Skills based organisations: a new way to connect talent to work 

The war for talent, a global skills shortage, the great resignation – call it what you like, tight labour markets can make it difficult for businesses to fill jobs.

But what if ‘filling jobs’ is the wrong way to think about it? What if there’s a better way to plug the skills gaps in your organisation?

That’s the thinking behind a new approach developed by Mercer’s global leader for transformation services, Ravin Jesuthasan, and introduced at the Workforce Solutions webinar Are you ready for the skills economy?

Jesuthasan, author of Wall Street Journal-bestseller Work Without Jobs, says the very concept of the ‘job’ and its one-to-one relationship with a person may be the factor holding businesses back from success.

Instead, leaders should shift to a new model, deconstructing jobs into their underlying tasks and matching those tasks to different individuals’ skills.

Resetting the work operating system around skills – not jobs – opens a potent new way of thinking about work and talent.

“How are we going to redesign work to enable talent to flow to it as seamlessly as possible?” says Jesuthasan.

“How do we re-envision the talent experience so that we’re meeting more and more talent increasingly on their terms, as opposed to forcing them to comply or fit a one size fits most model?”

The answer is an entirely new approach to work that moves beyond the job to a marketplace for talent where people are matched with work in a fluid, agile and flexible way.

Jesuthasan tells the story of an experiment conducted with the World Economic Forum to uncover the hidden skills in a workforce by using machine learning algorithms to analyse people’s work history and education.

“The average employee, when asked to identify the skills he or she had, had a list that was about seven long,” he says.

“When the algorithm went through and looked at all of that person’s previous work, their previous projects, their education etc... the average starting point was 24.”

This explosion of skills available to an organisation comes from analysing individuals’ work without reference to their current job.

“It put the organisation in a much, much better place to understand the complete makeup of skills.”

Mercer’s experience shows the most advanced organisations are moving to a model where 30 per cent of work is in fixed jobs, 50 to 60 per cent can flow to projects and 10 to 20 per cent is in completely agile pools that are connecting to work through skills architectures.

Companies that move towards more agile ways of working and skills-based architectures are seeing exponential gains in productivity, speed and agility, says Jesuthasan.

Jesuthasan outlines four principles for the new work operating system.

1. Start by defining the tasks that need to be done – not the jobs that traditionally did them
2. Use automation and technology to enhance human productivity
3. Consider all the ways we can work including freelance, contract, gig work, alliances, projects and more
4. Allow talent to flow to work and don’t limit people to their job.

“Everyone has a different starting point on the road to a skills-based approach to work”, says Lafontaine. Some will need to spend time considering the benefits to their own organisation. Some will want to workshop the idea internally. Others may want to build a business case, create a skills taxonomy or select a technology vendor.

Whichever starting point you are at, Mercer is here to support you.

To learn more, read Mercer’s Guide to Talent Marketplaces or get in touch to speak with a Mercer talent specialist.