You’re probably familiar with traditional hiring practices: you have an open role and you fill it with the best candidate. But what about the hidden skills that already exist within your organization? This is where Skills Intelligence comes in.
We sat down with our CEO, Rachel Sumner, to get her to break down the basics, like what is Skills Intelligence, how does it work, and how does a business even get started?
Here’s what Rachel had to say:
For me, Skills Intelligence is a necessary evolution in the ways in which human resources are allocated in our labour markets. It’s the way we understand the skills and competencies that individuals possess and the way that organizations understand the skills and competencies of their workforce.
There's another layer to it as well, which relates to how we develop Skills Intelligence, which is both a human and AI-supported process model where we want to gather data about skills. We want to analyze that data, derive insights, and build intelligence from it.
An example of that would be working with a particular business that is in growth mode and launching new strategic projects to which it has to allocate human resources. It needs to first understand whether its existing workforce possesses the right skills, at the right level of competency.
If not, the decision lies in whether it should “buy” those skills and competencies by hiring individuals, “build” them from within through reskilling and upskilling, or “borrow” them by reallocating individuals within the organization or even externally by contracting individuals with the skills and competencies needed for a particular project.
So that’s where we come in, by rendering those buy, build, or borrow decisions with our services so that ultimately, business leaders make more cost-effective and equitable decisions related to their people resources.
At the organizational level, I think it's a game-changer in several ways, but the one that I might highlight is the hidden skills and competencies that the workforce possesses.
There is a significant percentage of the workforce with skills that aren’t immediately obvious to an organization. When it comes time to think about whether we have the right people and the right skills at the right level of competency, organizations only have a partial answer to that question.
With skills intelligence, we can use our technologies and our services to update this skills data, allowing businesses to understand and optimize the use of the skills and competencies their workforce actually has and thus remove the financial costs from skill underutilization.
What we've come to learn so far is there's a critical point in organizational growth, where understanding and knowing the skills and competencies of each employee becomes challenging.
For example, in a startup organization with three to five employees, it would be pretty reasonable for the organization to have a good handle on the skills and competencies of those employees. When you get to 10, it becomes a little more challenging, and incrementally so as the organization expands. When you get to 20 or more, it's almost impossible to accurately identify the exact skills and competencies each individual possesses, because that’s when the organization starts to build a hierarchy or a matrix structure. So there's really no single person who understands each unique employee. Equally, without the systems to support the data capture around skills to overcome that, skills slowly become invisible and underutilized.
So the short answer: organization size matters and I would say organizations that have 30 employees or more or have been in business for three years or more could yield material cost savings from Skills Intelligence.
I think any company that’s looking to undertake some kind of workforce transformation, looking to build a workforce strategy for a new line of business, or a large-scale project would benefit from Skills Intelligence.
I think the answer's pretty simple. Come and talk to Talent. Not only can we help you explore the benefits of skills intelligence to your organization, but we fundamentally believe that our Skills Intelligence approach to workforce strategy will assist in reducing the overall costs of human capital to the organization and produce more equitable outcomes. So if you're ready to start, come and talk to us.
Interested in learning more about the latest in workforce transformation trends and topics? Check out the top in-demand skills in the energy sector, how AI is changing the healthcare landscape, and how your organization can level up with Skills Intelligence.