The Power of Skills: Empowering Talent Transformation

BY Emily Nonko | December 09, 2021

It’s estimated there are more than 1 million distinct skills that workers can possess–and on top of that, the role of skills is always evolving. Given this overwhelming reality, how should workplaces approach skills-based hiring and upskilling? Colin Emerson, the customer success executive at Eightfold, a talent-intelligence platform, thinks it’s time for companies to rethink their approach.

“Companies are struggling to use skills and manage their workforces with skills, and it’s a common thread for why many companies won’t be able to meet their talent needs in the coming years,” said Emerson in a presentation entitled, “The Power of Skills: Empowering Talent Transformation,” at From Day One’s November virtual conference on upskilling, coaching, and recognition.

Emerson outlined why skills are hard to identify and empower within workplaces. The number of skills has exploded over time, he pointed out, and the relationship between skills and roles is always evolving. Tools like Grammarly have made people better writers, and changed the skill set of professional editors, he offered as an example.

Skills also need context: “Suppose you’re talking about planning. There are skills related to being a building manager that are clearly different from being an event planner,” Emerson noted. “Planning may be the skill you’re talking about, but it’s very different based on the complexity of the role.”

Companies that rely on a manually-built, skills-based system have found that it cannot keep pace with the complexity, context or evolution of skills–and Emerson put forth an alternative. “The traditional skills database doesn’t help you in understanding the skill itself,” he said. Emerson’s company, in contrast, takes an AI approach to breaking down the complexity of skills, with a deeper understanding of the relationships between skills, roles, and individuals. The goal is to match individuals to opportunities.

Colin Emerson, customer success executive at Eightfold (Photo courtesy of Eightfold)

More specifically, Eightfold utilizes “deep learning AI” to examine employee potential, capability, learnability, their fit to a role, and likelihood of success. The technology pulls from a global data set of more than 1 billion profiles, 1 million skills, and 1 million job titles. “When AI discovers the relationship among skills, between skills and roles, how skills change over time, and isn’t confused by issues of context, you can finally use skills the way you want to,” Emerson said.

Eightfold has tackled the challenge using AI to manage workforce skills at scale, with the aim of delivering “personalized, meaningful, real-time experiences for thousands of unique employees,” Emerson said. Since each employee has their own workplace history, goals and aspirations, the use of “purpose-built artificial intelligence helps the employee immediately, and concretely, to understand the skills they need to step closer to their aspirations,” he said.

The technology helps identify the skills an employee has in their current role, what skills still need to be developed, proactive pathways to fill those gaps, and finally, help in identifying aspirational roles. Employees are empowered to take control of their careers, managers have access to talent to execute business strategies, and business leaders can implement data-driven talent strategies at scale.

It’s a culture shift, Emerson said, that ultimately encourages the development of rising skills: “You can imagine how this unlocks the potential of your employees, managers and business leaders so that they can develop in the service of your talent goals.”

Editor's Note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight, Eightfold.

Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

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How to Unlock Talent: Orchestrate Your Company’s Skill Development

