This blog summarizes key insights from a recent webinar hosted by Kahuna Workforce Solutions with experts from Skillcentrix and Workday. Together, they outline a practical blueprint for building a skills-based healthcare workforce by aligning CHRO-CNO priorities and leveraging digital skills and competency tracking tools.
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In today’s healthcare landscape, CHROs and CNOs face mounting challenges—from burnout to compliance risk to limited workforce mobility. While 70% of frontline healthcare workers want to grow in their current roles, only 20% can see a clear path forward. This disconnect contributes to disengagement, and disengaged employees are 1.7 times more likely to leave their positions. Both HR and clinical leaders are working hard to address these issues, but often in silos. And that lack of alignment isn’t just inefficient—it’s a barrier to improving retention, reducing risk, and delivering high-quality care.
If you’re still managing nursing competencies on paper, alignment with your HR platform is a consistent impediment to success.
Why CHRO and CNO Collaboration is Essential for Skills-Based Healthcare
CHROs and CNOs may sit at the same leadership table, but they’re speaking entirely different languages. For example, what HR calls a “skill,” nursing may call a “competency.” Let’s take a closer look:
HR Leaders
HR leaders speak in terms of scalability, workforce planning, and talent transformation. This perspective represents the big-picture view of enterprise-wide talent development.
Clinical Leaders
Clinical leaders speak in terms of precision, staff and patient safety, and validated competencies. Nursing leaders understand competencies and requirements at a much more granular level.
In their respective vernaculars, CHROs rely on talent software to oversee retention and workforce planning, while CNOs often manage clinical competencies manually in spreadsheets or binders. “It creates a natural tension,” states John Angele from Skillcentrix during the webinar.
“It’s hard to imagine a robust skills-based organization from a talent perspective without the inclusion of clinical competency results,” says Jai Shah, CEO of Kahuna. “But fundamentally, the underlying systems and processes are disconnected as well,” adds Angele.
Organizations struggle to answer critical questions, support their workforce, and balance the competency granularity of the clinical perspective with the talent aspect of the HR perspective. That disconnect is more than a workforce engagement issue—it’s an underutilization of the internal workforce, as Bill Hehr from Workday considers it. When CHROs and CNOs work in silos, patient safety suffers, compliance risk increases, and burnout rises.
The good news? It’s not a people problem—it’s a systems problem, and it’s solvable with the right tools.
"It's hard to imagine a robust skills based organization from a talent perspective without the inclusion of the clinical competency results, the proficiency, the workforce capability in those clinical disciplines is very important."
The Shift: From Disconnected Systems to Shared Strategy
At the heart of the shift is one powerful idea: CHROs and CNOs work for the same outcomes—retention, resilience, and readiness—but they’ve been working from disconnected data, systems, and strategies.
While both sides strive for the same results, the urgency to align is setting in more and more.
The transformation calls for organizations to reevaluate their approach to talent as they move toward a skills-based healthcare model, not as a collection of isolated competencies, but as a dynamic network of validated skills that spans job levels, career paths, and departmental agendas. This network comes to life in the form of a newly shared strategy.
“Skills are going to be the new currency that allows for flexibility. We’re going to be much more reliant on skills as our workforce shrinks.”
To create a shared workforce strategy, both HR and clinical leadership should build this new mindset to accommodate the current healthcare landscape. This mindset ultimately requires:
- Establishing a common language: Bridge the gap between “skills” and “competencies” so both departments align around outcomes like retention, readiness, and resilience. A shared vocabulary allows both teams to finally operate from a unified framework. “Skills can be… the connective tissue between HR and nursing,” expressed Angele, and when surfaced properly, they open up the door for streamlined decision-making and engagement.
- Digitizing competency tracking: Centralized tools give departments real-time visibility into who is qualified, where skills are missing, and how staff can be optimally utilized. More importantly, digital systems create the flexibility to compare data across departments and standardize how competencies are defined, measured, and reported.
- Streamlining competencies into actionable skills intelligence: By aggregating and mapping frontline-level validations into broader skill categories, organizations unlock entirely new capabilities. HR can assess workforce readiness across units, talent teams can build career paths based on validated capabilities, and clinical leaders can surface their data in a way that everyone can utilize.
That’s the shift: From managing requirements in isolation to mobilizing skills in unison.
"Competencies and skills, they both need to live together, independently with what they're serving for the CNO and the CHRO, but then integrated effectively to drive max benefit for the organization.
