This week we met several HR leaders in North America and London, and it was a productive week.  Much of the focus was on Skills Architecture emerging as a key business advantage.  We also discussed how Recruiters and Workforce Planners could transform the organization through the same lens of Skills Architecture.  One key takeaway was that skills must be grown and nurtured in the right environment.  A skills-based organization’s job is to define the skills and understand who is good at those skills.  In the book Gene, an intimate history, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee presents an interesting case study on learning environments.  Gregor Mendel, considered a genetics science pioneer, began life in Brno, Czech but was initially considered timid and uninspiring.  But when Mendel moved to Vienna, he was mentored by Christian Doppler( who invented the Doppler Effect).  This mentorship changed Mendel’s approach, and they went on to create history and develop the most advanced models.

But how can an organization move towards a skills-based architecture and, more importantly, maintain it on an ongoing basis?  Draup has developed a point of view on how Workforce Planning, Recruitment, L&D, and People Analytics can unite and make this happen.  Here is the schema around the same.

Here are the key elements of this model:

Strategic Workforce Planning maps the Business Intentions that an enterprise is planning to accomplish.  But rather than the usual supply/demand graph from a role-based headcount, we also map the supply and the supply-demand gap at the skill level.  (There are many steps to get there, but this is a crucial mapping).  This skills architecture output can be used to reskill and upskill.  TA can use such a foundation for hiring.  Integrating with People Analytics on real-world experiments (testing the data for how we are performing against the plan will be mighty valuable)

Skills Architecture also requires a lot of Recruiter Inputs who are intimately familiar with the skills.  Draup is also creating this cheat sheet for Recruiters that will help.  Our goal is to create a comprehensive skills view by Job, Family, and Role.  Our tech team can create a Search Engine for you to align the Job Families and Skills Quickly.

These skills can further be arranged as Current Skills, Skills to be learnt within a year, and Skills to be learnt within two years.  The idea is not to overload with a lot of skills and hyper-prioritize areas of learning.

Such a skill view can also be extended to external market studies.  Here we have shown Rust programming language skills availability (one of the most wanted skills in the Crypto world – Not available but will be sought by companies in the next 2 to 3 years)