HR leaders understand that developing employees’ skills is necessary to prepare a company for the future. What few understand yet is how to operationalize the development of those skills. Begin by reimagining learning and looking for the many places skills are acquired. “Organizations historically have been tracking skills based on the job someone’s doing for the organization, but people develop skills in a variety of ways, through projects, activities, and learning opportunities,” said Jason Cerrato, the senior director of product marketing at Eightfold, an AI-powered talent intelligence platform. “By giving better visibility to the skills that are required and the skills that people have, skills-based organization can be more nimble, adaptable, and responsive, especially as business needs change and fluctuate very quickly.” During From Day One’s recent virtual conference on reskilling, upskilling, and building a culture of continuous learning, Cerrato and his colleague, Eightfold’s director of customer experience Carly Ackerman, gave a brief, astute presentation, titled “Understand Skills, Unlock Talent,” on how HR leaders can operationalize skill development and propel their companies into a successful future. Cerrato and Ackerman talked about four external forces pressing organizations to reexamine their talent strategies–organizational complexity, the expanded role of the leader, organization as a safety net, and the war to fill skill gaps–and how these can be turned into opportunities for entrenching skill development in company operations. Organizational Complexity Organizations increasingly comprise full-time employees, as well as contractors, freelancers, part-timers, and temp workers. A variety of employee types requires a variety of skill-building methods. According to a report from the MIT Sloan Management Review, titled “Orchestrating Workforce Ecosystems,” 93% of managers view some external workers as part of their company’s workforce, but just 30% say their organization is sufficiently prepared to manage a workforce that relies on external contributors. Jason Cerrato, the senior director of product marketing at Eightfold (Photos courtesy of Eightfold) “We’re seeing much wider use of contingent workers and broader adoption of hybrid workforce practices,” said Ackerman. “We’re even seeing some fully remote workforce designs. What we’re not seeing are organizations preparing their managers to support and nurture workers in this totally new environment.” Nimble companies aren’t waiting for a unicorn candidate to fill a role, noted Cerrato, but are deconstructing specific jobs into their component skills, and hiring a combination of people to meet those needs. When a single person doesn’t own and control all the skills required for a role, it creates the need for more people to learn those skills, spreading the knowledge around. “It allows organizations to respond to needs more quickly. It also allows for the development of teams more broadly, as well as greater exposure for who’s already on the team and could potentially be upskilled or reskilled and redeployed into other areas,” Cerrato said. The Expanded Role of the Leader Many companies are under-planning for succession. Eightfold ran a survey of 260 HR leaders and 1,000 employees and found that although respondents believe that identifying high-performing talent for promotion is a priority, 64% said succession planning is focused on only the top jobs, and 44% said they’re succession planning only once per year. This is short-sighted and can cause a company to fall behind. “If you aren’t going deep enough into the organization with your succession planning, or with your skills and analysis, you’re likely missing the emerging skills that you should be tracking,” Cerrato said. “If you’re only engaging in planning once a year, and jobs are changing so fast that in less than five years they will look very different, you only have two or three cycles to identify, plan, and get it right before the profile may change completely.” The Organization as a Safety Net “Workers want to feel that they can trust their leaders and organizations with their well-being, and that means both in the workplace as well as out of the workplace,” said Ackerman, describing the dramatic shift in the employee-employer relationship that has taken place over the last two years. Carly Ackerman, Eightfold’s director of customer experience Employees now expect their employers to prepare them to adapt to and excel in the quickly changing job market. Skill development increases “transparency and understanding of how people can grow their careers, what’s expected of them, how they’re measured, and maybe even how managers and leaders view and evaluate talent,” Cerrato said. “Help people create aspirations, but manage expectations.” When employees know what skills they need and the proficiency they need to achieve for promotion, it helps them plan for the future and “reduces the feeling that they are spinning their wheels when they think they’re doing everything they should, and they’re not getting these opportunities. That creates frustration.” Putting the Skills to Good Use Once a company helps employees map and gain the skills they need, those employees should see their hard work applied, or they may bounce. According to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning Report, employees who feel their skills are not being put to good use are ten times more likely to be looking for a new job than are those who feel their skills are being put to good use. To reinforce learning and give employees the chance to flex their newly developed muscles, Ackerman and Cerrato recommended “democratizing skills” so that employees have a say in their development, by way of tools like skill marketplaces. “Give workers the keys to their own careers,” said Ackerman And finally, cultivate enthusiasm for skill-building across the organization, not just among HR, so that company culture rewards upskilling. “It’s imperative that organizations embed skills throughout the entire talent lifecycle all the way from hire to retire,” said Ackerman. “Skills can and will become the fabric of an organization, tying the work, the culture, the value, everything, together.” Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this Thought Leadership Spotlight, Eightfold. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Va. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza December 02, 2022

Using Skills to Shape the Future of the Workforce

After two years of major upheaval in workplaces, more is coming. In just three years, by 2025, an estimated 97 new types of jobs will need filling, 6% of the workforce will be displaced, and one in two employees will need reskilling. “The future of work has arrived,” said Cynthia Stuckey, VP of professional services and growth for the upskilling platform Degreed. In a presentation at From Day One’s December virtual conference on the future of work, Stuckey focused on using skills to shape the workforce, stressing that the pandemic has changed how employees see themselves. “If there’s one takeaway I’d ask you to think about, it’s the employee as a ‘market of one,'” she said. Skills and upskilling can help address many of the new worker expectations coming out of the pandemic. Workers are feeling burnt out, are willing to take less compensation for more flexibility, are becoming more disillusioned by climbing the career ladder, and want control over how, when, and where they work, Stuckey said. New policies should prioritize flexibility and virtual resources, as well as support new skills and different levels of skill proficiencies, she said. Other workplace transformations, according to Stuckey, include new digitized work processes, ESG and human capital accounting, and the growing urgency around skills management and upskilling. “All of these changes indicate one common theme: new skills, reskilling, the need to understand technology, the need to personalize the way we serve an employee,” Stuckey said. “It’s far easier to upskill and reskill someone committed to your mission, driven and passionate about what you do, than it is to go hire,” Stuckey said. She pointed out that the annual cost of worker attrition comes in at an estimated $47 billion. Cynthia Stuckey, VP of professional services and growth for Degreed (Photo courtesy of Degreed) So how can companies reimagine workplaces that respond to these different changes and prioritize reskilling? “My belief is that in talent, L&D and HR, there’s a challenge in front of you to really reflect on your life cycle,” said Stuckey. “Map that life cycle and your employee proposition against that ‘market of one.’” Work, she said, must be reimagined around the human-centric expectations of the employees. One of the biggest priorities should be investing in a “culture of learning,” Stuckey said. She pointed to a few companies–JP Morgan Chase, Accenture, Amazon and AT&T–that have made big investments in upskilling and retraining. “Many of them have decided to look at how they’ll do a skills-management strategy and how they’ll upskill employees to stay competitive,” she noted. Continual learning is important too, as the half-life of a learned skill is 3.5 years and for a technical skill, just two years. “There’s new software, new complexities that my current skills won’t align to,” Stuckey said. “Skills are decaying faster and faster, and new skills are being required, and that requires continual learning.” Skills in high demand, she noted, include “power skills” like communication, teamwork, and flexibility, as well as technical skills like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. She described another important skill as “learning management.” Said Stuckey: “What I want to call out is that it’s about learning agility and an intense desire to learn.” Looking ahead, companies will need up-to-date data about employees’ current skills, as well as a willingness to engage employees in learning, retraining, and empowerment. “We need better integrations and experiences,” Stuckey said. About 75% to 80% of workers don’t complete their HR system’s talent profile and more than 60% of the workforce isn’t getting regular feedback on their performance or skills. Eight of ten CEOs say lack of key skills is a serious threat to their growth, Stuckey said. She recommends that employers connect skills development to employee expectations and technology. That means collecting current data on the supply of skills and skills demands, as well as integrated learning systems, the sources of learning content, and real-life opportunities to put skills to work. “It’s about underpinning your business with knowing what capabilities and skills you need, so you can prepare for the work that needs to get done today, tomorrow and next year,” she said. “It will enable you to get ready for some of these shifts, like Covid, like new strategies, like new market changes.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Emily Nonko January 13, 2022

