Skill Buy-In is Essential
Skills are everywhere, and nowhere was that more prevalent than at the HR Tech Conference last week in Las Vegas. Seemingly every company is saying they have SKILLS and how they will revolutionise your company.
But skills are meaningless if they’re not:
Internalised by employees.
Used by leadership to make decisions.
Ignored when it comes to learning and upskilling initiatives.
At Empath, we take a holistic approach to skills both in how they’re used by leaders and employees. And all of that starts with a strong skills taxonomy with levels. Without levels, there is no point in saying you’re becoming a skill-based organisation. Just because I have a github with some practice python code doesn’t mean I know Python. Additionally, they’re so worried about their own current needs that they don’t want to think about what they don’t know.
Job Architectures/Job Leveling should be used to establish buy-in
At a previous employer, I found it extremely empowering to help give feedback and craft my job’s Job-Skill Architecture. I found that the job description that had been crafted for my job years before was incomplete at best, completely false at worst. I’d been in the position for several years, and this had never come up before.
This was a few years before I got involved in workforce skills specifically, but I was knee-deep in working with the CASE specification and had done significant work creating open learning objectives. But I used an instance of OpenSALT I had running at the time and cross-walked my job’s objectives to skills found in the ACT Holistic Framework for fun. (PCG now runs OpenSALT and has been doing some great work in North Dakota etc!) It didn’t go further than that and I talked to ACT’s HR department about doing more, but in the end it was decided there needed to be a bigger focus overall. 100% those kinds of projects led me from K12 to Workforce in 2019–2020 because it just seemed to make sense — to codify and synchronise skills the Business clearly had with what it needed.
Conclusion
At Empath, we’re doing some really interesting work with organisations who have job-skill architectures as well as helping those who don’t. Combined with other work we’re doing around defining skills using Artificial Intelligence, it’s an exciting time to be helping Skills-Based organisations, and it’s only getting better!
