Your Top Priority as an HR Leader in 2022
HR Leaders’ Experiences
Build critical skills for your organization
The years 2020 and 2021 have completely changed the way we work. We’ve seen a shift to remote work, then to hybrid offices. According to Gartner, almost half of the companies around the world are going to keep offering hybrid offices after the pandemic. We’ve seen a transformation in employee experiences, engagement techniques, and benefits packages, which were heavily supported with online technologies and health-related benefits. We were witnesses of a massive shift toward mental health support services, with a big example of Nike, who gave their head office workers a week off to ‘destress’.
2022 is a year when human resources must navigate the wave of change that has spread over the past two years. Recently, Gartner has published an overview of top 5 priorities for HR Leaders to focus on during the next year. Building critical skills and competencies for the organization was identified as a priority by 59% of HR Leaders who took part in the research, which became a top priority to focus on in 2022.
As our solution EDLIGO focuses on helping organizations identify competencies needed to succeed in the short and long term, we decided to take a close look at the issues that HR leaders face when building critical skills for the organization.
A common challenge for HR is that they can’t build skill development solutions timely enough to meet evolving skill needs. Covid-19 that shaped the way we all live and work, rapid development and new technologies, huge volumes of information distribution led HR Leaders to quickly shift first to crisis management and then to focus on the factors that make their organizations strong today such as the development of right skills and competencies, building resilience, and having strong capabilities to grow in the nearest future.
An additional threat is that the required competencies keep changing at fast pace. For example, Gartner found out that skills required for a job in IT, sales, or finance increase by 6.3% yearly. It is also predicted that one of three skills needed for a role in 2018 will not be needed anymore in 2022. Predicting and investing into the right skills remains a difficult problem to solve.
Skills-based Talent Management
To compete in the current competitive environment and drive value to customers, businesses are required to focus on talent to make sure that the right employee is matched to the right role. However, with a growing number of competencies required for the market, the role-based talent management approach does not fit the organization’s strategy anymore. The workforce needs to be more flexible and adaptable to any new business environment change.
In 2020 LinkedIn has seen a 21% increase in job offerings advertising responsibilities and skills instead of qualifications (HBR). So, having a great university name on the CV is getting less advantageous these years Employees are looking for skills, not titles. And based on a 2020 survey conducted by LinkedIn, 97% of employees want to expand or continue the amount of time they spend on learning and training for the new skills they need for career development.
When organizations use skills as a common currency, the competencies transform into frameworks for managing work itself. Companies can focus on what kind of skills they need, and the skills can be acquired or developed through strategical talent planning activities, while HR Leaders and employees can focus on alignment to the career needs and competencies development. Both employers and talent should understand the potential contribution and make it the basis for talent-related decisions.
As the top priority for HR Leaders is Building critical skills and competencies for the organization, many leaders are interested in how to structure talent management around skills, not just roles. Education4sight has connected with top HR leaders from different countries and industries to discover their approach to skills-based talent management.
United Nations, Occupational Group Manager, United States
Creating an agile and adaptable workforce often requires reskilling and reshaping their areas of expertise. It is therefore important for an organization to first analyze its own jobs and specializations and recognize what it needs in the next 3-5 years as its own industry evolves. By highlighting which skills, it will require in its near future, it will be able to conduct skills mapping and prepare its own workforce to embrace the change and to reskill and upskill its talent. At the core of this strategy is the enabling of employees and managers to be empowered to drive their own interests and align them with that of their companies. Talent can be nurtured but it needs its own space to grow.
Telecom, People Analytics / Human Capital, Argentina
Without a doubt, to understand how to structure talent strategies based on skills, it is necessary to understand the current situation of our organizations.
The data of our collaborators play a fundamental role in making better business decisions and aligning current skills with future ones through workforce planning.
Talent strategies leveraged with people data such as performance, engagement, or training, can have a huge impact on having more adaptable teams and aligned to the strategy.
