We would call out three aspects that have especially high potential to help organisations drive an effective skills-led approach. Firstly, talent marketplaces. These are being increasingly widely adopted, and for good reason. As employees enter more data about themselves into marketplaces and engagement increases, talent marketplaces create compelling benefits for organisations and employees alike. The business can match skills to projects and tasks, plan more dynamically and identify key skills gaps; individuals can see open positions that may be of interest to them, take recommended learning courses and modules, put themselves forwards for ‘gigs’ (side projects that will build new skills), find mentors and build their career path. Deployed successfully, a talent marketplace becomes a hub for the organisation’s talent and skills-related data, joining up disparate sources and creating that much-longed for holistic view. As an example, see here for details of a thriving marketplace that KPMG helped Aegon to create.
A second key aspect is learning in the flow of work. Many individuals simply don’t have the time to research what learning resources are available – so a key strategy is to bring learning to them. This may partly be achieved through a talent marketplace, but other methods include building digital assistants into platforms such as Teams that, based on an individual’s activity, can proactively make the individual aware of relevant skills and learning materials available. In this way, they can build their skills organically in the course of their work.
Thirdly, apprenticeship schemes are an effective mechanism that map very well to financial services businesses. Graduate intake remains a staple of the recruitment model, but running an apprenticeship programme alongside this means that, through a series of structured skills-based rotations, organisations can build a pipeline of talent equipped and ready with the skills specifically relevant to business needs.
Given the pace of change in today’s world, skills requirements will continue to rapidly shift and evolve. This makes it more important than ever to establish a model now that sets the foundations for an agile, skills-led approach.
