Episode 204: How to Build the Skills-Powered Organisation (Interview with Tanuj Kapilashrami & Ravin Jesuthasan)
Organisations are finding that the traditional job-based structure are no longer be enough to drive innovation and growth. As they face new challenges and opportunities, businesses are beginning to understand that shifting to a skills-based approach is crucial for future success.
To explore how moving to a skills-based organisation can open up new possibilities for organisations, in this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green sits down with Tanuj Kapilashrami, Chief Strategy & Talent Officer at Standard Chartered, and Ravin Jesuthasan, Global Leader of Mercer’s Transformation Services Business.
Together, they discuss:
Why traditional job structures are falling short in today’s world.
The tangible business and socio-economic benefits of adopting a skills-based approach.
The leadership shifts and capabilities needed to guide this transformation.
The critical role of data infrastructure in supporting a skills-powered organisation.
Key insights for HR and people analytics leaders on navigating this change.
With the upcoming release of their book, The Skills-Powered Organisation: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise, this conversation is packed with timely advice for HR leaders ready to future-proof their organisations.
We would also like to take the opportunity to say thank you to Visier for sponsoring this series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
Visier is the people analytics platform for successful HR teams, bridging the gap between HR productivity and business performance, giving managers the insights they need to lead effectively. Learn more at visier.com.
Links to More Resources:
[0:00:00] David Green: A 2022 study by Deloitte found that 90% of executives are experimenting with skills-powered approaches across various workforce practices. The same study found that these organisations are 63% more likely to achieve results across 11 key business and workforce metrics, including placing talent effectively and being more likely to innovate. These findings by Deloitte mirror those found in similar studies and help explain the shift from jobs towards skills as the primary currency and building block for work.
I'm David Green and joining me today on the Digital HR Leaders podcast are two leading voices who are at the forefront of articulating and implementing a skills-based approach, Tanuj Kapilashrami, Chief Strategy and Talent Officer at Standard Chartered Bank, and Ravin Jesuthasan, Global Leader of Mercer's Transformation Services Business. Together, they have co-authored a new book, which will be published on 1 October, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise. The book is a must-read for all HR and People Analytics leaders looking to adopt a skills-first approach to workforce planning and talent management. I'm fortunate to know both Tanuj and Ravin well and have had the pleasure of speaking with them separately on the podcast in previous episodes. But today, I am thrilled to be sitting down with them together to discuss a topic which I believe is critical in transforming the success of businesses of the future.
In our conversation, Tanuj, Ravin and I will explore why the shift to a skills-based organisation is critical for the future; we'll also look at the business outcomes of this approach; and the steps organisations can take to start this journey. So without further ado, let's hear from Tanuj and Ravin.
Tanuj and Ravin, it's wonderful to have you back on the show, both for your third appearance actually on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. I was really delighted when you told me that you'd collaborated on the book, The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise. And having had the privilege of reading the book, I can thoroughly recommend it to listeners as well. Ravin, what brought you together to create this absorbing and important book?
[0:02:32] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, thanks, David. It's such a pleasure to be back here with you and Tanuj. So you know, it's really fascinating because, so on the heels of my previous book, Work Without Jobs, I was really intrigued by the work that Tanuj and her team at Standard Chartered were doing to drive more agility in the organisation, to create a business model that was much more sustainable, and a business model that was built on the smaller building blocks of skills as opposed to these headlines that limit both how work is done, and frankly limit how people are engaged in businesses around this thing called a job. And so, I was really intrigued by the journey that Standard Chartered Bank had been on. Tanuj and I had collaborated in a number of different speaking engagements and I think we were at an event, Tanuj, maybe three years ago in London and we were both speaking at it and I looked at Tanuj and I said, "Hey, I'm thinking about my next book, would you like to write it with me?" And she was curious and we got chatting and just under three years later, here we stand with kind of a finished product! But, Tanuj, am I recalling correctly? What have I missed out or potentially blocked out in my mind?
