Skills management program initiatives driven by business outcomes and supported by executive leadership, provide organizations with the real, validated skills data that is needed to be competitive in the marketplace. Identify skills gaps, develop your employees, and build a more skilled, competitive workforce.
This podcast episode, Skills Management in the Larger Learning Management Landscape, was published by GP Strategies “Performance Matters” podcast. Jai Shah, CEO and Founder of Kahuna Workforce Solutions, sat down with John Plusquellec and Michael Thiel of GP Strategies to discuss the importance of skill management programs in the dynamic workforce environment. Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Skills management is not just a passing fad
Michael Thiel
Driven by the increasing pace of change and complexities of the work environment, industries and organizations around the world have sharpened their focus on the idea of skills management. I did a little digging on this topic and found this idea of skills management is not just a buzzword or a passing fad. Check out some of these stats.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, 23rd annual Global CEOs Survey, 74% of CEOs are concerned about the availability of key skills within their organizations. And as far as the executives themselves, a recent McKinsey report indicates that nine out of ten executives face current skill gaps or expect them in the next five years.
That’s a lot. So what exactly is skills management? How is it different than what you may already be doing? How do leaders get their arms around this topic? And where do we go from here? That’s what’s on the docket today.
Performance Matters Podcast Introduction
Are you ready to perform at your highest potential? Welcome to the Performance Matters podcast from GP Strategies, your workforce transformation partner. In each episode, we’ll interview industry experts and explore best practices and innovative insights to help your organization improve performance.
Michael Thiel
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Michael Teale. By day, I’m a creative director serving within the innovation team at GP Strategies. Now a perk of my job is that I also get the honor of hosting the Performance Matters podcast, and today’s topic is one that is at the heart of workforce transformation. And that is skills management in the larger learning landscape. I’m pleased to be joined in the virtual studio today by a dynamic duo of guests. Here with me is John Plusquellec, Vice President of Human Capital Technologies here at GP, and Jai Shah, CEO and Founder of Kahuna Workforce Solutions. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me here. I appreciate it.
Jai Shah and John Plusquellec
Of course. Thank you for having us.
Michael Thiel
Talk about a virtual world here. I’m in Phoenix. Jai, you’re in California, I’m assuming, correct?
Jai Shah
Solana Beach California. Yeah.
Michael Thiel
A lot of beautiful areas. I’ll trade you spots here in about two months, you know when the temperature starts rising. And I want to start, though, with John because, John, tell us where you’re at right now.
John Plusquellec
I am in lovely Maui, Hawaii.
Michael Thiel
I love it. I love it. This is the benefit of a virtual world. We’re all staring at each other in the podcast world right here. So John, tell me a little bit about this. Thank you, number one, for carving out time on your vacation to be with us. But just share a little bit of your background yeah.
John Plusquellec
So I started in the space actually in HR out of graduate school. My background is actually in industrial-organizational psychology. And after giving that a go for a while, I got into HR IT Systems Consulting and specifically got into SAP SuccessFactors and have been doing that for over 20 years and have had multiple roles from configuration consultant all the way up to project management. And then also running my own company. And now I manage a team of consultants that implement HR systems for clients.
Michael Thiel
So you’re just a baby in this industry is what I’m hearing, right? Just a tiny little green pea. So appreciate that. Thank you for taking your time. Jai, How about you tell us a little bit about your background?
Jai Shah
Yeah, sure. So much like John, although John’s a little older than I am, I have a consulting background as well. And I think that’s important in terms of our shared passion around this subject and what it takes to make it successful, that the idea of the kind of selling enterprise change and helping organizations through that change is really central to our mission. But about 25 years in the human capital management space.
My very first project for Deloitte Consulting many, many moons ago was with the Kohler Corporation actually, and Kohler was really looking to invest in technology that would give them a better sense of their skills DNA. I’ll never forget that term. They use the term skills DNA. And you’re not familiar with Kohler, they manufacture very specialized products and kinds of bath and plumbing and they were really interested in what made their skilled tradesmen different and what made them special, and how they contributed to the organization.
