR? Are we going wrong by adopting skills-based organisations? Moving forward with skills is the best option to evolve your organisation and the employee experience, but in the next five years moving to that next level of granularity of skills into tasks has to be where this is going next, and where the technology is going to go as the greatest enabler of all scalable skills approaches – AI – just gets smarter, more detailed and more personalised. 

After all, this is just a stage in the evolution of HR and the people experience – skills is not the final destination.

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidperring/