Your people are the key to remaining competitive in an unpredictable marketplace. Let’s get more specific about that phrase, which we’ve heard in many guises for many years. Your people’s skills are the key to remaining competitive in an unpredictable marketplace. It’s not enough to think about talent in terms of headcount – it’s high time to think about your people in terms of skills.

This is a big transition for HR – “from executing on the basics to truly helping talent become the competitive advantage in the market,” in the words of our esteemed podcast guest, Diane Gherson, former CHRO at IBM.

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders host David Green speaks to Diane about the transformation that HR underwent during Diane’s tenure and here, in this blog, we’re going to dive deeper into one area of their conversation - skills-centric career management and the talent marketplace approach at the tech giant:

1. How does IBM’s learning platform inspire continuous learning?

2. How does IBM use AI and analytics to measure employee skillsets?

3. How does IBM make sense of skills demand in the marketplace?

4. How does IBM connect the dots between learning and careers with talent marketplace?

You can watch the full interview below or click here to listen to it your app of choice.

If the power of talent lies in their skills, and skills fluctuate rapidly in the digital age, then the real power of talent lies in their ability to pick up new skills – and their dedication to doing just that. To foster a workforce dedicated to upskilling, you need a powerful learning platform first and foremost. Diane’s view is you need the “right platform, that [is] truly infectious, that [makes] learning a habit.” At IBM, that’s ‘Your Learning’ – the home-grown learning platform that curates internal and external training all in one place and delivers recommendations to users Netflix-style - highly tailored and personalised. The pressure is on for employee experience to match consumer experiences and at IBM, a user-centric approach to designing ‘Your Learning’ has led to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 53 for the platform (generally, anything above 0 is considered ‘good’, and anything above 30 is considered ‘great’.)

Skills data powers the ‘Your Learning’ platform, for example recommendations are partly based on what skills employees have and their proficiency in those skills. Analytics at IBM looks at an employee’s digital footprint to determine this. “What is really important in IBM is skills aren't just what you know, but what you share,” says Diane. When you share a skill, there’s a trail, for example, in a project summary or a sales pipeline. IBM used experts in the various fields across the business and the industries that IBM works in to validate skillsets over a number of years. The result is that this year IBM has inferred the skills and related proficiency levels of all 350,000 employees. When IBMers were asked to validate their skills profile, 80% validated it as 100% accurate. Human bias was eliminated in this process and the result is more accurate that self-reported skills.

It’s not all about the technology though, it’s about the culture too. For Diane, it’s crucial that her leaders emulate the ethos of continuous learning. Leaders are encouraged to publish figures about their learning activities, skills consumed, and badges achieved. It’s crucial that organisations eradicate any leftover perception that undertaking learning somehow infers a weakness – as if a gap in knowledge is a bad thing and not simply the most natural thing in the world. Long gone are the days where we could learn everything in the first phase of our life and apply it successfully over a forty-year career without a refresh. 

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As well as understanding what skills you have within the organisation, you need to understand skills demand in the marketplace: what skills have you got versus what skills do you need?

At IBM, Diane focused on answering questions like: What skills are hot at IBM? Where do we have demand? Where does the market have demand? How do we align our people accordingly? To answer these questions, IBM scrapes all of the job advertisement data from their competitors and surfaces where demand is going in terms of skills. 

This type of insight is undoubtedly powerful for workforce planning, but it also helps to shift mindsets around learning. By seeing skills demand objectively through the data, IBMers can make sense of their current skillset and its durability. They can get to grips with the reality that some of their skills no longer have traction in the market and therefore need updating. In other words, transparency around fluctuating skills demand normalises the need for continuous learning.

The final piece of the puzzle is to connect the dots between skills demand, internal skills supply and closing gaps with powerful, addictive learning experiences. Understanding where the market is heading in terms of skills, as well as emerging roles internally and externally empowers employees to align their career goals and their learning goals. In Diane’s opinion, “the employee thinks learning and career go together.” And so, “if you are going to take the time to take some learning you would want to see what career opportunities it can give.”

To address this, ‘Your Learning’ recommends internal opportunities based on skills and learning. Once an employee completes a learning phase, they are awarded a badge and that badge is used to apply for other roles internally. Once again, the focus is on ease and usability for the employee. By combining learning and career management in one platform, the career experience is seamless.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t happen overnight. Diane explains her innovative approach to marrying learning and careers in the organisation:

“We had learning in a different organisation from skills. What I did was I did a squad for six months and I pulled the Head of Learning into our skills organisation and magic happened, suddenly your career and your learning came together.”

In conclusion

The talent marketplace solution is undoubtedly advanced, powered by the tech company’s existing core capabilities. These solutions were not created overnight, they are the result of years of hard work. The key takeaway for organisations is to work towards understanding employees in terms of skills adaptability. To achieve that, HR has to transform itself into a digital, data-driven function.

NEW Skills... NEW Future... NEW Opportunities

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Bailie is the Managing Director of myHRfuture.com and an advisor and consultant for start-ups focused on HR technology and People Analytics, including Adepto, Worklytics and CognitionX. In his previous role as the Senior Director of People Planning, Analytics and Tools at Cisco Systems, he was responsible for delivering the tools and insights to enable and transform the planning, attraction and management of talent across the organisation globally. Ian is passionate about HR technology and analytics and how to use both to transform the employee experience and prepare companies for the Future of Work.