What everyone should know about skills no matter where you are in your skills journey

The ability to track, manage, and develop employee skills is an incredibly powerful enabler of business and people strategy. Cornerstone's Talent Health Index research shows that high-performing organizations leverage skills-based talent strategies at about 2x the average rate. Yet, when it comes to guidance on how to actually implement a skills strategy or even just get started, much of the discussion can be overly theoretical, describing a vision without any practical advice on how to get there, or overly technical, getting lost in terminology, taxonomy and technology.

Cornerstone knows that HR and business leaders need more — how to practically identify, develop and deploy their workforce’s skills to drive outcomes — engagement, development and business performance.

One of the reasons for this confusion is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to skills strategy. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. Skilling can unlock value for organizations with various business needs, use cases, maturity levels and tech ecosystems across multiple industries, organization sizes and contexts.

But no matter where you are in your journey, there are five principles everyone must keep in mind when working on skills. These are lessons learned that have been defined and refined after countless hours talking about skills with customers, prospects, and partners, and more importantly, after observing where and how skills are being used to improve people processes and business outcomes.

57% of HR leaders say skills shortages undermine performance, which will only grow with labor market shifts and new technology. By 2030, all 75M baby boomers in the US will be at retirement age, and 85% of jobs that will exist haven’t been invented yet. These are good reasons why skills are a focus across the HR industry. Yet, you need to create more specificity for yourorganization's why. For example:

Focusing on which business problem you are trying to solve is ultra-critical for an effective skilling strategy. It helps you define success criteria, measure value, and prioritize your skills efforts. Organizations that are successful with skills-based strategies don’t start with a broad ambition to become ‘skills-based.’ They are laser-focused on how addressing their organization’s and employees’skill needs can help solve a specific business challenge.

Identifying candidate skills can help you improve the quality of hires as a part of your recruiting process. A person’s skills are 5x more predictive of future job performance than educational background. Identifying people with critical skills beyond traditional functional boundaries can help you increase internal talent mobility. Talent pools expand on average nearly 10x when using a skills-first approach. Designing learning journeys that target skills can improve learning and development processes. Organizations that promote skill development have a 2x increase in employee retention.

The power of skills is that they can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of people development processes across the range of the employee lifecycle. While it’s likely that most organizations would be eager to do all the above, it’s not recommended to try to do all the above all at once. Many organizations, leaders, and practitioners alike get overwhelmed tackling skills because they think they must have every question answered, every process re-designed, and all technology integrated to become skills based.

We recommend identifying a core skilling use case (e.g., recruiting, talent mobility, learning, performance management) to focus on that best supports your business. As skills become embedded as the new way of working, you can continue expanding your use cases.

Start simple. While you may aim to, for example, have skills requirements defined for every role in the organization and robust skills-based learning journeys created for each one, that may not be the best place to start. Instead, it may be more manageable to identify a handful of business-critical skills for a single function you can curate learning for.

Embedding skills one step at a time to improve your people processes is much more manageable and realistic. You can absolutely deliver business value at elementary levels of skills use. A step-by-step approach allows you to define a reasonable scope of work, deliver value earlier, and, most critically, bring your organization with you on the journey.

Even for organizations who aim for the ‘Skills Ferrari,’ remember to teach your managers and employees ‘to drive’ along the way. You can help them understand and adopt skills development at earlier, more straightforward stages while you build toward a more complex and mature state.

Getting lost in intellectual and technical discussions regarding skills strategies is easy, particularly for HR and IT teams. How are skills different than competencies? Should we choose an external taxonomy or create one? How do we define proficiencies and which scale do we use? How do we ensure skills are integrated across all our systems? These questions are undoubtedly important, and answers to these will be required at different points along your skills journey.

However, too many organizations get overly focused on these questions at the expense of more important ones, such as:

Be careful not to spend too much time on academic or technical debates than focusing on how to drive change, adoption and value. Always keep in mind what really matters to employees and your business. 

While it’s natural to want a comprehensive and flawless plan, waiting for the perfect strategy or answers to every question can lead to missed opportunities and stall out. Even the most mature organizations, well on their way in their skills journey, will tell you they are still figuring things out. That’s ok! Pilot small-scale initiatives, gather feedback and iterate.

Remember, the goal is to create momentum and foster a culture of continuous learning and growth rather than striving for an unattainable ideal from the outset. By starting with a clear focus and embracing ambiguity, you can build a robust skills strategy that evolves and strengthens over time, better aligning with business needs and employee expectations.

Ready to drive real business outcomes for your organization? Cornerstone can help you navigate your skills journey with confidence — learn more.