Job Mapping and Skills Evaluation in the Age of ChatGPT and AI Disruption

Last week, I traveled to several places in the US, Europe, and India and met with several leaders.   Leaders are interested in mapping their internal job roles and job families with external job roles.  Perhaps the motivation is around some evaluation of the available skills and how innovative they are.  2023 has already shown that it will not be a dull year.  Last week at an all-hands meeting at Google, a debate sparked my interest.  “Bard and Chat GPT are large language models and not knowledge models.  They are great at the human-sounding text and ensuring text is based on facts”.

It isn’t easy being a data scientist in these times.  They must judge their project per their own standards and not let the shiny objects make them doubt the work (Deeplearning.AI).  There is a genuine expectation that ChatGPT and other similar technologies will disrupt the workforce.  But the panic may be a little overpronounced.  The concern is less about job loss due to such technologies but more about an opportunity to see how productivity can be transformed.  ChatGPT will be one meaningful milestone in productivity improvement.

According to Allan Ritter, a computing professor at Georgia Tech, it costs about 11 cents (0.11 USD) for one Chat GPT query.  Some other studies state lower costs, but it will be cost-intensive for companies to use this technology at scale.  It is unclear what it costs for companies like Google or Microsoft to serve this.  The computational demands are intense.  We tried to do one experiment this week and decided to use our own internally developed light model for summarizations

There are a couple of initiatives that become important at this juncture.  HR leaders must look at the Job Catalog and see how it aligns with external Job roles and skills.  This step may help you evaluate the skills available vs. areas of gaps in a directional way.

A job catalog may have elements as follows.  Here is an illustrative job catalog

Figure1:  Representative Job Catalog

• Through this job catalog, it becomes important to compare the job catalog with the external job families and ensure innovative components are included
• Labor board descriptions are also evolving, so across countries, we can map the job catalog roles as shown in fugure2)
• The core goal of HR leadership should be to understand the available skills and reskilling opportunities and source for skills not available

Figure2:  Mapping Across Global Labor Boards