Skills@work 2025 : Impact Accelerator #1 - From Concept to Capability: Your Skills Strategy Starting Line

Uh, well, thank you, Zach, for inviting me and, um, allowing me to spend a few more minutes talking about, uh, a topic that is, that I, I love talking about, um, and in my, in my current role. So let me introduce myself a little bit and, uh, just gimme a minute while I adjust display settings. Um, okay. So, uh, my name is Shar. I am based in Houston. Um, Zach, just give me a hands up, if you can see my screen. Um, I have, uh, spent the last, um, about 25 ish years working for working in HR across three or four different regions of the world. Um, I spent most of my career with, with a company called Cummins in the power generation and engine manufacturing space. Um, and then with ExxonMobil and oil and gas, pretty much both roles, working extensively on talent strategy, both development as well as implementation. And, um, currently and with a EPC company that is specialized in the power space. So, my background has been predominantly in, in the industrial and en and engineering space and skills matter. Um, whether you are in healthcare or engineering or, uh, or technology, particularly in the technology space, there is, um, uh, skills are a key part of, of success in, um, implementing a robust talent strategy. So, let's get down to it. I'm gonna try to keep this, I'm not gonna read my presentation, but I'll, I'll try to talk you through it, and then we'll hopefully have some time for questions. So, literally, every job that I've been in for the last almost eight, 10 years has been focused on transformation, uh, transformation, new strategy, new business. The rate of change is very, very fast. Uh, there is so much that's going on right now, particularly in the industry that I'm in. Power generation is exploding, uh, just because, you know, the interconnection between industries are growing. Um, AI seems to be driving our world, and as a result of that, the kind of skills we need is, is, is a key driver now in hr, because especially those of us that have been in talent acquisition for a lot of our part of our lives, we always think of jobs and position profiles and job profiles and things like that. We do have a section there that, that we sometimes kind of toggle between calling it competencies, or sometimes we call it skills. Sometimes we use those terms interchangeably. But really what are, what we're saying is these are the capabilities you need to, to have in order to do the job. But then capabilities or skills are not just knowing it's doing, it's having the knowledge and then being able that to apply that knowledge. So it's skills applied. But let's take a step beyond that and ask ourselves, as we look at our strategy, do we actually know what those capabilities are and how do they connect to our business strategy? And if we don't know that, then we're gonna struggle with, uh, getting those skills, because we're probably gonna have the same problems A lot of companies have. I, I apologize, this is very, very small, um, and difficult to read, but this is the only way I could kind of get my thoughts on paper. And I give you some examples of, if you think about what this example, this column being, what we're trying to do. So we might be wanting to do digital transformation. We might wanna be expanding into renewables. We may be looking at customer experience design, but really take a step back and say, most companies kind of have the second bucket done so they know what it is that we're trying to do and what objective that they're trying to get to. Where we kind of struggle is what are the capabilities that we need to have? What type of skills, uh, that or what, first of all, what kind of jobs are needed? What kind of roles are needed? What's the architecture of the job or the job design that we need in order to deliver a customer experience redesign? And if you think about it and step back and say, okay, we need somebody who knows customer service. We also need people who know process design. We know we need people who understand behavioral analytics. We need a great project manager for sure. So we need agile delivery. We also need design thinking. So see what we're doing here? We're peeling the onion back from what the objective is into trying to understand what kind of skills or capabilities that we need. And this is where, again, organizations kind of get to that, especially organizations that have very intentionally got about, are gone about in doing this work. Where they kind of struggle again as a next step is narrowing the skills identified down to the critical few. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. These are what I would call on this slide. What I have listed is hard skills. These are hard skills. They're functional in nature. You need kind of some education to be able to acquire these skills. You can do a lot of, uh, capability development. But then if you think about, like, you have metadata, you have meta skills, you have skills that underlie these skills. Um, this is something at ExxonMobil when we were starting to think about even HR skills, and we said, what exactly are we not getting? Um, one of the thing, and these were some of the examples, we came up with, system thinking. Everything is dependent on everything else. Organizations are complex systems. So if, if our issue is we need to transform, we need to blend different pieces like technology and process and people together. We need to have system thinking skills. We need to have people that understand the impact of applying one skill and not the other. We need agility, we need communication. Again, this might be a lot, this might sound like, oh yeah, we have communication, we have a communications function. But do we understand the complexity of it? Do we understand the process? Do we understand how to layer communication? How to strategize on communication? Thi this is a lot more complex. Um, I was so glad to hear about influence in the session, uh, just prior to mine. Collaboration and influence. Again, key meta skill. If you don't have this, having the hard skills won't help. And then learning agility, fast changing world, new skills, retraining and upskilling, um, is gonna be critical. You need people that have the ability to come in and learn quickly. I'll give you an example. Um, a company that I worked with, uh, which hopefully, you know, you know, oil and gas, large oil and gas was getting into trading business, crude trading. And what we found is, oh, well, we, you know, difficult to find people, very difficult to locate them, but if you started breaking them up, we said, okay, what can we train from inside? So that required us to go in, and really what we found is we need a lot of quantitating modeling, quantitative modeling. We need a lot of data analytics skills. And guess where we can find them? We can find them in the geologists and the data analysts that we employ in the upstream side of the business. So just a small example to kind of say, if you can get to the meta skills, that opens up a whole new world for you to try and, and get, um, skills, um, trained in people. I'm not gonna belabor the point, but everyone is looking for people. There are more job gaps. Um, there, there aren't a shortage of candidates. There are lots of candidates, especially anyone that's building a talent, um, strategy at an HR leadership role knows that there are more candidates. An average posting brings about 200 plus applicants. The question is, how do you then identify those that can do the job as opposed to, um, people that perhaps don't have the right skills? So we have, we have, um, significant gaps, uh, or at least most of us do in the area of, um, key jobs that we're looking to hire. We are looking to drive inclusion, but we are looking to drive inclusion based on merit and not on just, you know, the fact that you, you come from or you have the right experience. Um, we are looking for redeployment, um, reductions in force are expensive. Not every organization wants to do, it's literally the the last lever you pull before that you