And I remember thinking, you know, if HR isn’t serving that mission, really, what is HR there for? You know, it’s about understanding your people. Understanding your workforce. So that’s where I got first interested in that problem of skills management, how to digitize it, how to capture, capture that data, and then make it available to the organization. So that’s a little bit about where I got my passion for this.
Michael Thiel
You know what? I also want to say thank you for the work you did with Kohler. My sinks look great in my house, and I’ll think of that every time here. So, you know, in preparation for cutting this podcast, I was doing a little bit of dreaming. I, you know, being a creative director, one of the things I was thinking about in my mind was the concept of video games. I mean, we’re all probably, you know, we grew up in the eighties and, you know, the fact where you could see the actual skills on your Bo Jackson or, you know, John Madden type games. And I was thinking, are we kind of maybe getting close to that in, in our world, in, in actual enterprise performance? So that leads me to my first question for you both is that we know that skills, the concept of skills management is certainly a buzzword right now. Jai, let’s start with you on this. Why is this such a trending topic?
Understanding your workforce capabilities with skills
Jai Shah
I’m reflecting on what you just said. Why did you want to see that data about your players in that video game? Right, it’s so you’d have a competitive advantage. You’d make those players have a competitive advantage over your buddies and you could dominate Madden. And you know, what we’re finding is that organizations today are craving that data to help them with decision making.
We’ve had so much investment in how to measure your supply chain, how to measure the performance of your equipment and automation. It’s really time that measurement of human performance, not in a judgmental way, but in a kind of an objective way to help both the worker and the organization get the best outcome. It’s time that you know, organizations have a need to invest in those solutions.
And it’s all about making that worker better, making the workforce more competitive. I think, you know, there’s no, it’s not a coincidence that many of the core industries that are interested in this problem are also going through a lot of change right now. So if you look at energy, for instance, you know, the Green Revolution, nontraditional resources, that takes a different skill set than drilling for traditional oil or even drilling for oil in more complicated ways in deeper and deeper environments.
That takes a different skill set. So change in the industry is a big driver. And then finally, you know, there is a little thing called COVID, the pandemic influence of you know, just a new way to work virtually and understand where your skills and capability really exist within the organization. And then being able to kind of manage that transparency, even though you’re not able to see the person virtually. Just like in your video game, can I understand what their capability is? And, that’s becoming super important.
Michael Thiel
Absolutely. John, what are your thoughts on that, too?
John Plusquellec
Yeah, I think, you know, COVID has been a huge game-changer in terms of how executives and managers view their workforce. Right. I mean, not only just looking at the way that people are working virtually and, you know, working from their homes on a regular basis now, you know, I think there was a feeling that managers just because they could lay eyeballs on their employees and see their employees working, that they understood what their skill sets were.
But now that people are working remotely, they’re not able to get a pulse on a day-to-day basis in terms of, you know, how are my employees performing? Now, with COVID, it has absolutely gotten managers to a point where they need to be able to look at something, a report or some sort of technology that shows, you know, assesses where people are against the skills that are required for their jobs.
And so what we’re seeing a lot is our clients are asking more about you know, one, pretty rudimentary. How do we assess these things? It’s not like a traditional performance appraisal where I’m just asking you, did you meet your goals? Now it’s way more important to them for managers and executives to be able to say, you know, where are we as an organization from a skillset perspective?
To be able to meet our objectives, both from a job role perspective as well as from an organization perspective? Where do our employees individually stack up against those competencies? So we’re having some pretty basic conversations with our clients in terms of shifting from those basic, older school style performance management to looking at something much more tactile in terms of understanding where people are relative to their skills within their job roles to be able to report on that.
Skills data provides tangible metrics for analysis
Michael Thiel
That’s one thing. It kind of hit me when I was doing some due diligence here. Jai, when I was checking out your organization, Kahuna, I was really seeing some of the dashboard potential. And what you’re saying, John, of having this is, you’ve got this elusive virtual corporation in many ways, being able to put some tangible performance metrics to different staff, almost like you know, I don’t want to go too far down the sports road, but like baseball cards, right?