[0:03:51] Tanuj Kapilashrami: No, firstly, it's great to do this with both of you. And, David, thanks for inviting Ravin and me. You're absolutely right. I think Ravin and I have both been intrigued by the idea of skills, how the move from jobs to skill is going to be the next big transformational journey that organisations are going to experience, are experiencing, sometimes without realising it themselves, and we have spoken about it a few times. And I was delighted to have this opportunity of collaborating with Ravin and trying to create something which obviously builds on this thinking, but tries to make it quite practical for the readers in terms of what does this really mean. And it's been a fascinating process doing it. I'm almost feeling sad that the process of writing is now behind us, Ravin.
[0:04:44] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yes, indeed.
[0:04:45] David Green: So, Tanuj, just one quick aside. How did you find time to write a book? And recently obviously moved from being Chief People Officer to Chief Strategy and Talent Officer at Standard Chartered Bank, I just wonder how you managed to find the time to co-author a book as well.
[0:05:03] Tanuj Kapilashrami: I have to say, doing it with Ravin, who is one of the most disciplined, I pride myself on being very organised and very disciplined, but having the opportunity of doing it with Ravin, who is supremely organised and disciplined, was very helpful. I have to say, because Ravin and I had spoken about this topic so much with each other and out in the open, it was so clear to us that our views were incredibly aligned. And so actually, it didn't take us any time to get onto the same page in terms of what is it that we wanted to say, and I think both of us had very distinct voices, driven by our experiences over the last few years. And actually, it made the process so much easier. I mean, we didn't come together to just write this book, we had been talking. I mean, we've spoken about this topic at Davos a couple of times now, Ravin, and we've done it. So, it was quite organic actually, being able to just build on those conversations and convert it all into something which is more enduring than our public appearances.
[0:06:08] David Green: I know you've done a huge amount of work in putting this skills-based approach into reality at Standard Chartered, and I think sometimes, when we hear consultants talk about it, it can seem quite a nebulous thing, but you've actually put it into practice. From your perspective, why is it so important now, maybe more than ever before, that organisations start shifting towards a skills-based approach to talent management practices?
[0:06:37] Tanuj Kapilashrami: I will start off by saying all of us, as individuals, as businesses, are experiencing and navigating rapid disruption in the world today. Changes in technology, climate change, geopolitics, I mean the amount of change that's happening in the world, which businesses are having to navigate, is phenomenal. What that really means is that the world of work is disrupting very quickly as well. The way work gets done, the kind of problems that are being solved, the human technology collaboration is completely disrupting. There is a lot of research which basically says, the classic web research that Ravin and I have quoted quite a bit, that over the next five years, it's expected that a quarter of all jobs in the world are going to fundamentally change, right? So, there is a huge amount of change and disruption that's happening.
For organisations, to keep buying these new skills that are going to be needed to be able to compete in this evolving world is commercially not viable. I mean, I keep saying that for our journey to becoming a much more skills-powered organisation started with a very commercial conversation between choices around build and buy, and that's where the conversation started. Of course, when I got deeper into it, I realised even if you could afford to buy all of these skills, the skills just don't exist. I mean, there's a lot of research that says now that the demand of workers with green skills over the next five years is going to exceed supply significantly. So there will be 60% increase in green roles by 2030, right? I've always been fascinated by the area of cybersecurity, which is a subset within the world of data, digital technology, and there is a huge amount of research that says there are over 3.5 million unfulfilled jobs in the world of cybersecurity. So even if you could afford to buy these skills, there's a huge shortage of these skills in the market.
So the world of work is disrupting, companies are trying to navigate these disruptions. That results in a need for organisational agility, and that means really reinventing how work gets done, thinking about expanding talent pools, thinking about going beyond the conventional wisdom of where you get these talent needs for.
[0:09:01] David Green: And, Ravin, you might want to add to that, because I know this is something you've studied and you've been writing books on it for a number of years now. And maybe as you do that, Ravin, from this research and experience, maybe identify what some of the tangible business benefits can be that can be achieved from this shift towards skills.
