EPAM: Skills-first is not an HR problem, it is a business one

A key trend of 2024 was skills and the need to build a skills-based organization.

However, digital transformation services and product engineering giant EPAM Systems, Inc (EPAM) has been skills-first since its founding three decades ago.

This begs the question: how and why have they been so ahead of the curve?

Dr. Sandra Loughlin, Chief Learning Scientist at EPAM, will be unpacking this at UNLEASH America 2025.

Ahead of her session on May 7 in Las Vegas, UNLEASH’s Editorial team sat down with Dr. Loughlin to get a sneak peek into EPAM’s keys to skills success.

Read on to find out how you can follow in EPAM’s footsteps—hint: you need to think carefully about how HR and the business work together on skills.

Unpacking the skills journey at EPAM

“Human beings are the engine of business – and to make the most out of them, your engine has to be tuned to what you’re trying to accomplish,” says Dr. Loughlin.

“For us, that means understanding skills.”

Skills are the key here because, since its founding in 1993, EPAM has been powered by engineers, data scientists, consultants and designers who use data and technology solutions to solve complex business problems.

Rather than relying on external platforms, EPAM built an entire skills ecosystem itself—it already had the internal expertise since part of its business is to build digital platforms for customers.

Everything is homegrown, and we could only be skills-based because we had that orientation towards data,” says Dr. Loughlin.

EPAM is very aware that skills are a “data problem” not a technology one – of course, “you cannot do skills without technology, but you can’t just buy a bunch of technologies and mash them together and expect to get what you need out of the system”, notes Dr. Loughlin.

Instead, you need “a whole ecosystem that has common skills definitions”.

EPAM leverages its skills ecosystem across the talent lifecycle—from hiring to development to performance management—and in strategic workforce planning, asking: What skills do we need in the workforce? – What do we have? How do we get what we’re missing? Is there a need to hire for particular skills? Can employees with similar skills be upskilled and reskilled?

Getting skills right is essential because EPAM’s professional services work is all about “matching people to work”.

“We need to be confident that the people who we assign to client projects actually have the skills to do the job we promised the client we could do,” shares Dr. Loughlin.

Organizations must be bottom up, not top down, with defining work in the future

It is noteworthy that throughout the interview Dr. Loughlin uses the word ‘job’ when referring to EPAM’s skills-based work.

This is interesting because a lot of the narrative around skills-first organizations is “skills means no jobs”.

For Dr. Loughlin, that’s just nonsense.

She understands the “visceral reaction” people have to the idea of no jobs simply because it doesn’t make sense to them; “they’re right, it doesn’t make any sense”.

At EPAM, there is “so much value in having jobs; that is something that is still very core to who we are,” she says. It helps to organize work but also gives employees a sense of community.

When EPAM does this skills-based work, “the difference is not whether or not we have jobs – it’s how we arrive at those jobs”, explains Dr. Loughlin.

Most organizations are top down – “you decide you want to have a certain kind of work done, you build a little box, you give the box a name, then you put people in the box. You assume that everybody in the box has the skills and can do the tasks, but that’s never true”.

In contrast, EPAM is bottom up – “we start by doing the task intelligence and looking at all the different tasks to be done in an organization”.

“Tasks cluster together, and people that can do [certain] tasks cluster together”, and that creates jobs.

Then EPAM looks at how tasks are changing and how the skills required to do those tasks are changing, “that helps us to know when we need to change the boxes and build new boxes”.

For Dr. Loughin, having a bottom up, task intelligence foundation is particularly essential in this AI era.

AI is changing the way we work and taking away some tasks. “Because of that, we need to take humans who were doing this one thing, and we have to shift them to doing this other thing,” Dr. Loughin tells UNLEASH.

This creates a need for upskilling to support further learning and development.

Of course, AI helps EPAM to be skills-based; “we use AI to validate skills, infer skills and track how skills and tasks are changing in our industry”.

Ultimately, “AI and skills transformation are so connected; they’re really two sides of the same coin”.

The business does the why and what of skills, HR does the how

The conversation turned to the role of HR in building a skills-first organization.

Dr Loughlin is clear that skills-first work is not an HR problem, it is a business problem.

She tells UNLEASH that “the business does the why and the what” of skills—it sets the direction of travel and decides what skills and tasks are needed to achieve the organization’s goals.

Then, “HR explains the how” – aka how the business and its employees are going to achieve this – whether that’s hiring differently, upskilling, reskilling or a combination.

HR has to be the one to align the organization toward achieving this skills direction, but the business has to be the one to set it,” explains Dr. Loughin.

Misunderstanding the role of HR in skills-based organizations is a trap that many early adopters fell into. If HR is only thinking about skills, “the business doesn’t care… If HR doesn’t understand the business, they can’t explain how it all fits together”, she adds.

In that event, this skills-based work becomes too theoretical and doesn’t move the needle and drive progress for the business as a whole.

The future of skills at EPAM

EPAM may have been on this skills journey for 30+ years, but the employer is still iterating and evolving its approach.

At the end of the day, “there are always skills gaps because the goalposts keep moving”, notes Dr. Loughlin.

It is very hard to validate skills at scale – “that is a perennial challenge because to understand if somebody has a skill, you need lots of data sources, and you need high-quality data.”

As a technology company, EPAM is on the ‘cutting edge of AI’. “We have to build the plane while flying it.”

Dr Loughlin concludes: “We’re disrupting our own business by really leaning into AI, agents and automation.”

This requires the employer to really “leverage our skills infrastructure to support our employees as their jobs are changing, as our needs for their skills are changing”.

Dr. Sandra Loughlin and UNLEASH America

That was a little sneak peek into how EPAM is thinking about skills – want even more detail and insights?

Dr. Loughlin will be delving in deeper at UNLEASH America 2025.

“I am so excited to help people who are now on this journey, particularly in terms of tackling the more complex issues of what is our business model. How do we partner with the business? How do we frame skills in terms of business outcomes and what does the business care about?”

Dr. Loughlin also can’t wait to hear from other peers doing great work on AI and HR.

She’s interested in speaking with vendors exhibiting at the show who are using AI to enable complex skills validation at scale.

You can’t afford to miss out on Dr Loughlin’s insights – buy your pass for UNLEASH America now.