When Skills Hype Meets Reality

Josh Tarr, the Director of Skills-Based Organizations (SBO) at Workday, and I recently had a 60-minute conversation about—you guessed it—skills. Josh is one of our key customer champions, fully committed to the concept of skills-driven organisations. Despite only having worked together for a year, we’re proud to have accomplished a lot to further their journey already. In our interview, we reflect on the past year and look ahead to what’s to come.

We covered a lot of topics, from the hype cycle around SBOs to Workday’s skills transformation journey, to the partnership with TechWolf, and the importance of skills use cases.

In this blog, I’m reflecting on my four takeaways in the form of four quotes that stood out to me. I’m very grateful to Josh for sharing his experience and insights and would recommend everyone listen to the full interview, which is now also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1. “We view this work as entrepreneurial work. (...) It’s like starting up a new business.”

Josh is uniquely positioned at Workday as, on the one hand, a Workmate with access to their abundance of customer champions who are on their own unique skills journeys, and on the other, as a practitioner who is tasked with bringing Workday itself to a skills-based organisation.

He’s essentially an early adopter with easy access to other early adopters. This makes him a vat of knowledge on the E2E stages of becoming skills-based, from setting the vision to managing stakeholders to exploring the market to the intricacies of implementation and validation work.

Also, I’ve come to realise Josh and anyone embarking on this new skills thing are entrepreneurs much like our 3 founders and everyone within the TechWolf walls who is figuring this out. You can hear it in his excitement, drive, and youthfulness while we’re talking.

Skills projects are new, scrappy, and require a commitment to a yet-to-be-validated vision and thus a good portion of optimism about the challenges ahead. Josh’s belief that this is not a fad, but something that will last, is striking but also necessary. We’re currently taking ‘the road less travelled by’ - and it’s making all the difference.

What we at TechWolf hope to be in that, is what we did with Josh in this webinar — be a channel to amplify the early adopter voices in our network. Bring a more practical surface to the skills debate with successful projects that bring justice to the complexity and have the best potential to withstand the test of time.

2. “We got started with data.”

One of the most interesting Workday customer examples of a clear skills journey is likely Workday itself. Josh’s team feels strongly that skills can equip their employees with the right opportunities and experiences to progress their careers. Hence, they’ve launched an internal ‘skills-based organisation’ project with executive support to drive that value for the Workday teams and customers—and to do it fast and effectively.

The starting point was to take data on (a) employee sentiment through their employee listening platform and (b) the company’s biggest challenges through company-wide interviews with business leaders. The themes that turned up were translated into key use cases:

• Worker Development — Focused on enhancing employee growth through the talent marketplace and internal mobility via the "gigs programme."
• Time to Hire — Aimed at reducing the duration of the hiring process by integrating skills data into recruitment. This involves using skills information to better match candidates with job requirements, thereby streamlining the hiring process.
• Career Pathing — Involves using skills data to create clear career pathways for employees. This helps employees understand how to progress in their careers by developing specific skills and competencies needed for advancement.
• Performance Enhancement — Utilises skills data to inform and improve performance evaluations. By understanding employees' skills, the organisation can better assess performance and provide targeted development opportunities.
• Staffing Enhancement — Focuses on improving staffing decisions by leveraging skills data to match employees with the right projects or roles. This ensures that the right skills are utilised effectively across the organisation.

This approach is a good example of our philosophy with customers to ‘lead by use case’. No party really benefits from a head-first, HRtech spending spree without knowing what the thing you’re buying will solve for. The same goes for TechWolf’s specialty: skills data is worthless before you leverage it.

There’s an analogy with ChatGPT’s early days when the tool was launched but not fully commoditised yet: the applications were so numerous (building websites, summarising reports, drafting emails, translating, …) that people didn’t know - and perhaps still don’t - what prompts to write when. Skills data is currently in the same spot and so the thought process of translating business challenges to skills challenges should trump the desire to get the data just because everyone else is.

3. “Together (with TechWolf) we did in 3 months what other companies do in 18”

As we got into the weeds of the ‘skills-based organisation’ project, Josh talked about the first focus of the TechWolf x Workday collaboration: improving the quality of skills for the most important jobs at Workday. Two things stood out from his point of view: the precision & speed.

Workday took 3550 TechWolf inferred skills relevant to Workday’s job architecture and surveyed 2600 people leaders on them for the jobs they manage. That information then got fed back to senior leaders who had to approve the top 10-12 skills out of those. Almost all people leaders were included, and the entire process took 3 months.

The output will be infused into the hiring process for the benefit of hiring managers in the interviewing and evaluation phases. What’s more, it will also help employees laser-focus their development on critical skills.

In this case, our tech helped make the process more efficient - with an estimated time saving of at least a year - but we won’t hide that it still required work to validate with the business. Nevertheless, now the foundations are there and the Workday team has a clear idea of what they want to build on top of it. Interestingly, in terms of keeping this up to date: the team doesn’t believe they will need to refresh all of the skills for all of the jobs all of the time. They prefer to look for signals to identify which skills within which jobs are important to keep track of.

4. “The value chain of skills is easy, the work is definitely not easy.”

That brings us to an important aspect that Josh—and most of our clients, for that matter—isn’t hiding: the fact that this work is not easy.

In the interview, we start by zooming out and asking the question: Why skills, why now, why should we care? The answers might lead one to believe it’s obvious and almost easy to get this started, given the market momentum from multiple angles. Josh made it crystal clear it’s not, and practitioners are starting to realise this.

As a vendor and strategic partner in the skills journeys of the world’s leading companies, our teams at TechWolf cannot afford to hide these complexities. Josh talked about the noise in the market and the fact that the current hype can be an inhibitor. We see this hype come in the form of ‘plug and play, silver bullet’ product promises:

It’s your recruitment tools that promise “state of the art, AI-driven inference technology” and fast, great quality skills data — but who still require the adoption of employees which can’t be guaranteed. It’s your talent marketplaces that promise to leverage hidden skills across your company but don’t take responsibility for the solid data foundation you need to uncover them. It’s in general the teams that talk more about AI in their future roadmap plans than in their present demos.

We will partner with you, your HR teams, and the business to figure it out and tell you in time when something is beyond our capabilities. Because in the end, for us it’s about helping every person flourish at work and that juice is worth every squeeze.