Building the Business Case for Change in a Skills-Driven World

These days, you can't visit LinkedIn or any other industry site without encountering something about skills, their rapid evolution, and the risk of being left behind. This has been the case since the Industrial Revolution: technology continually evolves, forcing organizations to adapt, hire new talent to train existing staff, and transform–or face an uphill battle to stay competitive.

So why aren't more organizations adopting a skills-based focus with their workforce? There are many different answers to that question.

• Managing Skills Data is Difficult: 80% of the organizations that we work with have only 15-20% of their job and skills data updated and tracked; data that is often fragmented and scattered across various departments and systems. For organizations that have grown through mergers and acquisitions, this data is frequently duplicative and outdated, making it nearly impossible to leverage in its current state.

• Lack of Ownership: Efforts to take ownership of this data typically reside in HR or Compensation departments for the purpose of managing their own individual tasks. As a result, the data often lacks a unified strategy and remains siloed, limiting its value across the organization.

• Data is Inaccurate: In most organizations, the data they have and can bring together is inaccurate, as skills and competencies haven't been reviewed outside of talent acquisition for quite some time. Many organizations lack the time and expertise to conduct the research necessary to identify the skills required for these roles and how those needs have evolved over time.

• Technology is Antiquated: Most organizations manage this critical data using technologies like Excel spreadsheets, access databases, and other homegrown solutions. This approach complicates collaboration and makes it challenging to maintain the data on an ongoing basis.

• The Real ROI is Unclear: Because of these factors, organizations often struggle to understand the true ROI behind shifting to a skills-based approach. Unlike most HR purchases, this decision is often justified solely by employee experience without a full understanding of its impact on the business.

So how do organizations start to make the shift?

1. Make Skills Management a Team Sport: Once all parts of the organization understand the business ROI, it's essential for everyone to play an active role in creating and maintaining this data as a team.

1. Leverage Technology: Not only can technology help your organization understand its positions and the required skills for those positions, but it can also provide a platform with an up-to-date skills ontology to keep your information accurate as your company evolves.

1. Focus on Return on Investment: To truly make this shift, your organization needs to understand the real ROI and how skills directly impact the business. An ROI calculator can quantify the benefits of a skills-based approach, demonstrating the cost of doing nothing and the value of making the shift now.

What’s next? The Anti is here to help. We partner with organizations to build a compelling internal business case for a skills-based approach. We equip HR teams with the tools needed to educate the rest of the organization, ensuring that skills-focused projects are approved, budgeted, and successfully implemented when the time comes.

To understand the impact on your organization, quantify the real ROI of a skills-based Talent Development approach, and get your custom ROI calculator, contact The Anti at aloha@theanti.com.

About the Author: Tom Boyle brings with him more than 25 years of HCM experience. With a focus on Talent Acquisition, Onboarding, Skills Transformation and Employee Mobility. He has consulted with hundreds of enterprise organizations to understand their unique business challenges and help to assemble the right process, technology, and approach to achieve the results they are looking for.

About The Anti: In 2017, we realized traditional HR technology consulting desperately needed an overhaul. So, we flipped the script on consulting culture.

• We grew a team with expertise in real world HR process design and technology implementation

• We aggregated and refined the best practices we’d already proven elsewhere

• We rejected traditional friction points and changed consulting culture for the better

It caught on, and we have since delivered 350+ ServiceNow HRSD engagements as the only elite ServiceNow Partner committed to the employee experience workflow products. The Anti brings a unique blend of HR Consulting experience, HR Technology backgrounds, and HR Practitioner expertise to every engagement.

Types of engagements and how we can help

We offer a comprehensive range of assistance that encompasses five key types of engagement:

• Implementation Readiness Assessments

• User & Experience Design

• Initial Implementations (Phase 1)

• Follow-on Deployments (Phase 2+)

• Advisory and Managed Services

Our mission is to meet you where you are in your ServiceNow journey to ensure your project is a success. Whether you require help with the initial setup or need guidance on optimizing your deployment, we are here to help every step of the way. With our expertise and commitment to excellence, you can be sure you are in safe hands.

For more information or to schedule a call with our team, drop a note to aloha@theanti.com!