Nobody wants to be part of the 83% of HR leaders struggling to find enough skilled talent. But this isn’t just an HR issue, it’s a business risk.
Hiring and promoting based on job role alone rarely paints a full picture of the candidate’s capabilities. Today, skills are the new workforce currency and businesses need to create a skills-based strategy to find, develop, and keep the talent they need.
In practical terms, that means knowing:
- What skills exist within your organisation at macro and individual levels
- What skills are needed for your emerging projects and priorities
- How to nurture, train, and redeploy those skills internally
- How to actively engage employees in upskilling
- How to build a culture that supports internal mobility
We interviewed a panel of talent experts to share with you seven steps to begin working with a skills-based strategy and get you ahead in the talent game.
#1. Recognise skills as your organisation’s DNA
Your employees hold a unique mix of skills that form your company’s “talent DNA” and that’s your competitive advantage. Unlike job titles, skills are durable and transferrable. They’re the atomic unit of your workforce. Even in the age of AI, skills will remain resilient; AI will simply change the tasks and tools.
Recognising skills as a core asset gives you the opportunity to be flexible, innovative, and grow in ways that competitors are finding difficult to achieve. A skills-first mindset equips you to find and develop internal talent and incentivise internal mobility because you’re not bound by assumptions about what people in certain roles can do.
Nithya Singaram, Skills and Talent Development Lead at London Stock Exchange Group pointed out, “By formulating the skills strategy, you’re able to have a better understanding of the talent to deploy in some of those emerging projects and that will then translate into higher productivity returns and fast innovation cycles.”
But a strategy needs an action plan with clear goals to measure its impact.
#2 Get clear on your goals
Before you launch into all things “skills-based strategy”, let’s get clear on what exactly you want to achieve as an organisation.
What are the business benefits? What elements of the talent cycle do you want to impact and measure – recruitment, onboarding, performance, learning, and retention?
Your goals could, for example, centre on:
- Internal mobility
- Skills growth and acquisition
- Fairness and transparency in hiring and promotions
Set time-bound goals with short-, medium-, and long-term priorities to guide your investment in skills development and keep HR, L&D, and leadership aligned.
#3 Map the skills in your organisation
“How can you plan a business strategy if you don’t know what skills you have or the skills you need?” asked Nithya. “It’s synonymous to flying blind.”
To achieve your goals, you need to map out four critical elements:
- The work that needs doing
- The skills your business needs to fulfil those tasks
- The skills already held by your employees
- Where you are going to find or develop missing skills
Use self-assessments, manager input, performance data, and AI-powered tools to surface and document both formal and informal skills. Don’t rely on CVs; valuable transferable skills are often hidden.
This isn’t something that can be done in a spreadsheet, though. You’ll need a centralised, dynamic skills database for accuracy and analysis.
The database should let you map skills across your employees, roles, and projects, and define the levels of proficiency, and allow continuous updating.
Once you’ve documented your talent DNA, you can strategically think through how you could best place and develop each employee to align individual aspirations and business strategy.
#4 Engage employees in your skills strategy
You can have the clearest skill-based strategy but it will never get off the ground without employee buy-in – and it can’t be a top-down strategy. This needs to be bought into, and championed, from the bottom up.
“From an employee perspective, [a skills-based strategy] is about increasing employee engagement and retention. To me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Nithya.
Communicate clearly how upskilling benefits individuals, helping them future-proof their careers. Demonstrate the power and impact of regular training, upskilling, and reskilling, as well as imputing their own skills data into the central skills database. Then you’ll see buy-in and organisation-wide impact.
- Make it clear: What’s the benefit of training, upskilling, reskilling, and maintaining the database for me?
- Reinvigorate and energise people to own their careers – this comes from clear storytelling at the top, and publishing the data for transparency.
- Make it easy for employees to self-assess, choose learning pathways, and plan their careers.
Anne Fulton, CEO and Founder of Fuel50, said, “[Many] are fearful around what AI is going to mean for them…Creating a clear road map for your people around skills growth…helps people create future resilience.”
With employee buy-in achieved and existing skills data documented, you can then turn to examining your skills supply chain.
#5 Know your skills supply chain
Look at skills as a supply chain. You need to understand the supply and demand.
Start with a skills gap analysis. Understand what skills you currently have and what skills you will need in the next year and the next five years. Where are the gaps? Then assess your internal capacity to meet that demand through upskilling, reskilling, hiring, partnerships, or automation.
Investing in your existing workforce often delivers the biggest ROI, but it requires planning. You could connect people to mentors, provide training schemes or experiences, or give them stretch assignments to help grow them in specific skills. Just make sure employees are invested and managers are equipped to support the effort.
However, whatever your design for upskilling your people, if there isn’t easy internal mobility, you’ll struggle to fulfil your supply chain demand.
#6 Build a culture of mobility
Even with the right strategy and skills, lack of internal mobility can stop progress in its tracks.
Michael Moran, CEO of 10Eighty, highlighted, “If you are being rewarded on your performance [which is based on] the function of your team, the incentive is not to export people across the organisation; the incentive is to keep them.”
Break down the barriers to moving across roles and departments. Think through how you can change incentives, like rewarding the number, or level, of skills developed. And make mobility visible and accessible through talent marketplaces, project boards, and skill-based assignments. Try creating new skill-based teams for individual projects that get dissolved once the project is complete.
Anne said, “Building a culture of mobility means you’ve got a mindset around growth and agency for your people. People own their careers, but also the managers are facilitated and empowered to become those career agents.”
But the only way a skills-based strategy will stick is if it’s embedded as a business metric in the company.
#7 Make skills a business metric
What gets measured gets prioritised.
Define KPIs that align with your goals then make their progress visible on dashboards to the whole company and report on them.
A data-driven approach brings transparency, giving employees insight into their skill achievements and gaps, and their contributions to their team and the organisation. Visible data also makes it easier to offer accurate, meaningful suggestions for tailored learning paths. When people can see their impact and trajectory, they’re more likely to stay engaged and invested.
Make skills your competitive superpower
Closing the skills gap is about rethinking how your business sees talent.
A skills-based strategy gives you the agility to shift with your industry, the foresight to plan for future needs, and the tools to build up and keep your best people. It helps you build a workforce that’s resilient and powerful.
If you want to lead, don’t leave training on the backburner. Embed skills into your culture, your strategy, and your metrics. Then you’ll lead.
Watch the LinkedIn Live
Skill gaps have become a top concern for executives worldwide. In fact, 83% of CEOs say skill gaps threaten business performance – yet few organisations have a clear strategy on this topic. In this LinkedIn Live Fuel50 CEO, Anne Fulton, shares her strategic 6-step framework to build a future-ready workforce, as well as how to embed skills into your business strategy.