try to, you try to redeploy, you try to retrain. And so again, getting those skills identified and understanding, um, how you develop the skills, uh, within the organization and continue to reinforce them is critical. I'm gonna share a small framework, and again, I, I won't go through each of these, but the skills first net, uh, framework really has four pillars. The first, we've already talked about you decode your strategy into capabilities, and you can call them skills. I like to call them capabilities, because capability actually takes skills, takes application, and combines them. The challenge with that is organization strategy is complex, especially if you are an organization that is into multiple different things. And at that point in time, how are you gonna prioritize is gonna be critical. You can have the best skills technology in the world. You can deploy ai, you can do a lot of different things, but if you are not able to identify the critical few, you are going to be in a situation where a lot of companies are, especially large companies that are sitting with thousands and thousands of skills where if the internal employee or the external, uh, you know, candidate, it, it's basically trying to make one size fits all. There are so many skills that it is very confusing to people to even understand which ones do I absolutely need and which ones can I kind of do without. So the prioritization of those critical few skills, and it's a simple 80 20 rule. 20% of your skills have 80% on delivering on your strategy. And that's the prioritization. Leaders struggle with this simply because they want everything that is, that's, that's kind of the, the issue. It is very difficult to sit across the table with a leader and really say, okay, can you let this one go? Because, you know, they're hedging their bets at that point. So the prioritization, asking those hard questions is, is difficult. The other challenges that comes in, in trying to do this is you're trying to do it in committee, right? You're trying to get different leaders from different functions. Um, there is an, there is a potential that you might overlook some of the support functions simply because a lot of your business leaders may not know those functions. So there is kind of the larger the company, the more siloed the understanding of each of the functions. And then there is a lack of leadership alignment. Nobody agrees. Uh, and so you kind of keep to getting into the spin of continuously trying to prioritize and really define those mission critical, uh, capabilities that you wanna develop. Um, then the next point is translate into skills. Again, there is some challenges in there. One is the skills taxonomy. It is very difficult to look at a job in treasury in terms of the skills and a job, say in commercial deal development, and compare the two, the taxonomy just doesn't match. Um, and if you look at, if you start working with functional experts, each has a different way. Like we have a, typically most organizations have a four or five layer. They start with, um, you know, absolute, uh, newcomer into the skills and goes right up to an expert at an expert level. You not only have a knowledge of that capability or skill, but you can also mentor and teach. And, uh, you will find that each person applies their own ruler to it. Their, their met, their rubrics are all different. So there is some level of consistently going back and checking and making their understanding is right, which makes this process time consuming. It makes it very difficult. The other issue we have is there will always be a more higher focus on technical skills. And I mean, hard skills, even if, you know, it might, it might be technology, it might be, um, functional leadership. It could be engineering, it could be tech. Um, it, it could be, you know, specifically coding, but nobody wants to look at the soft skills. And as we've kind of said, there is a core of meta skills that makes the, or that allow accelerates the success of the organization going to the third bay, third, uh, step in the process. And really that is a process which a lot of companies have today. Uh, at least every company I've been in, um, has it. And if you don't have it, it's pretty easy to do, which is, um, assess your current skills. Um, most companies have a skill assessment process. Um, they use a technology or a software, and, um, it's an annual process. You have the person do a self-assessment, then they sit there with their leader or supervisor, and they basically, the manager or supervisor, uh, reviews it and either confirms it or changes the skill assessment. Now, there are problems with this. This is very, again, it's very individual dependent. Hr, the system side of it actually, I would say is very difficult to keep it current because people go in and they look at it, you know, look at their skill, you know, skills assigned to their role, and they've changed roles. So it's a, it's somewhat of a, it needs to be a dynamic process. And the technology that we have today, or at least most of the technology that you have in place, is very static. It freezes itself in one year. Um, it is also very, very individual dependent, and that's what makes it even more, uh, complex. Um, and assuming you have done this, the next piece is the mo the most kind of, you know, the, the piece that I would say is the most critical, even if you've done the first three, I would say having a ecosystem. So it's very easy, again, to connect, okay, I have a skill assessment process, I can do the skill gaps, and I can easily connect it to an LMSA learning management system. We can do bite-size learning, we can do learning, being pushed, all of that very good, relatively easy to do. But if you think about then taking every part of your talent management system, your acquisition, your deployment, your development, most importantly, your reward and recognition, the key piece is to have a skills view to all of them. So as you think about development, think about, um, how you would hire for skills, uh, from an acquisition perspective. How would you use the skills data to do in, in internal moves? How would you reward people for developing skills and acquire them? And make sure all of that kind of fit into your overall talent reward and recognition philosophy. And that is what I mean by having an ecosystem. Having just the one piece, which is the skill gaps connected to LMS isn't gonna necessarily help us, uh, go year on year and, um, be able to, um, reinforce the skills first culture. And then finally, I mentioned skills. First. Culture. There is a key role for a leader, the leaders. So you are, along with that, you are also looking at reviewing your leadership framework. Your leaders are your strategy translators. They are the people that help the organization understand where we are going and why we're going to do it. And each of us, the role they, we play in helping the corporation get there. In order for the leaders to be strategy translators, we have to equip them with the right skills. Meaning they have to have common language. They remember I talked about strategic communication. That's where it comes in. They have to continuously be able to feed this ecosystem. Um, they have to start thinking about not head count, but capability count, which is a very difficult thing, especially when you start looking at costing it out. So leaders play a key role, and again, we go back to that influencing meta skill that I talked about and saying, we need leaders who are not just strategic leaders in the current sense, but be able to very quickly learn, adapt, and be able to, um, help the organization graduate down that path. Um, I don't know. Uhs, how much time do I have? We have a couple more minutes. Okay. I am gonna go, um, I'm gonna spend the last few minutes, uh, talking about a case. This is an energy transition company. This is, this is actual data. This is, uh, not a company that I've been part of. Just to be very clear. Um, about a year, year and a half ago, they set together a strategic goal. Um, they were, again, uh, you know, they were looking to