How to Manage Your Workforce for the Future with Capabilities in Mind

Even before multiple crises challenged the engagement of employees with their companies, workers were restless and ambitious. Eighty-three percent of employees want to change roles, 53% want to change companies, and 64% want a clear career path, according to a survey by Eightfold AI, an AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platform. How will they achieve those ambitions–and how will employers help them do it? The essential component is being open to learning, according to Kamal Ahluwalia, Eightfold’s president. “Everybody needs to learn more things. I think there are more assets than we ever realized, and the No. 1 is learnability,” Ahluwalia said in a presentation at From Day One’s recent conference on the workforce of the future. Eightfold’s mission, delivered through its Talent Intelligence Platform, is to help chart the right career for everyone, based not so much on a worker’s experience but instead on the person’s skills and capabilities that can be discovered and enhanced. (The company’s name derives from Buddhist philosophy, in which the Eightfold Path guides each person to wisdom and nirvana.) In everyday practice, this approach will make traditional approaches to talent obsolete, said Ahluwalia: “Resumes are useless and job descriptions are even worse.” Likewise for job-hopping merely to get a boost in pay. “People don't leave their current role to do the same thing in their next job,” he said. Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai (Photo courtesy of Eightfold AI) What AI contributes to the process is bringing together billions of anonymized data points and algorithms to help assess a worker’s potential. “What we are able to do with our AI is identify the validated skills, missing skills, likely skills and skills to be verified, based on what candidates have shared with us and the context of the job,” Ahluwalia said. The data at hand shows that hiring based on potential and aptitude makes more sense than focusing on the candidate’s current skills, which are just a snapshot at a moment in time. In that respect, AI is an invaluable resource in keeping track of a constantly evolving array of skills in demand. In the current job marketplace, there are 1.4 million uniquely identifiable skills, and the half-life of each skill is four to five years, Ahluwalia said. Thanks to AI, “not only do we understand what they are, but we also understand how to apply them. We understand the adjacency of these skills and how to put it in the context of a job,” he said. One of the areas in which this method its proving is effectiveness is in developing the careers of  military veterans, who represent 6% of the U.S. workforce. In September, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS), chose Eightfold in a competition “to build an application to better match transitioning military service members’ skills with employers’ needs,” the department announced. While military veterans have often learned skills that are much in need in business, sometimes the jargon that’s used in the two different worlds leaves something lost in translation. A slide from Ahlawulia's presentation (Image courtesy of Eightfold.ai) U.S. military-service members “are amongst the best trained in the world. They are used to working with technologies that some of us won't even see for another five to 10 years,” Ahluwalia explained. “And [they have] the other soft skills that we all yearn for our workforce leadership skills: the ability to work in ambiguity; having each other's back; the trust, loyalty, and transparency. It’s a workforce that we should be opening our arms to. And yet, it's not as easy for them when they're ready to transition out of the military service.” The complications of hiring during COVID-19 have aggravated the challenge. Ahluwalia described a layered process for bridging the gap. First, the company aggregated data such as military job-occupation codes and the military version of the resume. Then Eightfold  representatives deployed its Capability Matrix, which allowed them to determine not only what the candidates were capable of doing, but also to account for their aspirations. One service member wanted to go back to school, another wanted to be a sound engineer, another one wanted to go into the performing arts. “When we talk about the Capability Matrix, we are talking about something that's self-updating, and automatic,” Ahluwalia said. “So nobody is sitting there updating stuff and trying to find every single thing.” With a focus on learnability, employers can avoid identifying candidates solely with their skills, which is limiting. “If somebody is willing to learn,” said Ahluwalia, “none of us should be in the way.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this session: Eightfold AI. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey November 21, 2020