By focusing on core competencies and employee development, HR leaders can adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing workforce.
By Maggie Mancini
As organizations continue to utilize advanced technologies to revamp and reimagine their daily operations, skills and core competencies are more important than ever. Many companies are finding that their approach to talent is not agile, making it harder to adapt and prepare for the future of work.
“The shift towards skills-based hiring is not just a trend but a necessary adaptation to the demands of the modern economy,” says Mike Ohata, a former executive at KPMG and Microsoft and current vice chair at Thrive Counseling Center and founding advisory board member at EZRA. HRO Today recently spoke with Ohata about the ways that a skills-focused approach to talent acquisition and employee development can help HR leaders stay agile.
HRO Today: As organizations grapple with modernizing outdated talent models, how can a skills-focused approach help HR and business leaders adapt to the needs of the rapidly evolving workforce and find the best talent to suit their business needs?
Mike Ohata: As a day one response, all HR and business leaders should have a strategy and plan around priority skills for the enterprise. We cannot win our hand in the market if we haven’t staked an investment in our people. Some of our skills focus will center around the technical skills of the particular industry. I call these core competencies.
An important part of the planning for workforce capability requires knowing foundational skills and competencies such as leadership, as well as traits or attributes such as learnability, adaptability, and persistence. With respect to the latter, those key characteristics depend on the kind of organization we’re leading. Are we a start-up? Are we in growth mode? Are we in a highly regulated industry? Understanding this sets the table for responding to rapid changes in the business environment as well as a changing workforce. If we haven’t worked through a skills-centric approach, we will react on many fronts.
HROT: Going along with this, how can HR leaders balance corporate business outcomes with individual employee needs, particularly as employees face ramping burnout and productivity woes?
Ohata: Understand that a sense of burnout and flagging productivity represent symptoms of deeper process and organizational design issues. We’ll need to dig deeper and identify key drivers. For example, supply chain issues can stall productivity—that’s easier to see and address. The harder challenge is getting a clear view of how the workplace regards all talent. As leaders, we need to foster a workforce education that supports all employees.
If leadership development is just for a select handful, and training in updated technical skills is a requirement for the rest of the workforce, what does that communicate in terms of how we value people? A lot of employees appreciate and seek out those technical skills because they fully get that the skills accrue to them. They are filling out the kits and deepening the resume, but if we just work employees till burnout, they’ve got packed bags of valuable skills.
Aligning business outcomes and employee needs is a question of transparency, priority, and commitment to people. As leaders, we’re good at rationalizing, optimizing, and driving to results. We need to add to that a commitment to people, and you know what? They get excited about market success, too.
HROT: How can skills-first talent acquisition help HR leaders address existing skills gaps within their organization and keep their workforce prepared for the future?
Ohata: A clear logical place for us to focus is how we acquire talent in the first place. For most organizations, job descriptions include activities and expectations, a sometimes train-of-thought mix of skills, some behaviors, and hypotheses on what makes a good employee. We also focus on work history and education. We need to evolve our view of talent through skills, traits, or attributes that determine how we apply skills in new situations and experience. Work history is a proxy for experience, but we will assume a lot of interpretations of what work history might be saying.
Education is sometimes a proxy for form of mind and traits, or a fund of knowledge. The bottom line is that the job description should make all this explicit. Also, organizations need to work on skills sensing to identify, track and drive the skills, traits, and experiences required for business success.
HROT: How can organizations utilize hands-on, interactive learning to upskill and empower employees?
Ohata: Most work requires learning and development on the job. From trades to professions, this truism points out the importance of experience and interaction with teammates, mentors, and managers to gain knowledge, apply it, practice skills, and, over time, grow in proficiency. So, then the question might be, why do we focus on training and not development and growth—the transformation of the employee and team over time, as they build capacity, capability, and competence? It’s all there.
We tend to look at the workforce like municipal land—is it a park and should it be watered and fertilized? Is it a parkway and we just let the rain take care of it? We can’t reap what we don’t sow.
The approach here is that experience in the workplace and for the workforce needs to be explicit, planned and then executed with some commitment. Otherwise, we leave the workforce and the organization’s capabilities to happenstance. We need all three: skills, traits, and experience. When we add collaboration to the mix, we have great hands-on and interactive learning.
Mike Ohata is the author of “The Talent-Fueled Enterprise,” talent strategist and leadership advisor to St. Charles Consulting Group, a former KPMG and Microsoft executive, and current vice chair of Thrive Counseling Center and founding advisory board member of EZRA, a virtual coaching and learning provider.
