Cornerstone Skills Graph Helps Organizations and Their People Instantly Map Skills and Effectively Respond to Rapid Change

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

Cornerstone Skills Graph Helps Organizations and Their People Instantly Map Skills and Effectively Respond to Rapid Change

The world’s most comprehensive skills engine is built directly into Cornerstone’s people development solutions and leverages AI to help customers implement “strategic skilling” to uncover skills across their organization, pivot their people faster and optimize career development

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Sept. 16, 2020 — Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSOD), a global leader in people development solutions, today announced the availability of the Cornerstone Skills Graph, an AI-powered skills engine that has been built into the company’s portfolio of products. The Cornerstone Skills Graph enables organizations and their people to implement “strategic skilling” — the practice of matching skills to people, learning content and job roles — to predict, prepare for and quickly respond to dynamic business changes.

As the world rapidly evolves, high-performing businesses and the people who work for them will need to adapt and shift quickly to meet current demands. For businesses, this means they need agile workforces and deep knowledge of the unique skills their people have, the ability to redistribute skills as needed, and the flexibility to pivot and build new skills for tomorrow. For employees, it means having a solid understanding of the skills they currently have, the tools to learn new skills they will need for the future and be guided by a clear path forward.

According to PwC, most companies are not as agile as they should be — 70% of CEOs think their company is not equipped with the right skills today to adapt to a new world of work. And, according to the Cornerstone People Research Lab’s latest report on workforce trends, “A License to Skill: Embracing the Reskilling Revolution,” nearly half (40%) of employees lack confidence in their organization’s ability to develop their skills for the future.

Fortunately, more organizations are seeing the value in identifying and building skills. In a recent survey conducted across Cornerstone’s global customer base, 88% said building critical skills and competencies is a top priority for them, and 86% of respondents from the “A License to Skill”survey agreed that assessing skills is more important than confirming credentials. However, most organizations (80%) still rely on word of mouth to identify the skills their people have and need (Human Capital Institute and Cornerstone). The challenge for these organizations is figuring out how to accurately and efficiently map the skills their people have today and help them develop the skills they’ll need tomorrow.

The Cornerstone Skills Graph solves this prevailing challenge. The technology, made possible by Cornerstone’s acquisition of Clustree, a pioneer in skills engine technology, leverages AI across critical parts of an organization’s business to uncover deep knowledge to support strategic skilling and address questions, like:

How do you identify skills across your organization?

  • Do you know which skills are most important to your organization today? What about tomorrow?
  • How do you activate an employee’s current skills quickly, where and when needed?
  • How do you give your employees the development they need to grow and stay engaged?
  • How do you effectively prepare future leaders?
  • How would you scale without dramatically increasing the burden on your L&D teams?

The Cornerstone Skills Graph is built on a robust and constantly updated skills taxonomy of over 53,000 unique skills pulled from millions of job positions across every industry around the globe. The skills engine can also be integrated with other skills libraries, such as an existing, customized skills library a company already uses, creating an unlimited catalog of skills relevant to any position or role. Employees can identify areas of interest — personally and professionally — and where they’d like to grow in their careers. Leveraging AI, the skills engine can then instantly match skills across people and job roles within the organization.

With this type of holistic information, leaders can quickly deploy employees’ unique skills as business needs pivot. They can also help their people build career paths based on the skills they currently have and the ones they want or need to learn, and automatically serve up customized learning recommendations with clear, step-by-step directions to their next role. Once new skills are learned, the organization can easily identify experts, and do so while removing implicit bias from personnel decisions, like hiring and allocation, ensuring an equitable and fair workplace for all. In turn, employees have greater visibility and return on the time they dedicate to developing skills.

“We are seeing a paradigm shift in how companies are helping and guiding their people to better prepare for the future,” said Heidi Spirgi, chief strategy and marketing officer, Cornerstone. “It’s a new era where businesses must truly know their people in an authentic way — for all their uniqueness — and leverage those unique skills and abilities to create positive change and propel forward.”

Today, the Cornerstone Skills Graph has been integrated across the company’s products, and additional functionality will be available in the near future. Now, Cornerstone customers and their people can:

  • Automatically map skills to an employee’s role, including skills that have a certified level of expertise
  • Find, edit and add skills to employee profiles from a library of more than 53,000 unique skills
  • Provide managers and coaches with insight into an employee’s skills, both current and in development
  • Recommend or assign learning content to new employees based on skills needed for their role

“Skills inference and skills assessment is now one of the hottest topics in business,” said Josh Bersin, global industry analyst. “Cornerstone’s new platform and the company’s vast reach has the potential to help companies address this complex problem in an integrated way.”

Over the next few months, Cornerstone customers will have access to more strategic skilling capabilities that will enhance their employee experience by enabling their people to:

  • Upload resumes and intelligently parse skills to match best-fit opportunities
  • Populate required skills into open requisitions
  • Based on a person’s previous roles and learning credentials, take only the learning courses needed to onboard faster
  • Auto-tag skills employees may have based on their position, learning, projects, assessments, characteristics and more
  • Receive continuous skill gap analysis with AI recommendations for suggested training and action items
  • Access hyper-personalized career navigation to explore best-fit opportunities with specific actions to get there
  • Discover new internal opportunities based on skill requirements

“We are excited about this first step in pushing out the Cornerstone Skills Graph technology across our product solutions,” said Spirgi. “Our customers can begin to reveal troves of new data they’ve never had access to, and become more agile, people-first organizations.”

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