transition 30% of their operations to renewable projects. Obviously, for a traditional energy company, whether it's oil and gas or um, power generation, this becomes a very difficult thing to do because you've invested all your money on your resources, on very different technology. And at this point in time, you're looking at hydrogen, you're looking at carbon, uh, sequestration, et cetera, which basically means you need to reskill re uh, over 5,000 employees. In this company's context. It also needed to redeploy 25%. And the 25%, um, of redeployment is basically because otherwise you'll have to let 25% people go and hire 25%, which isn't necessarily gonna help our operations productivity go up by 12%. It started doing something very interesting. Typically, uh, the one thing I wanna talk about with this, and it did a lot of really cool things, but the really interesting thing, I think everyone in HR at some point of their life has done headcount forecast, right? That's what we do when we do planning, et cetera. But what this company started doing was they started developing a process where it forecasted capabilities. And the capabilities, yes, you would have to cost it out and be able to turn, take, um, a swag at what, you know, how many roles it actually meant. But by forecasting capabilities in a very critical strategic and operational planning process, it was able to think about getting a mix of entry level skills. It was able to look at going out and actually doing a sourcing a little bit more early. It was able to redo and refocus their campus strategy and, uh, be able to also look at what capabilities and competencies are aligned to each other. I gave you an example of being able to use geologists and data modeling folks, uh, from an upstream business into a trading business, different company. But the principle is the same. The minute you start thinking less job and more capabilities, it opens up a whole different world. Um, again, we talked a lot about measure. Um, none of this is cheap. It's gonna cost you money. So you, you should be able to, um, think about what you will deliver, uh, in terms of tangible mat uh, metrics to the company. Um, the biggest one that I will point out to you is the internal hires for skill adjacency. This is a big, big, um, cost saver. Uh, from a CHRO's perspective. It is, it not only saves hiring costs, it also saves, um, reduction costs. So if we're able to kind of get this, this as a key leading metric along with the, um, cost of hire per person going down, uh, those would be two very key near term metrics that we could think about. Um, this is a little bit future, it's a little, you know, futuristic skills or capabilities, p and LI mean, think about if we could, if we were able to embed so much of the competencies and capabilities language into our HR organizations where we stopped doing headcount counting, we were able to do more capabilities accounting. We used AI skill graphs to show how we were gonna model these skills out, how these skills were, were going to be able to grow and we could use skills as a differentiator. And it all goes back to kind of the foundational work that I talked about, where you really need to start understanding your strategy and be able to relate that strategy back to capabilities. Um, I'm gonna stop, but again, um, just kind of highlighting it is understanding strategy. It is mapping, um, the strategic pillars and being able to identify the critical few. We do need skill metrics. We need to start putting them into quarterly reviews, monthly reviews, whatever it is that we have. Uh, this has to be, this is not an HR effort. It is a business effort, hr, finance strategy. All of these are functions that are great allies that need to come together, um, and be able to develop that infrastructure. Um, having a robust communication strategy around why, how is critical, because you are gonna talk about a new approach, um, and you will need communications as a partner. Um, and the only way to do it in my mind is this is not an HR or a talent initiative. It's a business initiative. It's strategic. And if we don't do this in partnership and as business leaders, uh, we will, we will not do as well as we probably could. The opportunities base is huge. So with that, uh, I'm gonna stop and ask what questions you have. All right. That was amazing. Thank you for breaking such a comprehensive framework. One first question, just quick follow up. Uh, we are running out of time, so we'll have to keep it moving. One, I shared your LinkedIn also in the chat, so if people have questions that you wanna really get into the weeds with, connect with her there, ask her a question there as well. One could. Is it okay to share the slides with the technology? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Perfect. And then one of the interesting questions that came up, which I've always found, uh, a challenge as you even shared, there are certain perception gaps or biases when it comes to measuring our own competencies and our own skills, or evaluating other people against certain skills. Do you have any advice or ways that you kind of minimize that gap to get more accurate kind of skills, insights on our talent? Yeah, I mean, do you mean HR skills? Well, if we just are, are looking at the, the skills throughout the organization and we wanna, we wanna measure where we stack against those skills. Uh, It is, yeah. So you can definitely measure if you have a, the first thing is to have a skill assessment method process. The technology is, there are many off the shelf technologies you can pick up, but really what you need is a process. Today, the only process that exists is a self-assessment process that I talked about. However, you can for, um, skills that have the ability to translate into assessments, you can actually do an assessment center if you have the ability to design and experiment around the skills. Uh, you could do it for technology skills where you have people answering technical questions. You could have, if it's a very hands-on application skill, you could give, give them an activity. A lot of companies use simulation games to be able to mark, you know, where people, how people stand. Um, it is these days with the technology we have at our disposal, it's very easy to do. Um, and I would say what you then need to do is take individual scoring, stack it up by whatever infrastructure, whatever grading system we have, and then benchmark it across similar companies. Yeah. That gives you a sense of, you know, how are we doing? Are we 50% there? Or, you know, it won't be a perfect measure, but it will at least give you a red, yellow, green. Yeah. The other thing that just comes to mind too, even if you aren't able to maybe go as through as an intensive or creative process to kind of test those skills, is you're gonna get some pretty quick insight into if they have the skills or not. If the results aren't there either, you know, like, and, uh, I, I would like to say that it's probably not true. You will find in, if you ask people to rate their skills, they'll probably all rate themselves as excellent, right? Or an expert. And, um, then you find that your results aren't that good. But typically you would have a skill expert like a CFO. If you're looking at a bunch of finance folks and you ask the CFO, you know, these are the types of questions to put it put, put to a person that says they're an expert. You do what is called a skill validation. So you do a sampling, you pick up five people that said expert, and you kind of look at their, you know, what do they actually do. Mm-hmm. And if that shows you, it's a good rule of thumb to say, if a certain percentage have assessed themselves accurately, then I think this assessment is fine. Yeah. So I would say don't let the, the engineering companies do this really well. So don't let the rigor of the process slow you down. Just the first piece of getting your business strategy translated into critical few skills. I think that if we could just get that and apply it to things like internal moves, apply it to things like, um, external sourcing, these are very quick wins. They don't require investment. They don't require a lot of intensive work, but they're huge game changers. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. That was incredible. Thank you. It was, uh, thank you for inviting me. What an amazing sessions, right. We've had so far. I mean, with Charlie talking about the importance of soft skills and Sure. Doing such a good job of showcasing what it actually means, um, to look at when you are getting people from a skills perspective. So let's do this, Zach. I'll help need your help on this one. I'm getting ready to share my screen. Let me know if you can see. It. Looks great. Alright. Thanks so much. Well, again, thanks everybody for joining us. I think Zach and achieve engagement do such a great job of bringing great topics in a timely manner. So the way I would love to showcase the presentation that I have in mind is taking what, or we learn from Charlie this morning with she, and then looking at how can we take this and make it, uh, from an implementation perspective at a scale perspective. So, um, as, uh, you know, Zach mentioned I've had the opportunity of leading large L and DS teams, uh, talent development teams in tech companies in Silicon Valley for the last 25 years. And most recently I was at a company called Micron Technology that designs chips, uh, and might be in every single device that you have. Uh, but since then, I've also started doing my own consulting and working with organizations to help them to look at what is the context, where are they in their journey? What is the skill strategy that they need and what ROI or benefits can they get? So I've been doing that for almost a year now. Also, as Jack mentioned, uh, just released my, uh, book called Navigate Your Career Strategies for Success in New Roles and Promotions. Um, and I'll talk a little bit about it at the end of the session. But with that, let's get onto the agenda for today. What I wanted to focus on was the scale strategy, value proposition. Now, I think Charlie and Sharp did a great job in setting that stage for us. We'll just showcase a little bit more information around there. And the reason I have designed the agenda in this way is because just to let you all know that when I was within organizations as an l and d leader, as the talent leader, it was really hard to get in front of our leaders at different points in times to say, here's why we should invest so much time, money, and effort in implementing a skill strategy. That's why I think the value proposition's important. And I really wish a few years ago, somebody had given me this playbook and said, this is how you do it. This is how you get in front of your leaders to ask for commitments, to ask for their leadership engagement. And of course, the resources that come with it. And then we follow through the strategy. So that's where this first focus is gonna be, of course, building a skill strategy, what that looks like, the elements in there, what a proposed timeline could look like. Here's where I'll caution you. This is where I would say, um, I had the most difficult time as a leader scaling this in, uh, in, in the past. Reason being is, it is a little bit more effort than you can think of. So everything you put on paper, I would say it's almost 50 times more than that. And that's where the reality check comes in. So we'll talk a little bit about that. And then lastly, what are the organization and employee takeaways? Which means what is the, you know, the value that the employee's walking away with, and what's the value that the organization's gonna walk away with, right? So with that, let's go forward. This is where the value, value proposition discussion really comes in. When, uh, research was done in the last few years by companies like PWC Accenture, um, even worth, uh, economic forum, where they saw was keeping up CEOs up at night, was the question about skills, the question about, um, is my talent ready to take on the future, right? Um, and you can see some of the quotes here, where one of the CFOs, in fact of the Fortune 500 company, talked about why skills data is invaluable for their organization, why they think it's gonna help them, not just to build, but to even retain and hire. And for those of you who chose to invest your time in this session today, know that that's where the importance is, right? So there's, I would recommend as you're getting in front of your, um, I would say the executive team or your leadership team where you need to get commitments from them, showcase the, um, you know, the data that's already out there that talks about the importance of building skills now rather than waiting later and talking about how AI has revolutionized this and accelerated it, right? So look for that information out there. I have some, uh, really good quotes over here, and there are some really good current reports, 2025 out there, starting with the World Economic Forum. On the right inside of the slide, I talk a little bit about the Singapore skills future government. In my past role, I had the opportunity of meeting with the Singapore government. Um, and you won't believe it, it's been a decade since they have been working on this as a, uh, not a company, but rather as a country, right? And you would think, wow, that's a huge effort. And yes, it was. And when I spoke to the head of l and d there, and the head who was actually leading this information, we talked about why did the country invest in their first on? And the most important thing she said was, it's all about data. If you know what the current skills are, if you know what the future skills are required, you can help fill that gap by bridging it and creating development plans. So for me, as an l and d leader, as an HR leader, that was aha, right? Because we, I get this question a lot, and I'll talk about this in my presentation, which is, many leaders, business leaders came to me. And Saida, what skills should we be focusing on, right? We don't wanna overwhelm our people here because not only are they working really long hours, maybe even, uh, looking at burnout, but then we are expecting them to actually continuously learn. And we are giving them so many hours of mandatory training. How do we make sure that their time is laser focused on the right things, they feel engaged? And of course, overall we see the results in the business outcomes. So the Singapore government, if you haven't had a chance, please do read about the work they have done. They have built a central repository of data about the companies that the, um, the country has and where the skills are. Imagine having that data at your fingertips and the things you could do with that, right? So here's an example of what, not just the company, but what a country's doing too, that's the value proposition. So continuing forward is the evolving industry landscape. So when your leaders, when your business partners or your, um, executive team members come to you and say, why should we invest in this right now? Right? We are already so busy doing this and that, and looking at AI as a transformation. How do we keep up with this? And this is where you as an HR leader, as an LE leader, can really help showcase to them that this is the right time to invest, right? The world is changing. We have digital transformations coming up so soon changing of consumer behavior, right? We see that every single day, every single week. We see that the consumer behaviors change that what is driving the market, and that's what is leading all the changes in the industry, whether for the good or for the bad, but we are seeing a lot of movement in the industry. Technology ment, I think is very similar to the digital transformation I just mentioned, and that's the direction where people are investing. Now, as I was coming in for this session this morning, uh, my early morning reading, I looked at some of the news that was out there, and some of the, unfortunately of Saba happening, and it was all being said, AI is replacing this job in that, right? But there is still a lot of advancement that needs to happen. The