When you’re kids and you’d say, okay, this person hit 52 home runs last year. Right? And this one can’t break the Mendoza line. So if it’s time for a role, which one maybe is going to have the advantage, even though technically they’re both Major League Baseball players, you know? So it’s kind of exciting. I just want to give some kudos out there. Shout out, Jai. It looks like your tool’s pretty interesting. So I wanted to ask you, Jai, what industries do you notice that is really embracing and leading the way, leading this forefront of the skills management?
Traditional HR technology has left the deskless worker behind
Jai Shah
Yeah. So you know, I think there’s a spectrum, you know, and we think about two dimensions to our market. We think about industries and then we think about workforces within those industries. So actual employee demographics within those industries. So, you know, from an industry perspective, when we’re talking about these operational skills and the need to track them, we’re seeing regulated industries and industries that are technically differentiated.
So healthcare, manufacturing, energy, and in many cases professional services you know, as core, aerospace and defense, those are core industries. And then within those industries, we’re seeing workforces like everything from specialized engineering to field service workers who are very tactile, to nurses. So it’s those types of work, of workforces. And in manufacturing, a lot of times the operators, the line operators.
And the last point I’ll make here is those workforces, especially the deskless worker, have really been left behind by traditional HR technology. So this idea of being able to quickly assess or understand where I am against my skill requirements, that’s a very difficult thing to do. If you think you have to log into your HR system, where you maybe go to check your benefits, you know, it’s not the same experience.
It’s got to be delivered in the flow of work. And so that’s kind of something that we’ve really focused on is that deskless worker and making sure that that use case is really well catered to.
John Plusquellec
Yeah. So I agree with Jai, 100% in terms of what he’s saying. We too are hearing from very large organizations, specifically, we’ve got a couple of defense contractors that are asking specifically around their skilled workforce. The tradesmen but as Jai was saying, we’re also seeing this come up in industries where you’ve got more technical engineering or scientific skilled individuals like pharma. So we’ve got some customers in the pharma space that are also looking for help in this space. For sure.
Michael Thiel
Who’s typically responsible for solving this problem? I know everyone’s, you know, performance matters for everyone, but who is that individual that says that’s my stake that I’m holding? Who is that, Jai?
Operations, HR, and learning work together for success
Jai Shah
Yeah. So, you know, again, focused on that operational skilling problem where the workforce is very tactile. It’s normally not, believe it or not, it’s not necessarily coming directly from HR. It’s not an HR person necessarily raising their hand and saying we need to go solve this problem. Rather, it’s operations craving that skill data just like you crave that skill data on your Madden players.
Like it’s somebody who owns the outcome if something goes wrong with the workforce or they’re not able to produce with quality or, you know, they’re not a competitor, they can’t meet customer demand. However, I don’t want to diminish HR’s role and responsibility in executing. And this is where maybe John could comment a little bit on kind of how these programs come to life. But our typical motion is we get engaged with an operational leader who has this need, and we encourage them to partner up with their HR counterpart and then kind of go solve that collaboratively. Because this doesn’t exist if it’s truly just operations or just HR. It’s got to be a collaboration. And, you know, learning and development specifically is kind of where this typically falls to go execute. And learning and development have always been one of those hot potatoes, you know. It sits in HR and technical training often sits on the operational side. You know, general corporate learning sits on the HR side.
So it’s one of those types of situations where you kind of have to figure out what’s the best collaborative approach to lead to that business outcome that the organization is counting on out of an initiative like this.
Michael Thiel
Yeah, that’s interesting. John, what’s your take on it?
John Plusquellec
Yeah, so similar to what Jai was saying. And I mean, typically from our perspective, we are talking to the HR folks, but that’s because of what Jai was saying. And the operations folks have come to HR asking for some help and solutions from a technical perspective around how to manage this process. And one of those larger defense contractors I was talking about, specifically the case where somebody in operations was given the charter to manage this proficiency and skills program, went to HR and started working with the learning group, the person that over both learning and career development from a technical perspective, from an HRIS perspective. And so the question that we have there is more around. So where does this technology fit in the overall HRIS landscape? Is it something that should be part of learning? Is it something that should be something separate?