[0:09:22] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, David, I think Tanuj has done a really good job of articulating what the imperative to shift is, right, because standing still is no longer an option. Where we've seen organisations go down this path, I think there have been five fairly immediate benefits, right? One has just been much greater speed and agility in understanding how work is evolving, understanding the skills that are available or not, and then deploying talent to that work. So, there's a premium in speed and agility. I think related to that, a much lower time and cost to fill, if you will, whether you're filling a job, filling a project, assignment and a gig, that speed of deployment is certainly much higher. We've certainly seen in organisations who are becoming more skills-powered, the opening of new career paths, the opening of new opportunities to develop skills and express them have led to much higher levels of employee engagement.
Then economically, what we've seen are organisations who have realised a step change in productivity. We've got a case study in the book where we talk about a global insurer that realised a 600% gain in the productivity of their data scientists by moving from a traditional job-based fixed model, where that talent was bound up in IT, to actually having a more agile talent pool, where the talent was connecting to work through projects and assignments and gigs. And so again, just a quantum improvement in productivity. And then lastly, a step change in profitability. There's been so much discussion about Gen AI and whether it's actually delivering on the productivity promises that have been baked into so many corporate valuations. And what we're seeing is, when you combine that conversation of the power of AI and automation with an understanding of the skills that are being rendered obsolete, the skills that are changing in application because of these technologies being augmented, if you will, and then the new skills being demanded, as Tanuj was talking about, what you get is a much higher-order set of sustainable impact that has, in fact, the translation of those, that promise of productivity into real and sustained profitability improvements in the operating model.
[0:11:49] David Green: We're going to shift a little bit of focus now. We're going to talk about, how do you do this, how do you set yourself up as a skills-powered organisation? And I'm going to start with Ravin, and he's going to talk about some of the research that's out there, and then obviously we're going to come to you, Tanuj, and you're going to talk about that specifically to Standard Chartered. So, Ravin, obviously you've been studying this for a number of years and obviously, as part of the work that you do at Mercer as well, and obviously with the research that you and Tanuj did for the book, what would you say are the critical capabilities an organisation needs to have or require to be a skills-powered organisation?
[0:13:12] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, David, that's a really good question, because when Tanuj and I were writing the book, we looked at this from a whole variety of angles, right? What does it mean for leaders to lead in this environment? Because it is such, as you've alluded to, such a step change from how we've traditionally run organisations. What does it mean for the HR function and the products that HR owns, everything from talent acquisition to development, etc? And there were three things that consistently came to the fore as being these three critical capabilities for organisations that were doing this well and needed to do this well. One is what I'll broadly term, work design, so an acute understanding of how the demand for skills -- how is the work changing, and how is the demand for skills or capabilities changing?
Paired with that, sort of an acute understanding of what's the supply of skills and capabilities in the organisation, whether that was employees today, whether that was AI today or AI to come, gig workers out there, etc. And then this capacity for organisations, leaders, HR, line managers, with the right tools, technologies, processes to be able to design the optimal combinations of different solutions to meet that demand. Where does process automation potentially step in to substitute and take on how you repetitive rules-based work? Where might generative AI augment the skills of someone you already have? So, this broad bucket of what design was something that emerged as kind of a critical capability.
Once we've gotten that work design piece nailed, understanding the demand and the supply, etc, how do we close those gaps by making talent development and skill development specifically a critical underpinning of the organisation's operating model and strategy? Do we have the ability to understand how do we upscale, rescale, and out-scale at real scale and speed. So, not your grandfather's learning and development, if you will, or grandmother's learning and development, but true skill development has a core capability of the enterprise, in much the same way any capital plan has, properly planned equipment in that plan, it's got infrastructure investment. In the same way, skill investment being sort of a critical part of that.
Then the third dimension is to ensure that we're not just doing development for the sake of development. And as we all know, we've had many, many years of where organisations have invested in development and not realised a return. And so, how do we address that is by ensuring that we've got deployment at scale and speed, as the third capability. So, we've understood the demand and supply signals, we've developed the skills to close the gaps, and now we've got mechanisms in place to deploy those skills at scale and speed back to the work that requires them.