amount of talent that we put in, the amount of knowledge that we put in for roles, AI is definitely starting at a good, uh, position. But they still have a lot of things to learn. And I'm saying they, I mean, the ai, uh, large language models and machine learning, right, has to learn a lot more. But that's where we have to continue having this discussion with our leaders to say, yes, there are some easier efficiencies that we can implement AI on, but how do we make sure that, uh, the people touches there, that we make sure that we help coach these individuals to make sure that they are taking the right decisions within the organization or if they choose to leave the organization, right? So all that data that's driving that decision making is gonna be really important for you as a leader to take in front of your business leaders and your executive teams. Now, I love this, um, map that we have driven. It's not a map, basically, but it's a framework that we talk about. And this is something that I hope you are already thinking about since you are here. Um, you know, going through this presentation, which is what is your two to three year vision or a roadmap for building a skilled strategy? And I'm calling it that because it is a long road, it will take you time to look at what's under the bone, right? Within your organization. So for instance, companies who have been there longer have job architectures that are attached to your total reward system, that are attached to your inbuilt systems. It could be success factors, it could be Workday that most company has and or other platforms, right? So all of that decision that was made when these systems were implemented are still there. So when you look under the bonnet, when you look under the hood, what are you gonna find? Right? So the job architecture is something that's gonna help define a lot of the skill strategy that you've built, right? So we heard our earlier, um, leaders, Charlie Andre, talk about what does it really look like when you start building that strategy. So this framework here will at least help you to think about all the stakeholders you have to work with, all the key areas that you have to focus on and the why behind it, right? It all needs to start with your business goals. Please do not go into this direction if your initial assessment and your discussions with the business leaders give you the perspective that the company's not ready for it, right? So instead of making a big, uh, message about this, start working in the backend, get the total rewards team, uh, into this discussion. Get your business partners into discussion rather than getting the business leaders in discussion. Because if you get them too early into the discussion forum, they will ask you for results, which is harder to give in this first one to two years, right? Not to say you can't do it, of course you can, uh, balance those relationships with the business leaders, but you need to make sure you're doing, you're doing a lot of groundwork now. The groundwork includes career paths and making sure that you have enough information about, uh, giving them career development opportunities. So, um, one of the leaders in our earlier presentation talked about job descriptions, right? What do they look like? Now, the good news is, uh, in the last few years, especially during COVID, a lot of online systems came into being, and most of it was focused around scale. So today, if you say, I need a software engineer level one or a hardware engineer, level two, whatever that looks like, you can actually go ahead and buy information from several a TS systems out there. Eightfold has great job descriptions. You have LinkedIn that has great job descriptions. Um, you know, fuel 50 also really helps in a lot of that information setting, right? So you have something to start with. You have something to say with, okay, maybe my company hired a software engineer 20 years ago, or let's not go that far, maybe even five years ago, maybe two years ago. But what has changed in the last few years? What has changed in the last 12 months, right? That's where these systems, these skills platforms, these skills, uh, data centers can actually provide you the latest and the greatest job descriptions. And of course, that's where you and your team, from a talent acquisition perspective, in partnership with your business partners and leaders can look at, are these the right job descriptions, right? You can look at that information and start building, um, that strategy and say, these are the critical skills that are needed, right? Then make sure you provide that information to your business leaders, um, in the initial stages to say, if it's a software development person, we need to make sure they have data analytics, right? As a basic skill. That's, that's a, you know, a no-brainer, right? As we move forward now, the company can decide and say, well, we are building a large team of maybe a hundred data, an analysts, or sorry, data, so, uh, sorry, software engineers. If you're building a large team, do we decide to develop people internally or hire or do a combination of both, right? That's where the skill strategy really helps you to, um, look at workforce planning in a smarter way and say, do we have people in different teams that we can bring together to actually build, um, you know, a software engineering team with data analytics or learn from these other areas? So that's why on this framework, I talk about upskilling and reskilling, and I'll just pause here for a second. For those of you who, uh, might still be confused upon, what is upskilling and reskilling, the definition's really simple. So upskilling is, I'm a software engineer, and based on the analysis, my leader comes to me and says, well, whether you have good data analytics skill at a basic level, but I need you to upskill yourself and learn data analytics at a advanced level, right? It'll take you 400 hours of training, uh, I'm exaggerating, it might take less than that, but let's build a plan for you that is upskilling so that I stay in the same role, but the role requirements are changing and I'm upskilling myself. Now, reskilling is when a company, let's say a manufacturing company goes into a completely automation, uh, side of things. Maybe they have a hundred people who are doing manual work in the manufacturing space. So then they decide, let's take 70 of them or 80 of them because they have the basic skills necessary and train them to help them rescale into this new system that's gonna come in. So their job titles will change. Uh, of course total rewards, you know, combined with that will change and everything will change right as they move forward. But we retain that talent as a company. So that's what reskilling is focusing on. Um, it can also be embellished with certifications and additional trainings, right? Upskilling and reskilling, that's the direction that most companies are going. And career navigation, which is where career paths really come in, is where you enable your employees and tell them, by the way, you are this level you. If you need to get to this different level, here are the skills needed. And if you have a smart system, like for instance, there are many smart systems in the companies, um, like Workday, success factors, degreed, even fuel 50 of what I've learned, and there are many more in the market. Based on your needs, you can implement these systems and look at those skills needed for each area, build content on it, or buy content on it, and make sure your, uh, folks who are going into that training get that information to build their skills, get certified in it, and start working at that next level, right? So that's career navigation. Talent management basically means is how do we make sure, and, uh, some of the leaders in this, uh, presentation, earlier presentations alluded to this, which is, how do we make sure it's embedded in talent? We are hiring for the right, um, skills, right? Talent acquisition in talent management when it comes to how are we, uh, rating folks and their performances promoting them or giving talent mobility options to them for their better growth. That all comes under talent management and internal talent mobility. Many companies are struggling with this, but there's a clear way of designing that and anchoring your decision making on the skills, right? And that skills part is where the investment from the company is so important because it'll help open up so many different areas for you. And the other ways where you can give people opportunities to learn is through job rotations, um, and job shadowing. 