And what we tend to do to help our clients understand is that you know, the skills management component of this is what drives the demand for the other HR functions or HR processes so once you identify what those potential skills gaps are, that’s what where you see that gap. That’s what drives the learning demand. And that’s what also develops, and drives the demand from a development perspective. And so it just needs to integrate with those processes and technology.
Michael Thiel
Thinking about this visually, is that it’s almost like The Avengers coming together, right? You have traditional HR With compliance training. You’ve got operations doing the work. And then this learning and development group that’s, you know, depending on the company sitting somewhere, everywhere. So it looks like they’re all coming together and creating this new synthesis of skills management. Am I getting close on this? What do you think, Jai?
Jai Shah
Yeah, absolutely. You’re spot on. And the point that I would kind of emphasize out of that is collecting skills data just to collect it doesn’t do anybody any good. So it truly needs to integrate. It is The Avengers coming together. And if you do that, you now have an ecosystem which I think is part of the learning landscape. I think of it as an ecosystem where you have a bunch of downstream systems that now are skill aware, which make them that much smarter in the way they can recommend learning, the way that you can get a resource kind of developed more quickly in a more personalized fashion. And that’s just not possible if you don’t understand the baseline proficiency and see all these critical skills in your organization and understand where you should be making those bets and investments and learning.
So you know, it truly is kind of a supply and demand type of equation where the demand for that learning, as John mentioned, is really informed by the supply of your current capability chain.
Identify skills gaps and develop your people accordingly
Michael Thiel
Absolutely. So speaking about this in terms of making an approach, how would you say are organizations changing their approach to learning than when they do adopt this scaling mindset?
Jai Shah
So what we’re seeing is, you know, take a large field services company that the typical motion, or even a healthcare organization, typical motion is, I hire somebody into a job role. I’ve got a long curriculum mapped out for that employee when they come on board. And I know it’s going to take them nine to 12 months before they’re going to be really unsupervised operating in their role.
And everybody goes on the same templatized job-code-based training. And then sometimes if I transfer from one organization to another, I start that journey over or I have a lot of redundant repetitive training because it’s all based on a standard curriculum that’s been developed. And I have no idea whether half that training is even relevant for me because I’m an experienced hire. I’m walking in with 80% of the skills and proficiencies that I need to do the job. I should really just be focused on that 20%. Or I’m never going to go work on a customer job that has certain equipment or specific criteria, so why am I bothering training the person in those procedures and equipment? So what we’re seeing is the mindset shifts from a templatized, global learning-first view to a skill-building or capability-first view of how we need to develop our people. And that makes it much more efficient, targeted, personalized, and engaging for the learner, for the worker in that model. And ultimately what that’s resulting in is much more streamlined time to revenue or time to productivity for the worker.
Michael Thiel
I can also see that from the employee standpoint or the worker standpoint, they feel a lot more motivated because their time is being honored, and their former skills are being honored. Just like if you took honors classes in high school and you know what? You’ve earned that credit and you don’t have to pay the extra hours to the college. Right? So you’re kind of taking that same skills mindset into the enterprise workforce.
Jai Shah
You nailed it.
Michael Thiel
Hashtag nailed it. So, John, anything you want to add there? You know, while we’re just basking at your beautiful view there in Hawaii, regarding how you’re noticing and observing organizations adopting their approach or changing their approach?
John Plusquellec
So I think the big thing with this, I think some organizations are struggling with is everything that Jai said you know, there are clear tangible outcomes if you take this approach. But the question is how do you get there upfront? You know, from the traditional sense of HR processes where you just start the year by looking at goals and then you, you know, at the end of the year, you look at whether or not you’ve achieved them.
With this, it takes a bit more thoughtfulness to understand within each job role, what are the skill sets required? And then boiling that up from a higher level is from an organizational perspective, what do we need to do to achieve our mission for this particular year? And so it requires looking at each role and understanding what those skill sets are.
