Workday Skills Strategy into Action

Putting Your Skills Strategy into Action

Introduction

Organizations face significant challenges driven by labor shortages, evolving employee expectations, and the impact of AI on the workforce. Traditional talent strategies such as hiring to grow the business or address employee churn are becoming less effective. Leaders need a new strategy that leverages skills to meet business objectives. A key component of this strategy involves analyzing existing skills within the company and designing programs to meet future growth needs. According to a recent McKinsey Global Study, 87% of executives report experiencing skills gaps, but fewer than half have a clear plan to address them. Additionally, a 2021 Lighthouse Research & Advisory study found that employees struggle to communicate their skills effectively.

Harnessing the Potential of Skills

Skills provide a common language to understand worker capabilities and future workforce needs. This allows organizations to:

• Identify top talent for critical roles.
• Enable workforce mobility.
• Analyze and close skills gaps.
• Increase the speed of workforce transformation.

Common business objectives include:

• Supporting continuous learning due to rapidly changing job requirements.
• Upskilling and reskilling employees.
• Building internal talent to reduce acquisition costs and minimize regrettable losses.
• Creating diverse and agile workforces.

Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Reality

Many organizations experience a gap between their vision for skills and their current strategy. To address this, Workday developed a skills maturity curve to help organizations assess their current state and the steps needed to achieve their goals. The curve includes four stages:

1. Singular: Ownership resides in a single business unit, often learning and development or talent acquisition.
2. Relational: Ownership expands to cross-functional teams, with some alignment across a few business units.
3. Transformational: Skills strategy becomes its own function, focusing on proactive talent management.
4. Ownership: Skills strategy is fully integrated, with centers of practice supporting functional or technical skill management.

Mapping a Successful Skills Strategy

Developing and executing a skills strategy requires several foundational steps:

1. Defining key characteristics for the future skills environment.
2. Designing guiding principles to structure future skills-related decisions.
3. Highlighting operational impacts that require attention.
4. Leveraging personas to bring these ideas to life.

Putting Your Skills Strategy into Action

Workday offers a comprehensive skills platform that serves as a single source of truth, leveraging machine learning and connected applications to inform actions. Key functionalities include:

• Forecast and Benchmark: View and predict market trends to plan for emerging skills needs.
• Analyze and Plan: Analyze skills capacity and gaps to better plan for build, buy, or borrow decisions.
• Resource and Redeploy: Quickly identify, schedule, and allocate resources based on skills needs.
• Reward and Pay: Reward and pay for skills expertise and upskilling behaviors, supporting equitable compensation.
• Perform and Assess: Assess and measure skills capabilities against business needs.
• Learn and Grow: Build skills and a culture of continuous learning, internal mobility, and increased retention.
• Recruit and Onboard: Identify, source, fill, and onboard the best candidates for critical skills needs.

Open Skills Intelligence Foundation

The skills platform is built on an open skills intelligence foundation with embedded AI, including:

• Workday Skills Cloud: A cohesive data model.
• Interoperability: Seamless integration with various sources.
• Reporting: Detailed analytics and reporting.
• Ontology: Structured data classification.
• Administration: Centralized management.

By leveraging these features, organizations can optimize their workforce, improve business agility, and enhance employee experiences.