'cause many companies do that for one or two weeks, and that works really well. Apprenticeship programs, many manufacturing companies are going in this direction and finding great impact through those programs. And then making sure, last but not the least on this framework, which technically is not last, but I'm mentioning it over here, is total rewards. The total rewards team should be sitting with you as you strategize and build this. Now, total rewards depends on, for those of you who might be from this field, uh, and might be better, uh, you know, uh, trained at this than me, but companies like Radford and other companies that provide data and information on salary structure and compensation, they are also doing a really good job. And then the last one year, I think many of these companies has come up with here other job descriptions. Here's the job architecture, and here's what compensation is tied with these new skills. So lot of, uh, you know, um, in updates have come up in the last one year. Lot of good stuff has come for you to take either buy or take advantage of from the public domain and utilize as you build, you know, uh, enhance, uh, you know, a skill strategy that you have. And the most important piece that I'll share on this is it creates a centralized talent data system for you, which is so important because when you say, we are building a new manufacturing side, or we are building this new data analytics team, or we are building this new software engineering team, maybe you already have internal data and you overlook it. And that's where companies make big mistakes. So from a retention standpoint, and from even saving huge amount of dollars and cost for yourself, you can actually look at centralized data and say, oh, DARTA, she has great data analytics skills. Maybe we should see if we can pull her in as we ramp up this new team and help her to either teach or be part of this new, uh, new team, right? So there are different ways where you can strategize and use that data. Now, what are the key elements of a skills strategy? You need to make sure you have a skills taxonomy. Now, a few years ago when I went into this direction of building skills strategy, finding a skills taxonomy was hard because the industry and the companies were also learning about it. Now, you can actually, based on your needs, go out there and look at what taxonomy works best for you. Now, no taxonomy will be a hundred percent match. If it is, that's amazing. But most of the times you want to customize it for your company, brand value for your company, uh, you know, um, terminologies and things, right? So go ahead, get the taxonomy, which is the best for your organization and start implementing into your systems because at the end of the day, you can buy the best taxonomy data. But if you don't have automated systems or you are not using AI to uh, spruce up your own systems internally, then you're gonna be sitting with Excel sheets. And we all know who ends up getting those Excel sheets, our poor business partners, and they end up sitting with those Excel sheets for ages, and we wanna make sure that we help them to move forward fast. So make sure along with the skills taxonomy, you have the right, uh, technology implemented. Uh, you make sure you change the mindset and the messaging. So make sure it is tied to OKRs or goal settings. That's where the talent management mindset comes in, makes you messaging it right and correctly to your employees and your leaders. Because at the end of the day, it's the leaders who can drive this reframe and digitize the job architecture. I'll pause here. This is the piece that takes maximum time. If you are a company who's been around for 20 plus years, 'cause through the years your job architecture has been touched by amazing minds, amazing people, but then it's come out to be, um, you know, not a Martha Stewart cake. It came out to be something really interesting, tastes like a cake, but many people touched it, right? So you wanna make sure that you have a key focus, a key vision in mind when you go into the job architecture, job, uh, structuring piece. Make sure your total rewards team is part of that, and make sure that you check in with your business leaders on a regular basis in this phase, which is time consuming, and you wanna make sure that you do it correctly. And last, but not the least on this page, which is critical skills identified. A lot of people ask me, how do you identify this? Talk to your leaders where have, and your TA leaders, right? Talent acquisition leaders, they'll tell you which roles have been the hardest to fill for your organization, then talk to your business leaders and say, uh, is that one person doing that critical role? What if they lead to leave tomorrow? Right? How can we make sure that we have that critical role, uh, understood, and that we have other people in the organization who can do that very similar to what we did in succession planning in our, in our times, right? But this becomes very specific to, if not, then what if they don't have the skills today as backup? Then how do we build that development plan, right? It's all about getting that data for you as an HR leader and building plans for your business, right? And then making sure if you need budgets, if you need resources, work with your business leaders, show them the value proposition and say, if this person leaves, how much money are we going to spend? Time and effort and our timelines will get messed up. Versus if we, uh, strategize this early on proactively, how much money are we gonna save? Right? So then applying these key steps, defining the critical skills, as I mentioned, is important. That's step number one, absolutely. Start with that. Step two, create a skills framework and rating. We will talk about the rating in just a few minutes. Um, Zach, pausing here. Am I running out of time? We are all the time reta, so oh my goodness, I apologize. It flew by. I mean, I appreciate the steps though, and kind of the reaffirming the framework for people that want the rest of the slides. I want the rest of the content and the ask questions, where can they connect with you? And then also where can people get your book? Yes, thank you for that. Let's do this. My sincere apologies that we couldn't get to all. I had some really fun stuff prepared, but firstly, thanks Zach and team for inviting us. Um, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Uh, my, um, just ani, I have my website here and use your phones right now to scan my book. Uh, you, it'll take you to Amazon and you can find the information there. This page was just a way to share, um, the way we have been featured, me and my team, the book in different areas, and it's been amazing year. And please remember, skills is a long-term journey. If you need to reach out to me, please do. They can find the slides, DM me on LinkedIn and I'll send you the slides. There's a lot of exciting information that I've shared there in the how to phase and the tactical phase. So Zach, thank you so much and I apologize for running out of the time this, It's okay. There's so much to unpack here, so I appreciate you just bringing your, your expertise and also the depth of the framework. My Name is Do With One O, otherwise it could've been very odd. And I'm the CEO and co-founder of Juno Journey. In the picture, as you can see, uh, my beautiful partner and kids. Um, and if I think about, yeah, since we found the Juno journey, we've been obsessed with one question. How can we help employees become the best version of themselves? While that question can take many directions, we