[0:16:17] David Green: So, if we think about the data infrastructure, Ravin, what is the data infrastructure that you need to support gathering all this information to support the skills-powered organisation?
[0:16:30] Ravin Jesuthasan: If you think of that I talked about the shift in building blocks from jobs to these much smaller building blocks of skills, we've got lots of data around jobs. But when you sort of peel that back, the level of insight we have into the work that's actually being done, the skills required to do the work, the experiences required, etc, it just gets lost, because we default to the headline of what the job is. And so, building the data infrastructure is a not insignificant task. But I think the good news is, as you know, David, there's so much tech out there that has made the gathering and organisation and analysis and synthesis of the data so much easier. So right now, I think in the last sort of three, four years, we've gotten so much data about skills. And I think what we're now starting to see is organisations that have recognised that, "Hey, we have all of this data. How do we start to make sense of this?"
This then starts to bleed into, you know, I know your passion, the analytics side of the equation, because it is such a pivotal part of shifting the currency, as Tanuj talked about. We've got lots and lots of data and analytics around jobs as the currency for work. How do we shift it to skills as the currency for work? How do we drive real insight into, as we talked about at the beginning, the demand for skills and the supply for skills? How do we drive real insight into how we're closing these gaps through development across a variety of different platforms and means and mechanisms? How do we ensure that, to the question you asked Tanuj about changing leader behaviour, how do we have data and insight that reports back to leaders on how they're moving the needle? Where are they falling short in powering the organisation forward? How do we ensure that we've got the data and the analytics to report back out to not just internal but external stakeholders on this journey? Because again, the currency has shifted so dramatically, and it's really difficult to overstate how much of a change this is.
[0:18:50] David Green: A little bit more on that, Ravin. I hear from organisations, "We want to do skills. We haven't got the right data", or they think about it as trying to do it across the whole organisation. What would you say, again from a data perspective, what data do they need to get started?
[0:19:06] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, David, absolutely good question. As we often say, you've got to eat the elephant one bite at a time, right? So, I think it's really important to start both narrow as well as with use cases that cut across, so narrow and shallow, if that makes sense. Narrow would be, we're implementing new technology. We really need to understand what the shifting skills are, and we need to earn a return by redesigning the work to get the return on the technology. So, that's often one. Another is, we can't find the skills. We're going into green tech, we can't find the skills. How do we get crisper and clearer about the skills we really need? Because in both of those instances, you've got a really strong business case for skills, right? It's tied to a strong commercial imperative. So, that's where you might go deep around a couple of triggers.
The other might be our talent acquisition. And, David, I know you've never heard this before, our talent acquisition process is broken. It's so much easier for our people to find jobs outside the company than within the company. Well, how do we start to make skills the currency across that one narrow process so that we have a little better insight into what skills do we actually have in the organisation. So, that might be enterprise-wide, but it's a fairly shallow use case that starts a conversation with leaders about, "Hey, did you know, we're spending all this money outside on acquiring this talent, and we've got these 30 or 40 people over here who actually have these skills, who have these interests?" and it starts a conversation. So, I think for anyone looking to start, I might consider both of those, the narrow and the shallow.
[0:20:55] Tanuj Kapilashrami: Can I just add to this very quickly, David? I 100% agree with Ravin. When we started our journey, there were things we did far and wide. We wanted to get skills in the vernacular in the company. So, we spoke about future skills that are going to be needed, technical, human; we had future-focused academies; we run a global learning week every year, and it sort of focused on future-focused skills, hot skills. This year, our global learning week was focused on AI and growth. So, we did enough. We did a talent marketplace, which was open for everyone. But when we started, we had five proof-of-concept cases, and the five proof-of-concept cases were all focused on the areas Ravin's outlined, right? There's a massive growth opportunity in a particular line of business, which required huge amount of talent being acquired in a very short period. Could we work on a skill-based hiring program which could reduce time to market, get them access to much broader talent pools, and could put a dollar value around the amount of money we could save to be able to do that?
