Skills to survive and thrive

In the current climate, supporting your current and future talent with the right skills development has become business-critical. 

From understanding, tracking, and analyzing existing employee skills, to finding better hires from both internal and external applicants, it is imperative to be able to detect, manage and grow your workforce skills at scale. 

Watch this on-demand webinar with our expert panel from Oracle Cloud HCM and Petrofac, moderated by Tom Haak, as they discuss strategy and tactics for:

• Assessing skills gaps and current capabilities
• Sourcing the right talent vs developing the right skills 
• Creating a dynamic skills approach that builds organizational resilience

Hype or not? Why is there attention today around skills?

From a people perspective, skills have always been important, enabling people to be in the right positions in the business to optimize performance. But I think it’s widely recognized now, that skills are rapidly changing.

Allie Boddington, Executive Director – HR Transformation, Oracle Cloud HCM

Tom Haak, director of the HR Trend Institute, considered that the focus on skills and implication on the HR domain has come about through a shift in attention from skills over the traditional “job” employee categorization. Today, he told the audience, it’s about “What skills can you deliver, instead of the ‘bucket’ of a job.” This mindset shift is allowing HR leaders the opportunity to redeploy people and reskill them to ensure they remain relevant to the organization, rather than the traditional “jobs” route, which doesn’t necessarily map or utilize the whole potential of an individual.

Allie Boddington from Oracle Cloud HCM started off the conversation by discussing her view on whether the skills hype is justified or not. She highlighted the Gartner research, released earlier this year, that uncovered the extent that the skills required in today’s workforce have changed over the last four or so years and why this demonstrates that the attention around skills is justified. Allie considered that the reason for these changes have come about from digital disruption and the changing nature of work and the skills required to remain relevant in the workforce, as well as the changes in employee expectations and elements of “the employment deal” -where employees expect to be provided with the tools to learn, “to come into an organization, to do great work, and enjoy it.”

Mirroring Allie’s view that “the skills needed for doing just the same job are changing, let alone for new jobs or better jobs”, Russell Gomes from Petrofac provided his perspective that globalization and thereby the opportunities now available through the “work from anywhere” approach, and competition for talent, means that an employer has to be providing development opportunities. He told the audience that an employer needs to be upskilling and reskilling their talent to ensure the organization has the appropriate talent in-house, but also in order to retain that talent through offering the opportunities and career paths that come with a focus around skills and development.

Where are the biggest gaps?

The focus on skills is often centered around “technical skills – data, digital, analytics…” said Allie. However, she highlighted there is also a growing recognition that the softer skills and leadership and management skills oftentimes need work too.

People work for people and they want to work in an environment and within teams that allow them to do their best work.

Allie Boddington, Executive Director – HR Transformation, Oracle Cloud HCM

She believes that generating an environment through bettering leadership skills will in turn create a culture of an organization that is agile and adaptable. And Russell similarly believed that every organization is different in where their gaps are. But, having the technology to help diagnose the skills gaps, will provide a map for bettering workforce planning struggles.

Tom questioned the panel on whether there’s perhaps too much emphasis in the skills narratives on the individual, and what the pair thought about this. Allie, using HR as an example, noted that oftentimes leaders will look at skills they need to deliver an initiative through the lens of the specialism. Instead, she said, we need to be looking at working towards getting cross-functional teams who can provide the right balance of skills for a particular project – moving towards “solving the problem with the best people”. She believes that this provides an organization with fluidity and gives interest and motivation to an individual’s work.

How do we close the skills gap?

“Where are the 2 or 3 performance concerns for the organization?” is a great place to start, Allie told the audience. Knowing where you can create the most value in the organization will help to focus your time and energies around skills and development.

Both panelists agreed that the solution might not always be upskilling and reskilling in-house, but that there’s nothing wrong with hiring people outside of the organization to provide the skills that are necessary for certain projects.

Russell touted the benefits of leverage technology, along with Allie, throughout the panel session. Russell, a user of Oracle Cloud HCM, believes that technology is a true enabler of being able to map the workforce to skills and then to diagnose where the gaps are that need improving. He told the audience that a fully integrated cloud platform has the capabilities of demonstrating where critical roles are within the business, as well as offering talent modules that allows self-service for improving and growing an individual’s skills.

Upon being questioned whether this self-service type model was enough to be effective, both Allie and Russell agreed that technology is a real enabler for process automation, for reducing costs, and diagnosing the gaps in the first instance (a task that is often daunting and overwhelming). However, both agreed that this technology definitely needs to be coupled with good leadership that creates an environment of empowerment and a culture where there is a hunger to learn, and thrive, and exceed.