Today’s business realities are shaped by a growing digital revolution and changing global landscape. Technologies are fusing, blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds, and artificial intelligence and robotics continue their path of sophistication.
The proliferation of AI, demographic shifts, emerging markets and environmental changes are disrupting every industry. These geostrategic changes have a significant impact on the work we do, the jobs we define, skills requirements and availability of talent.
You must prioritize creating opportunities for skill building, learning and meaningful career experiences for your employees. As new ways of doing work continue to evolve, you need to both understand the skills your workforce needs and be ready to evolve to keep pace with inevitable change.
A skills-first approach is an important lever to address the fast-moving challenges associated with technological and geostrategic change. WTW helps clients like you define infrastructure for work as well as identify and maintain the skills you need to achieve your business results in an evolving landscape.
Establish a skills-first orientation
You can establish an overarching career ecosystem by building on a solid work architecture, which is comprised of job leveling, job architecture and knowledge architecture. Doing this provides connection and continuity among the business, how your jobs are organized and, ultimately, how you measure performance and reward your employees.
Develop an overarching skills strategy and optimize your skills
A successful approach to skills requires a fit-for-purpose skills strategy. Whether you want to develop a custom skills taxonomy or buy a single off-the-shelf solution, we can help you enhance your approach – quickly. We’ll help you consider key factors for your strategy, including the alignment of skills to your job architecture as well as the granularity of skills.
Forecast and embrace future skills needs
From a skills perspective, a clear link to job architecture and job leveling creates a mechanism to understand and forecast your jobs and skills needs based on the work being done in your organization today as well as what will be needed in the future.
Support new work models
Your organization needs to think about how HR programs and processes can support new work models and realistically implement them. At WTW, we delve into your work strategy to determine your key business drivers and technology plans:
Understand the data
Start with an analysis of the overall existing job architecture, considering the roles that currently are in place and how the requirements for work are changing now and in the future.
Design a knowledge architecture
Identify the skills required for work and identify the sources of knowledge (e.g., career development programs, employee assessment programs).
Map skills
Lean on data to verify talent supply vs. demand and map the skills to work. This will set your reskilling pathways.
Enable talent applications
Create transparency for your talent to connect on new work and further their ambition in meaningful, purpose-driven work.
By considering the nature of work and the potential of technology, we collaborate with you to design work strategically to address capability gaps, human capital risk and cost for improved outcomes. We believe in building a clear, defined work architecture to provide a clear view of the work being done and the skills needed to achieve the right business outcomes.