choose to focus on one core idea why companies invest in learning and development in skills in the first place. And that why has taken us, um, on the most fascinating journey, at least from my perspective and my point of view. Because at the end of the day, skills that have always been and will always be the key, and it's probably what brought you all today, right? Skills at work. So since our topic today is Skills at Work, I've prepared something I hope you'll find super practical and effective. And before we dive in, just two quick slides about Junior Journey. So what does J Journey have to do with skills? If you're an HR learning and development or talent development leader, everyone wants a piece of you. And what do I mean? Yes, we're sweet, but it means that leadership, management, employees, managers, they all need just one thing from US training to update the onboarding process, help people to upskill themselves and so on and so forth. And truth is, most professionals spend far more time on operations than on impact on helping others, right? And this is exactly where, uh, the Juno journey learning and development agents team steps in giving professionals like yourself the space to focus on strategy and impact while we take care of the heavy operational lift. Our team, our agent team, uh, builds courses and training programs, checks, knowledge of your employees, unlock hidden expertise, and connects employees goals to personal development plans. We're proud to serve hundreds of fleeting, uh, companies all over the world, from Pelli to Gong and many others, uh, through our two core solutions and agent first learning management system. Trust me, forget everything you know about learning management system and a goal-driven development platform designed to turn business needs into skills, which brings me to, to today's topic, the skills shift. So we usually think of CEOs or CFOs when we talk about business strategy, right? But in a world where AI is rewriting how companies compete, the real question is what skills will keep us ahead, right? So the focus of today is the skills shift. HR and learning and development be the center of business strategy. Now, let's give it a bit of context. AI is reshaping work in real time. No doubt roles are disappearing, others are blending and job titles. They're crumbling faster than organization can keep up. If we think about it, some will say that, you know, I will use an example. The ink on a job description is dry before the role has already changed, right? So the pace of change demands more flexible adaptive organizational structures that can evolve with business needs. Now, where's the challenge? Here's the trap. Job titles oversimplify. What people can really do? A single title cannot capture the full range of skills, experiences, and potential that each individual brings to an organization, right? It also lock talent into boxes. I mean, traditional job titles create artificial boundaries that prevent employees from contributing their diverse talents across different areas of the business. And they definitely do not reflect, I would say the speed of today's business needs. Static job descriptions becomes absolute quickly in today's dynamic business environment, if we think about it, failing to adapt to emerging challenges and opportunities. So you may say that titles are yesterday's answer to today's chaos. Um, skills. Skills are completely different. Skills are, they are portable, measurable, adaptive. They can flow across teams, across functions, and companies that organize around skills. They are agile, they are disruption. Proof skills are the real currency of work. If we think about it. And here's an example for a company. Take jro, a public company, that together with Juno Journey turned all 2000 of its employees goals into personal development plans, helping every employee build the skills they need today to reach their next step. Just giving you a quick, uh, All right, so yes, usually videos like this sound good on paper, but probably people need to ask me, do, do we really see skills as currencies? So let me share two examples that might change how you think about skills as currencies. Okay? Let's talk about, um, content writing as a skill. Once a specialized role for content writers, obviously requiring dedicated professionals with specific training in writing, editing, and content strategy, right? Content writing used to sit squarely, I would say with marketing teams, dedicated specialists, writing blogs, managing campaigns, shaping brand voice. But today, something very different is happening now. Leaders themselves, especially executives, are now expected to be visible and to share their thoughts and knowledge, and they need to acquire a new skill. Content creation. Here's an example. I hope you can see it. She's amazing. Take a look at Chili Piper's, CEO, um, Elena and or the CEO of retention.com, Adam, they both post so constantly that 50% of their company's deals, new deals are influenced by their LinkedIn content. Now millions in pipeline every quarter for them. Posting isn't just a, isn't just branding. If we, if we think about it, it's a business growth scheme. And suddenly there of ai, A CEO can use, whether it's charge GBT Cloud, whatever it is, or any other alternative to organize their thoughts into LinkedIn posts, social posts, what was a content writer skill becomes something every leader must and could acquire. Um, and, and, and, and to simply put, leadership, today isn't just strategy. It's a skill of communication, influence. And at least in my eyes, or I, I hope that I manage to convince you to this example and content creation. So the democratization of content creation tools means that leadership, communication skills are now essential for business growth, not just for marketing teams. And we have many more examples. One of them is here, the, uh, a, a salesperson, not necessarily, um, uh, uh, a CEO or an executive. Second one, second example that I want to share with you, which I have experienced on a personal level. Let's talk about product design, right? Product design is a skill design used to belong only to designers, but AI tools like Figma now allow product managers and engineers to design and iterate instantly. What was once followed is now completely democratized. Skills do not belong to to roles anymore. They flow. And I want to break it down, why skills matter in the AI in the AI era. Okay. First, AI accelerate, accelerates change. Yesterday's role do not fit to today's reality. Functions are disappearing or re or being redefined. Second, skills shift faster than titles, right? We set a skillset for a specific job title four months from now. It can be completely changed. Skills evolve in Wix, and that's why adaptability is now the true differentiator. And third companies that can redeploy skills across functions win. That's it. If you can move talent fluidly, not stuck by job descriptions, but activated by skills, you gain speed, innovation and resilience, which is super important, specifically nowadays. This is the new playbook. Speed of change, speed of skills, speed of redeployment. This is where it gets written. What is needed for business strategy. Strategy today isn't about organizational charts or job descriptions. It's about skill adaptability. Can you bring the right skills to the right problem at the right time? This is the question. Competitive advantage comes from redeployment speed. We see the amount of changes in the market from Salesforce to Google, Amazon. The changes are unbelievable. And the faster you can shift people to where they're, they're needed, the more you outpace your competition. And the core of all of this skills are the foundation of resilience. Skills-based companies do not just survive disruption. They thrive in it because they can pivot, they can innovate, and they can keep moving forward. Super critical nowadays, and this is where you come in, learning and development is no longer just a support function, creating courses, running programs, and staying in the background. No, that's it. You're sitting right at the