The second one was absolutely, as you say, a line of our business where we did not have enough women. And the leader of the business wanted to do some targeted re-skilling to redeployment interventions. The third one was in the area of green skills for us because sustainable finance is a big commercial driver and an opportunity. So actually, while we focused on re-skilling for all in terms of the skills that are going to be needed for the future of work, and we had a talent marketplace which made this idea of having technology match demand and supply to skills, where we went quite deep were looking for these really important proof of concepts, which were based around either a big growth opportunity or a cost reduction, cost saving opportunity, or a very clear need to have a very different type of talent in that particular kind of organisation. And actually, that proof point, which was done in a timebound way, we were able to measure outcomes, started then going as a bit of a ripple effect in the company. So, I agree with Ravin's analogy of one bite at a time when you eat an elephant.
[0:23:18] David Green: Based on your experience at Standard Chartered and maybe other experiences from researching for the book, what would you say are the core capabilities and skills required by the People Analytics team and the HR function itself to support the company in successively driving the transition to a skills-powered organisation?
[0:24:30] Tanuj Kapilashrami: Yeah, thanks, David. Two things, I mean, Ravin keeps saying we are in the future of work. I think Ravin and I start almost every conversation now saying we kept talking about, for over a decade, a future of work being something which was far away, and then suddenly we realised we're in the future of work, so we are in the future of work. I talk about two skills, or two big pivots HR functions need to make. I talk about the role of HR as product managers. The first time I spoke about it openly was actually in your podcast, David, very early on in my journey as a CHRL. And I said, HR leaders need to think of themselves as product managers, where employment is their product. And if you think of yourself as a product manager, the skills you need around change management, driving adoption, telling effective storytelling, how do you co-create design of the product with your stakeholders? So, thinking of yourself as a product manager is a whole different set of skills which you need to embody in the way you are managing this pivot inside companies. And I think for me, that's a very big shift that is happening. And the successful leaders, HR leaders that I meet, or successful HR departments, are those that think of themselves as a product manager and get that product management discipline into the way they lead on this work.
The second one is obsessively data-driven, right? And again, it's about not just your ability to be able to get the data, it is the piece on analytics. How are you getting data from different parts of the organisation together into telling the story and building the narrative, and actually engaging leaders in a way that feels commercial aligned to business strategies? When we had a strategy conversation with our board, skills were really at the heart of it. When we spoke about the big growth engines for the bank, the big opportunities for us, the conversation very quickly came to, "So, what are the skills that are needed? Where do we get these skills?" And actually, if you are able to bring that data in service of the commercial imperatives of the business, the big growth drivers of the business, actually it's a really powerful and a very engaged conversation.
So to me, HR as product leaders and being obsessively data-driven, I think are two very big pivots that need to be made to be able to deliver on this agenda.
[0:27:05] David Green: Let's build on a little bit there, Ravin. We talked earlier, we mentioned this earlier, and as the Skills-Powered Organizations book highlights, reversing 140 years of the legacy of jobs will require time and focused effort. Now, we've been talking a little bit about that, but, Ravin, if you could bring that together for the HR leaders that are maybe taking the reins of driving this transformation, what are the key pieces of advice you would give them to maybe get started on this journey, but then take it to the next level perhaps as well?
[0:27:40] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, so I would say a couple of things, David, and I think we've touched on this over the course of this this conversation. One is HR absolutely has to be at the conversation about work. As Tanuj said, it's not about being a steward of employment, it's no longer about ensuring the compliance and control of running the enterprise with enough people at the right cost, at the right skills, etc. It's a far more evolved conversation around how is the work changing, and let me sit there with you and help you orchestrate and architect how the work is going to be done with our talent and with technology. We've seen a number of HR functions, in a couple of organisations, shift from just being HR to being HR and technology, in terms of becoming total resource management functions, which I think is a really intriguing step forward. So, I think there is just a shifting of the conversation as step one.
I think the second is, as Tanuj said, having real insight into how does everything that we've traditionally done and things we've not done in the past, align to meeting this need of redesigning and re-architecting work and ensuring the supply of skills is there in a steady, predictable and orchestrated fashion. And that, I think, goes back to some of HR's traditional services. It also goes to a bunch of other services that they may not have traditionally provided. So, I'll give you one example.