The Solution: Aligning Leaders for a Skills-Based Healthcare Organization
Fixing the Foundation with Shared Leadership Strategies
Aligning leadership and establishing a common language puts organizations well on their way to building a skills-based organization, enabling:
- Reduced turnover by showing employees visible paths to grow
- Boosted resilience by mobilizing nurses with validated skills
- Accelerated time to competency through skills-based learning
- Lowered compliance risk with automated, audit-ready skills and competency tracking
- Empowered career mobility by replacing rigid job descriptions with dynamic skill profiles
When HR and Nursing Work Together
Leadership alignment is more than a collaboration. It enables real change. Here’s what organizations gain by bridging HR and clinical priorities:
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Reduced Turnover
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Boosted Resilience
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Faster Time to Competency
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Lower Compliance Risk
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Enhanced Career Mobility
Trust and Transparency Matter
As an added benefit, organizations that focus on aligning leadership increase trust among the workforce, leading to enhanced engagement and quality of work, and ultimately quality of patient care. In one study, researchers found nearly half of healthcare workers reported feeling more engaged at work when they trusted their leaders, often going above and beyond in their roles, taking initiative, and showing a stronger commitment to learning and driving change.
Achieving these benefits is possible, and the next step in understanding how to best leverage technology to help.
Why Technology is Enablement
Technology is the common denominator that brings the shared skills-based healthcare strategy to life. While each department revolves around different requirements to accomplish its respective purposes, technology can be leveraged to make sense of both frameworks as a unified ecosystem of data. Hehr expresses that technology opens the door for solutions that address new workforce expectations, patient care, staff burnout, retention pressure, and cost risks.
Modern platforms built for skills-based healthcare uncover a world of possibilities in terms of:
- Making clinical competencies visible and measurable across the health system
- Powering internal mobility with validated readiness data
- Reducing compliance risk and workforce gaps through smarter planning
- Driving engagement with personalized, skills-based learning paths
When your systems speak the same language, your leaders can execute more strategically and intentionally to achieve a skills-based healthcare organization and align goals, regardless of department.
Skills-Based Healthcare Tech Makes Skills Visible, Measurable, and Actionable
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Visibility into systemwide clinical competencies
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Validated readiness for internal mobility
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Smarter workforce and compliance planning
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Personalized, skills-based development paths
Kahuna's Role in the Skills-Based Healthcare Ecosystem
As healthcare organizations work to align CHRO and CNO priorities, Kahuna provides a critical piece of the puzzle. Purpose-built for clinical environments, Kahuna’s healthcare competency management engine validates skills at a granular level to support multiple validation methods, preceptor qualifications, evidentiary requirements, expiration tracking, and more.
By centralizing and standardizing previously disconnected competency data, Kahuna makes it actionable for both HR and clinical leaders. The platform creates a shared language across departments to combine structure with flexibility, so each team can meet its goals while contributing to a unified, skills-based healthcare strategy.
With Kahuna, organizations can:
- Capture and validate clinical competencies at a detailed level
- Support a variety of validation methods and compliance workflows
- Integrate skill insights with systems like Workday Skills Cloud
- Build a connected, organization-wide skills infrastructure
"It's okay if and and it's probably expected that your operational clinical competency framework is different from your talent framework. We just see a path to join the two, and have each serve its specific purpose and support its specific outcome, set of business outcomes, do its job properly, but then be able to use technology to make sense of the entire ecosystem and utilize each in in its own way."
Connecting Models, Not Merging Them
As technology improves and skills-based approaches gain traction, CHROs and CNOs also need to realize the nuance of the situation: they don’t need to merge models; they just need to connect them.
It’s appropriate to have different models so that each may serve different purposes, but the additional step is about “bringing them together and unifying them to yield the downstream results that we’re looking for”, believes Shah.
That means aligning frameworks, standardizing a language, and using technology to bridge the gap between clinical competency and enterprise talent strategy.
Building a Skills-Based Foundation
In healthcare, every competency counts—and every misalignment is a missed opportunity. By building a skills-based foundation that connects HR and nursing, organizations can more seamlessly move from reactive staffing to proactive workforce strategy.
As Angele states, your clinical and HR frameworks “both need to live together, independently with what they’re serving for the CNO and the CHRO, but then integrate effectively to drive maximum benefit for the organization.”
Ready to build a skills-based healthcare workforce? Talk with a Kahuna skills advisor to get started.
