I am keen to learn more about how companies are evolving into skills-based organizations. From your experience, how have you seen companies approach this transition? Additionally, could you share any insights on which vendors you have observed supporting this particularly well?
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Hi Jess, great question. From my perspective, the Skills market is still fraught with challenges.
We have Talent Marketplace / Skills “system of record” vendors, who primarily put the burden of Skills upon the employee (hey, employee, enter your own skills by yourself, maybe using our taxonomy, and keep that current quarterly!). To me this is problematic, in that employees don’t always know their skills, how to identify them, and have any incentive to keep them current. While Visier is great at providing insights on this data, the data isn’t of the same quality as other domains in HCM, which diminishes the value of insights delivered. So, from a vendor perspective, I’m still waiting/watching for a great SoR application that incorporates automated skills attribution, employee augmentation of those recommended skills, and manager approval / validation of those skills and incorporation into a performance management system (in each quarterly / semi-annual / etc performance review, we discuss my evolving skills and what I need to develop next).
But to perhaps be a bit controversial, I don’t think the Skills vendors are actually going to make the market move. I think more likely, the emergence of GenAI is going to start to decompose jobs, and my guess is we’ll evolve from a world of copilots to a world of Agents. Andrew Ng has written thoughtfully about Agents here: Robots Talk Back, AI Security Risks, Political Deepfakes, and more
If indeed we see a plethora of Agents that take on mundane / repetitive tasks, we should see improvements in productivity, and we should see increasing demand to upskill employees. McKinsey has a good article on the likely impact to workforces here: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2023-generative-ais-breakout-year
So, tl;dr, no vendors have impressed me yet, but I think GenAI is likely to force a more cogent approach to upskilling in the coming years, and I’m looking forward to the innovation.
p.s. If you want a great book that gives a potential likely future for us this coming decade, read “The Coming Wave” by MSFT AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman.
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