I've got a client I'm working with at the moment where they've actually said to all of their HR VPs, "We are going to make work design a systemic capability of this function. And from this point on, Mr or Ms HR VP, we're going to redesign these roles, we're going to shift a bunch of work into our service centres, and we're going to make this capability of work design systemic, and we're going to re-architect some of our core leadership processes. So, a leader, when he or she is trying to resource new work, they're going to go through a different process that involves you as the HR VP partnering with them with a new toolkit for helping them think about how the work is going to be done and ensuring that we're tapping into all of these different options we have". It came on the heels of the organisation introducing their own large language model and saying, "If we're going to be using gen AI, we have to get a return on it. We can't do what many companies have done, which is let's just give everyone access and somehow hope that magic happens and we get this productivity lift for the investment". So, they wanted to be a bit more intentional as to how they did that.
But it was fascinating to see how they connected the dots, right, technology investment, changed the behaviour of leaders, changed the way the HR function is operating, and created the space for HR to actually step into this new way of working. So, I think those are some of the big opportunities, David, for HR starting to rethink how it plays and frankly leads on this particular journey.
[0:31:00] David Green: Yeah, I think that's a nice link to, Tanuj, the kind of evolution of your role. I mean, Ravin mentioned that HR has to be at the conversation about work, about strategy. We can't be in a position where HR is the receiver of strategy and is just to implement it from a people perspective. Now obviously, your role at Standard Chartered has recently evolved from being Chief People Officer to being Chief Strategy and Talent Officer, which suggests that you are bringing very much strategy and that people or talent element together. I don't know if you could talk to that a little bit and how your role has evolved.
[0:31:33] Tanuj Kapilashrami: Yeah thanks, David, and I agree. I think, actually, if you look around in businesses, you see far more examples of skill-based appointments than we give ourselves credit to. And I think the real trick for us is how do we industrialise it and deliver it at scale, right? I mean, for a lot of us, if you look at our careers, it was somebody taking that punt on you and making an appointment on the basis of core skills that you got into the table, as opposed to what have you done for the last ten years or what's your education background or what degree you've had. The challenge is how do you scale it? So, in my current role, I'm the Chief Strategy and Talent Officer, which is obviously designing the strategy, working with business leaders, looking at the trends externally, internally, looking at what's happening in the space. But then, thinking about how do you operationalise that strategy by having several levers.
So, in our case, I look after the entire organisation, I look corporate affairs, but brand and marketing, I look after our supply chain. But if you think of it, it's about your strategy, but then how does that link into your client value proposition, your employee value proposition? And then, taking it to the next level, how do you ensure that you are able to execute that strategy across your entire stakeholder group, which is your shareholders, investors, customers, regulators, employees, and also your suppliers or your partners? So, it's a real ecosystem at play. And I think it's based on a realisation that if you get strategy, people, transformation, leadership, as levers together, you can deliver real exponential impact within an organisation. And to me, I think the construct of the job really goes to the heart of what a skills-based organisation could look like, what are the levers to build that skills-based organisation.
[0:33:28] David Green: Looking ahead, what is your vision for the future of work in a fully realised skills-powered world?
[0:33:35] Tanuj Kapilashrami: I have two things, David: skills becoming a currency of work; work flowing not to jobs, but to skills. And it sounds like a statement, but if done well, I think it has a massive power to unlock untapped productivity potential within the company, drive higher levels of innovation, and then most importantly, deliver purposeful, meaningful, joyful work to the workforce. And I think if done well, there is a huge opportunity to build an ecosystem which is not just good for business, but it is good for employees and creates a much more inclusive work environment. So, I think for me, that's the big trend.