OXFAM, HR coordinator, Africa
In light of the post-pandemic talent management analysis, an adaptable workforce has proven to be the right solution to solve the skills gap that would potentially threaten an organization.
To ensure this, a talent strategy needs to be skills & competencies centered rather than role centered. In order to create a game-changing Talent strategy, it needs to be aligned to your business strategy, from which, skills that are crucial to your future business success are pointed out.
This step is crucial to be able to formulate numerous parameters that would be the base of a successful organizational structure; some of these are pivotal roles, critical positions, next-generation skills, etc …
To conclude, the future of Talent Acquisition and Talent development is in building a flexible and agile Talent pool structured around the skills that are essential to a business’s success instead of already defined roles.
FMCG company, HR Business Partner, Asia
The concept of developing the skills of talented employees is a fairly new practice for many companies. Managers often fail to see the link between investing money in employee skills development and the financial success of the company. Lack of development programs can contribute to staff turnover, as talented employees will seek new development opportunities in other companies. Companies that focus on internal strategy devote more money and time to planning and developing a workforce with the right employee skills, such companies create focus groups from them for important projects. Also, many companies are implementing programs to generate “talent pools”. Creating talented pools allows for the more individual development of the skill set of specific groups of employees. Thanks to the pool of talent within the organization, the company provides itself with a base of trained employees with certain skills, leadership qualities for future top positions. Companies focused on internal strategy and the role of talented people in it can stay ahead of their competitors in the future. The management of talent and their skills is a necessity for the clear execution of tasks. More and more managers are moving from general staff development to an individual approach to assessing the workforce as an opportunity to individually develop employee skills in accordance with the needs of the business.
Doctoralia, People Experience Business Partner, Mexico
For me, generating a good talent strategy starts from knowing that talent is the fundamental part of an entire operation, understanding that each member of an organization is a key part of reaching our objectives.
Therefore, our main axis is to generate a good experience for employees and candidates in the selection and recruitment processes.
We must not lose sight of the fact that it will always be easy to develop and train a person’s hard skills, but the soft ones they already have.
Understand what we need to continue moving forward: people who live our values, with adaptability, passion, energy… That they love what they do and continue to find our “unicorns” that match our culture, people who want to achieve a better version of themselves and that with an accompaniment they can give the best of themselves.
Sales Director Shanghai Branch, ALIFEFLOOR,
Managing Director, TERANGA Trade Ltd., Africa, and China
How to structure talent strategies around skills, not just roles, for more adaptable workforce?
Here is the plan:
– Encourage cooperation and sharing best practice
– Work together to improve company’s processes
– Team building with different departments
– Let each department identify challenges and open to all employees to think about the solutions
– Open choice on trainings relative to any segment of the company
– A day in the life of… Having some immersion in other departments from time to time.
EDLIGO Approach
As we can see Talent management based on skills is not an easy task, many different approaches might not result in the same outcome for every industry. Defining the skills that your organization needs is only the first step, as a Leader you need to have a map of people and their skills and be able to identify the competencies that should be developed and obtained by your talent. Collecting dynamic skill data is easy and fast if you use the right human resources technology. Moreover, to fill in the competency gaps, there is a need to develop an effective and cost-efficient learning and development strategy, which is just one more headache for HR Leaders. However, the HR analytics market has solutions that are based on AI-Powered technology and can help make decisions based on data and get the task done fast – EDLIGO.
Over the last 7 years, EDLIGO Talent Analytics has proved its effectiveness and relevancy to the HR technology market. Meeting current market demand for the advanced talent analytics solution enables Leaders to have a clear, objective, and data-driven map of their people and skills, develop efficient learning & development strategy your organization, be able to identify future leaders & top expert talent, and make major talent and business decisions based on data and AI recommendations.
EDLIGO Talent Analytics
If you would like to know more about how AI and Talent Analytics can help your organization to succeed, please contact EDLIGO team or schedule demo.
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