intersection of skills and business needs. Think about it. You're the ones who know where skills are missing, where there are growing, and how fast they need to evolve. And this is probably why Josh Bersin put it so clearly. I think I, I really like this, um, quote, when you define work in terms of skills, learning and development stops being a service and becomes a central to the business execution to the business execution. This is the moment for every single professional to stop being react reactive, and to step into the role of strategic business partner. Now, let's be practical because it's, I think that it's the most important part. Step one, partner with the business. I know it sounds obvious, but it's, it's super challenging. Don't wait for strategy to trickle down, be in the room when it's made. Ask what skills will make, will break, will make or break this, this product launch. How can we support it with skills, customer experience? When you map skills directly to strategy, you stop being a support function and start being a driver. Step two, use AI and data. Yes, it's also a skill that we as professionals, we need to acquire right now. We have to know how to use AI and we have to know how to play with data. You cannot manage skills with spreadsheets. Someone before me mentioned spreadsheets and the care that spreadsheets, uh, creates internally inside every single organization. You need real time visibility. Skills can't be measured today and being reevaluate in six months. You need to see things in real time. What skill, what skills do we actually have today? Those are the type of questions that I would ask myself. Where are the gaps? How are they evolving? And here's the kick here. AI doesn't just track skills. It predicts where the business will need them next. That's how you stop reacting and start preparing. And just to say, this is exactly what Juno is built to do, to connect gold skills and learning paths in one place. Now, the last one, but definitely not the least, start small then scale. 94% of the AI projects up until now in enterprises have failed, at least according to Deloitte. And I can totally see it as well as Business Insider. Uh, mentioned it, uh, a few times. Start small. Pick one. Critical area can be product, sales, customer experience, and pilot. A skills-based approach show the business impact faster, time to market, better close rate, stronger customer retention. Once you pivot, scaling becomes preventable. This is the playbook for learning development leaders who want to lead, not lag in the AI area. And one last thing, the future belongs to organizations that can adapt, redeploy, and constantly develop their human capabilities. The question isn't whether this shift will happen. It's whether you will lead it or follow it. And I'm sure that every single person that join us tonight is going to limit it. Um, thank you very much everyone. I hope that I just ended up on time. Zach, feel free to let me know if I'm wrong. You were great, Dora. That was perfectly on time. If anything, we got a, a minute or two to spare, so I would love to ask a follow up question if, if you, uh, can continue here. So one, shout out to do and Juno journey. Check them out. As they're just shared, they're actively helping organizations map these things to the strategy, but also track and enhance and fill in some of the SCO gaps. So check that out. Number two, we're our communities are actually hitting the road together next week, so I just want to give a shout out to that as well. Uh, you'll find us in Austin, Boston, and New York next week. So if you happen to be in any of those cities or you wanna make a trip out to one of those cities, that'd be awesome as well. Send us a message, send Dora a message. Uh, just shared, uh, his LinkedIn there too. We would love to see you all. We're gonna have some discussion on this topic continued next week. Um, Dora, I'm curious of your thoughts on pilots and how some of these groups might actually launch a pilot. Let's say they leave this program and they're like, Monday, I wanna launch a pilot. What are some of the ways you think groups should approach that to start, is it like looking at one team? Is it looking at a whole entire department? Should you look at specific use cases? Like how do these pilots get kicked off sometimes? So first of all, if you're planning to start on Monday, don't, uh, Monday it's a bad day to start with Any type of pilot, people usually come back from, uh, their, uh, weekend. I'm just kidding. I think that the most important question is not which group. I think that the most important question is to find a real problem that you can tackle, right? Um, being a business partner means that we actually ask the right question. So I would go out sitting with executives right now and trying to find this stakeholder, the internal stakeholder that that faces real problem eventually. The number one, uh, reason for learning and development people to fail in their programs is lack of collaboration. Internally. It's super difficult to convince people that learning and development is going to change their performance. And I think that once you focus on one critical problem and you convince one specific executive that fills this pain, that running a small scale experiment will cost you nothing, but again, can be tremendous. This is where you should start. Um, not on Monday. Pick Tuesday. I think That's definitely expert tip number one. Never launch anything on a Monday. Yeah. And then number two though, I think what you hit on is really critical though. Look at business problems or challenges that people are having. And I I, I don't think any executive would go, Hey, yeah, I'm struggling, or, our team's not performing in this way. If you come to 'em and say, Hey, let me help you approach this and uncover gaps or reasons why they might not have the skills to achieve what you're trying to achieve. Every executive's gonna be like, yes. Like please help. So I think that's such a critical part. And then where do you go from there? Would you say in the pilot? Is it then like, working with that executive to understand, okay, what are the goals? Let's break that down into what are the skills needed to achieve that? And then let's go attack that R right? So it's, it's, we're going to talk about it next week, both in US in Texas, as well as in Boston. And we have another event in New York. So I will share my formula. It always starts with a problem. Then we go to the second phase, right? You have a problem. Why do you think that you have this problem? Let's focus on the human capabilities, which are missing in your eyes, because if it's, if it's lack of cash, um, uh, you need a software right now, it's not something that learning, uh, uh, learning and development team can help you with. But if you are looking at the human capabilities, the specific skills which are not meeting your expectation as an executive, this is where I would focus on the next part would, would probably be what's your north star for this experiment? Because we cannot change the world through an experiment. What will make you super happy, satisfied, and will give you the, the, the, the this feeling that we're going towards the right direction. Because sometimes guys, remember helping people to gain the relevant skills can take time. We can't take them from 10 to 100 or from zero to zero, but we can definitely show an improvement. So I would pick the relevant key performance indicator for this experiment, and I would make sure that it can actually be achievable during this experiment period of time. So three things. I would say find a problem, take a look if there are any human capabilities, which are not meeting the expectation skills. Third, set up the right expectation because any experiment can be considered as a failure or success depends on the metrics that we set at the beginning. So it's super important not to, um, set up, uh, an aggressive, uh, KPIs, which will, uh, fail this, uh, experiment. Eventually make this, uh, experiment fail eventually.

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