The second one actually is very close to what Ravin just said. I really feel bringing together an ecosystem where you have seamless integration of data and technology from various sources, traditional HRIS system, the recruitment data you hold, staff satisfaction, staff surveys, the skills data we hold, being able to create a system that is integrated, it's automated, and it gives a super-personalised experience to colleagues to be able to maximise on that potential. So, there is a business angle to it, but there's a massive employee angle to it. And actually, why is the second one important? Because it's very clear. If you look at the new generation that are coming into the workforce, they won't have one job for life, and actually, they'll have multiple gigs at the same time. And I think my vision is, how do we create that seamless experience for them working inside large corporations? So, I think those would be my two bets. I don't know, Ravin, what is your vision, Ravin?
[0:35:26] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yeah, Tanuj, I would absolutely agree with that. And actually, David, we just had recently a post, to Tanuj's point, about this next generation of talent and this pivot away from leaders thinking about, "I've got this particular job that needs to be filled with someone with this technical skill", to actually thinking about, "How do I find that that individual who can pivot with me as the business needs change? Yeah, she might be able to do the work today, maybe not at the level of proficiency I need, but you know what, her value for tomorrow and the year after is so much greater". Because as we've all talked about, this shift from building for just-in-time, which you can do when it's predictable and stable and I know what next week is going to look like, or next year is going to look like, versus building for just-in-case, which I think is going to be an ever more critical imperative for organisations.
[0:36:22] David Green: How can workforce or people analytics enhance HR decision-making and drive business success?
[0:36:29] Ravin Jesuthasan: I think, David, all the progress that you and others, like Dave Aldrich and John Boudreau and others, have made over the years have really led us to this point. I see skills as being the new lens, if you will, to the great work that's already been done to make HR the decision science that it long should have been, but is increasingly becoming and is increasingly accepted as a critical decision science, in much the same way, finance and marketing have always had that place, right? And I think what's really fascinating is, as we see more data, as we see more analytics, as we have better models and frameworks, whether that's work design, whether that's workforce planning, whether that's, as Tanuj talked about, an analysis of engagement and sentiment, etc, all of which we can clearly link to a set of economic outcomes, I think skills helps us get that much more precise and crisper and clearer in demonstrating that value proposition.
[0:37:36] David Green: Well, Ravin, thanks very much for grouping me together with Dave and John. They're two absolute giants of our field, so that's very humbling. Tanuj, I don't know if you want to add anything to what you just heard from Ravin, and then as part of that as well, let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, and maybe find out about the book as well.
[0:37:54] Tanuj Kapilashrami: No, nothing to add, Ravin's absolutely right. And I think, David, I'd go back to your closing. I think the power of doing this, not just for individual businesses, but for employees, but for wider society, is massive. And I think to me, this ship has sailed really. And I say this very often, that years and years in HR, we spoke about war for talent. Actually, that war for talent has now become war for hard skills. And the reality is, businesses that don't embrace this change will genuinely get left behind. If not because they will not continue to be productive, they actually will lose the war for talent. Because if you look at, you know, talk about what is it that the employees want, what is it that the workforce is looking for, they really want to do purposeful, impactful work, but they want to work in organisations where there's an opportunity for them to learn, earn, and grow. I talk a lot about learn, earn, and grow, and learn always comes to me before earn. I think there is a real opportunity for businesses to think about that.
So, look, it's lovely to be invited to this conversation with two of my favourite people, a real pleasure to do this with both of you. For people who are interested in this topic and other things, I'm on LinkedIn. And Ravin and I both talk about topics related to skills and other topics via LinkedIn account, so I think that's the best way to stay in touch.
[0:39:28] Ravin Jesuthasan: Yes, LinkedIn, absolutely the best place. We both post regularly about the book and some of the insights, and we've got a campaign. So, every week, there'll be something new about the book that hopefully people will find useful. There is a website for the book. So, www.skillspoweredorganisation.com and you can pre-order the book, it's certainly available for pre-order, and there will shortly be a bit of a campaign around it with a not insignificant discount. So, hopefully another enticement.
[0:39:59] David Green: One to look out for then. And as I said, luckily I've read a lot of the book and highly recommend it to listeners. So, Ravin, Tanuj, thank you so much for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast for the third time each, but the first time together. So, thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you both in person in the coming weeks and months.