Ninety percent of HR executives indicate that their companies are already experiencing or expect skills shortages to arise in the next five years. In response, HR leaders are introducing more skills-based hiring practices to address these issues.
Unlike traditional models based on fixed job descriptions, skills-based hiring is centered on the particular skills needed for critical business workloads. In fact, current studies indicate companies using skills-based hiring approaches are 60% more likely to make effective recruiting choices than those without such practices, and that attests that skills are becoming the workplace currency.
However, amidst this urgency, companies still have a general obstacle: what are the skills to concentrate on in order to remain competitive in 2025 and beyond?
To address this, Draup has developed the Skills Quadrant Framework. A strategic workforce planning tool that allows organizations to visualize, prioritize, and act on the most critical workforce skills.
A Data-Backed Blueprint for Strategic Skills-Based Hiring
The Skills Quadrant Framework gives business and talent leaders an efficient, fact-driven approach to skills-based hiring. Unlike generic lists, the framework structures skills along two axes of analysis:
- Current Relevance to Operations: How critical is the skill to operations today?
- Future Strategic Value: How valuable will the skill be for tomorrow’s growth and innovation?
Based on the two dimensions, each of the skills is allocated into one of four strategic skills-based hiring categories:
- Core Skills in 2030
Highly relevant today and even more tomorrow.
These are your must-invest-in skills, key to both existing operations and future innovation.
Examples: AI/ML deployment, data governance, cloud-native engineering
- Steady Skills
Valuable currently, but declining in strategic value.
They can be redeployed or reskilled as their worth diminishes.
Examples: Legacy system admin, manual QA, classical BPO professions
- Emerging Skills
Not used frequently these days, but critical for the future.
These are early-mover opportunities. Skills where proactive skills-based hiring investment gives you a head start.
Examples: Generative AI integration, autonomous agent engineering, and quantum-safe cryptography
- Out-of-Focus Skills
Little current value and even less tomorrow.
Prospects for phased reduction, automation, or outsourcing.
Examples: Routine report generation, older programming languages, and data entry
Through skill mapping along these dimensions, organizations gain insights into current workforce alignment and future-readiness, allowing them to invest in the right skills at the right time with skills-based hiring precision.
Applying the Skills Quadrant Framework to Create a Future-Proof Workforce
Skills Quadrant Framework is not merely a classification tool, it’s a strategic enabler that helps HR, Talent, and Business leaders make more informed decisions on skills-based hiring, upskilling, and organizational agility. Here’s how organizations can use it to their advantage:
1. Prioritize Skills-Based Hiring
Focus recruitment on Core Skills in 2030 and Emerging Skills; capabilities that will power both current performance and future innovation.
Example:
A cloud infrastructure provider could use the skills quadrant to ensure a shift from role-based hiring (e.g., “DevOps Engineer”) to skills-based hiring centered on cloud-native engineering, data governance, and AI/ML deployment. These are categorized as Core Skills in 2030 and can be incorporated into job descriptions, assessments, and sourcing plans directly.
Emerging Skills like Gen AI integration and autonomous agents can be prioritized in the innovation teams that are in the early stages of development. Rather than trying to get mainstream approval, the company could proactively build future capability via niche recruitment channels, academic partnerships, and tech communities.
This approach would convert the company into a future-ready talent leader in hiring and could align skills-based hiring strategy with enterprise objectives.
2. Establish Reskilling Paths
Reskill employees in Steady Skills or Out-of-Focus Skills toward Core or Emerging areas with adjacent competencies.
Example:
A big IT services company, when preparing for skills-based recruitment, could discover hundreds of employees working in legacy system management and QA positions by using manual techniques, both categorized as Steady Skills. They already possess system architecture and testing logic skills and are ideal candidates to be upskilled for cloud-native engineering and AI-powered test automation (Core Skills in 2030).
Similarly, employees performing monotonous report generation, an Out-of-Focus Skill, could be reskilled in data storytelling or interactive analytics dashboards, using their subject-matter expertise in more strategic, technology-enabled manners.
This skills-based hiring approach will enable the organization to maintain institutional memory while it adapts its manpower to suit new technological environments.
3. Future-Proof Workforce Strategy
Embed the Skills Quadrant in a long-term skills-based hiring plan by tracking the evolution of Core and Emerging Skills.
Example:
A consumer electronics company in the midst of AI transformation could use Draup’s skill quadrant to map future capability requirements. It would find that although traditional BPO functions (Steady Skills) are still operationally applicable, they are no longer adequate in isolation. To remain competitive, the company will have to practice skill-based talent acquisition and rapidly build competence in quantum-safe cryptography and generative AI integration (Emerging Skills) to fortify its next-generation offerings.
As a result, the talent strategy team can create a 3-year workforce strategy composed of:
- Skill audits across teams
- Partnerships with academic initiatives on AI ethics and quantum computing
- Internship and fellowship pipelines in new technology fields
This proactive skills-based hiring approach would minimize disruption, reduce the cost of future hiring, and align workforce transition with product innovation cycles.
4. Enhance Internal Mobility
Use the framework to surface adjacent skills and connect employees with upskilling opportunities or lateral moves into future-focused roles.
Example:
A biotech company with a robust documentation team could discover that most of its positions fall under Steady Skills, such as manual QA and compliance audit. But the same employees possess transferable strengths such as attention to detail and regulatory stringency that make them suitable for data governance or regulatory AI automation (Core and Emerging Skills).
An internal talent marketplace, powered by Draup’s data, could be used to assign these employees to stretch assignments and formal learning streams that would build these new competencies, further strengthening skills-based hiring.
Through this skills-based strategy, in-house mobility would increase retention and engagement and allow the business to redeploy talent more effectively at zero cost of external recruitment.
How to Scale a Workforce Strategy Across Teams
Companies can start in a single function, such as engineering, operations, or marketing, and utilize the quadrant to redesign their skills-based hiring needs or discover adjacent reskilling opportunities. If successful, the approach can be scaled across departments and geographies, and the quadrant becomes a key component of enterprise workforce strategy.
Draup’s skills-based workforce planning enables companies to become AI transformation-ready by shifting workforce strategy from reactive to proactive. Draup can scale this model to the future of work so that the right skills-based hiring strategy is established.
