We live in an era where innovation may happen in any corner of the world, and thereby as HR leaders, we need to be tracking a library of locations (local and global).  Nasdaq acquired an Anti Financial Crime company called Verafin in Feb 2021 for over 2.7 billion dollars.  Verafin was founded in St. Johns, Newfoundland – Canada.  A location that is not necessarily in the tech footprint maps.  Such is the power of distributed technology and what is possible in the new age of the cloud-based world.  Last week, I was fortunate to connect with several key leaders in the industry and felt inspired by their revived enthusiasm for tackling fresh challenges.  An increased focus on leveraging new skills and better-equipping employees seemed paramount among their collective concerns.

2023 will also be the year that companies will migrate a bit closer toward skills-based architecture.  The one challenge may be around budgets, so companies must get creative in this journey.

Skills-based architecture, in combination with Automation advances, may help us accelerate in several areas, such as Inside Sales, Digital Marketing, DevOps, and several other functions.  One of the powerful outcomes of skills-based architecture is that it can help us understand emerging skills, diminishing skills, costs by skills, and availability and criticality by skills.  From a supply chain concepts standpoint, this is essential to achieving long-term optimization.  This approach enables us not to miss locations like St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada (although remote).  Here are some practical steps based on our last few implementations:

1. Define Core and Specialized Skill Clusters:  One starting point we used is to think about the core and specialized skill clusters across the various functions of Software Engineering, inside sales, and so on.  Here is an example snapshot of the Core Skill Clusters and Specialized skill clusters

2. Define Functional and Emerging Skills by Clusters:  Each skill cluster is further categorized into functional skills and Emerging skills

3. Map Skill Depth By Experience: A third layer of skill depth analysis can be very helpful to map out which experience levels should specialize in what skill clusters

4. Develop Reskilling and Upskilling plans for Emerging Skills and including soft skills

5. A global availability and demand map by skill can be generated through this framework