Prabakaran Murugaiah is a HR Tech entrepreneur & Executive, iMocha – skills intelligence and assessment platform.
Even before we stepped into this decade, technological advancements were steadily revolutionizing the future of work. But the pandemic brought on a sudden plot twist and change of speed. Now, these transformations have reached a breakneck pace because of AI-based developments and other digital tech transformations.
Technology literacy has become the third-fastest-growing core skill globally. Moreover, employers surveyed expect 44% of skills disruption in the next five years. Thus, to stay competitive, companies must improve their readiness and agility by investing in real-time skills intelligence. This is a strategy to build data-driven, skills-first ecosystems through skills taxonomies and ontologies. Specifically, it’s an HR tech architecture that empowers businesses with a centralized source of skills-based insights.
By analyzing skills data collected through taxonomies, market intelligence and inventories, organizations can gain valuable insights for enhancing their workforce and attaining business growth. Most importantly, they can better navigate the future of work across key functions, like HR, general management, finance and sales.
Enhancing HR Talent-Based Processes
Skills intelligence can be handy in different HR functionalities, from talent acquisition to talent management (what I call the applicant-to-alumni lifecycle). For instance, in talent acquisition, a skills intelligence strategy can provide accurate insights into competitive costs for acquiring skills and external market intelligence. This would be highly beneficial when hiring for high-demand or niche roles.
Furthermore, skills intelligence can assist in career path designing and employee development based on skills adjacencies and fungibility. According to a recent Deloitte study, 72% of employees supported using AI technology to develop their career path.
Here are other HR functions that skills intelligence can support:
• Detecting skills gaps
• Identifying cross-skilling opportunities to build a multiskilled talent force
• Building skills assessments and candidate/employee benchmarking
• Gaining further insight into KPIs and other factors that affect employee performance
With 360-degree solutions powered by skills intelligence, HR professionals can function better, allowing them and their organizations to save time and money.
Optimizing Management Decision-Making
From setting strategic business goals to delegating employees to projects, an organization’s management team makes many critical business decisions and actions that can benefit from skills intelligence. For example, as most organizations move toward building distributed global workforces, they have to perform skills baselining. It’s management’s duty to create this threshold by analyzing market data, logistics and existing skills within the company. Then, they must ensure all their employees have the ability to perform their roles’ duties and responsibilities. With skills intelligence, managers can also allocate talent to the right projects at the right time through benchmarking.
Thus, with data-driven insights obtained through skills intelligence, an organization’s management can optimize, baseline and benchmark talent efficiently.
Growing Sales Departments’ Tech Knowledge
Having weak and non-tech-savvy sales professionals can impact an organization’s business growth. As discussed at a Gartner conference in 2023, sales departments (and organizations in general) must position technology as an active teammate to attain high-quality leads and enhance productivity. This requires developing sales teams’ tech skills. Through skills intelligence, businesses can perform skills profiling of existing talent and then deploy resources accurately.
There are other sales-related benefits of skills intelligence:
• Offering insights on assigning the right sales professional to a lead
• Conducting sales effectiveness baselining and improving training programs by understanding the skills requirement
• Providing valuable data on employees’ functional tech skills, like their proficiency with customer relationship management, customer data and martech platforms.
Sales teams can enhance productivity, deploy talent and attain growth by capitalizing on skills intelligence strategies.
Shifting The Requirements For Finance Professionals
The concept of Excel-crunching finance professionals is gradually fading as a result of advanced technologies like AI and blockchain being introduced to financial systems. There are pros and cons to this. Gartner research has determined a lack of digital skills in senior finance leaders could be the cause for half of employee turnover by 2026. Additionally, a World Economic Forum study found that 9% of incumbent financial services jobs may be lost as a result of AI by 2030. But, there’s a silver lining because the fintech workforce will likely expand. Thus, skills that support tech knowledge will become key requirements for finance professionals.
Therefore, it’s vital for finance teams to identify the skills of the future and train employees accordingly. Skills intelligence can offer insights into the new age of cloud, AI-powered financial applications and tools. Then, by implementing these technologies, finance teams can concentrate more on advanced analytics, expanded risk management and other high-impact tasks.
Skills Intelligence Is Integral To The Future Of Work
Being able to properly assess skills can help organizations benchmark talent, baseline skills, build employee skills profiles and more. Companies have many options for support, whether it’s engaging with skills intelligence platforms or performing manual analyses, to develop skills profiles, build inventories and map employees’ skills. To stay ahead of the curve and beat the competition, skills intelligence may become a top priority for organizations that want to prepare for the future of work.
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