And in the end, you know, from a development perspective, employees are much more clear about what it is that they need to do once those skills gaps are identified between where they are and where they need to be. But also the organization as a whole understands where they are versus where they need to be. And so it does take some thoughtfulness of mapping through understanding what the organizational objectives are, what the job role objectives are. And before you can get to start doing those assessments to see where people are.
And so it does require HR working with trained professionals, understanding how to do those mappings, and working with executives to understand what the mission of the organization is and then be able to pull all that stuff together in terms of being able to then map it into a system, HR system to be able to track it going forward.
Michael Thiel
So this is an open question to either of you. Then thinking about this, obviously from the workforce perspective, could this potentially then boost employee engagement from just an overall career pathing perspective?
Boost employee engagement with specific learning
Jai Shah
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there are several things emerging on that front. One is engaging the worker/learner in that learning journey because you’ve now got an incentive. Right. You talked about that. My time is valued and I know why I’m engaging with these learning resources. They’re specifically advancing my capabilities in these areas.
But the second phase of that is the organization has told me they value these skills. They value them because they are needed in the future for us to be successful in the company. So I’m going to fit into that future picture better. So I have incentives from a job retention perspective. And then the final piece of that we’re seeing, that I think is super exciting, is the concept of pay for skills. So know in the past, the way you…
Michael Thiel
Got my attention.
Jai Shah
The way you get rewarded often is a promotion, right? And not everyone in the organization…the organization can’t offer everyone a promotion because you become a top-heavy organization. But the organization also understands, especially in today’s labor market, that I can’t have valuable skills walking out the door. So if I’ve gone through the work of identifying the critical skills for the future of my business, I’ve mapped them to roles, operational roles. I’ve assigned those to people.
And now those people are doing their part of the bargain and coming through and developing themselves towards those skills. That becomes a really powerful combination of data. The last piece of that is now I can start to understand that when you hit certain skill or capability milestones, I can offer you more rewards in the form of compensation relative to that achievement so you don’t walk out the door. I’m being proactive. There’s a trust in that contract between the worker and the organization.
If there’s real-time feedback, that if I achieve these capabilities, I automatically am going to be eligible for this additional compensation. And I think that’s super exciting to see organizations taking that type of mindset to how they can use this data again and engage the worker in the journey.
John Plusquellec
Yeah, and I think just I don’t know very many successful people that it just as a human being, let alone from an employee perspective, that you know, wouldn’t like to understand where they are and where they’re going, right, in life.
Michael Thiel
Right? That’s pretty foundational.
John Plusquellec
So from a personal perspective, most people like to understand where they are and where they’re headed. And so from an engagement perspective, what this does is it provides employees, whether they want to be good at what they’re doing right now or whether they want to be able to understand what are the paths forward for me, from a career development perspective, I can look at any particular job role and understand what are the skills that are required to be able to do my job now or to be able to do something else that I may want to do in the future and then understand what do I need to do to get there from a different and even at different proficiency levels. And then to Jai’s point about tying that back to compensation, I can then understand how I’ll be rewarded for that. So it’s just, as you said, it’s very foundational. And so it takes things from being much more nebulous from a traditional process perspective and makes things much more concrete for employers. And so without question, it lends itself to being able to truly engage employers and understanding where they are and where they’re headed.
Skills management programs driven by business goals
Michael Thiel
Let’s think about if you’re saying, okay, I’m liking this, I want to approach skills management here, so I’m just going to put this out here. Are there some different ways of approaching skills management to accomplish that same end goal?
Jai Shah
So I think that we should start with the end goal.
Michael Thiel
Okay.
Jai Shah
And we need to define what the end goal is, and that is it sounds easier sometimes than that. Everyone says sure, this sounds great. If I had a dashboard I could pull up with, you know, my entire workforce and their proficiency against the critical skills in my organization. Fantastic. The question again comes back to why are we collecting this data?
In field services organizations, that may be again, because I need to make better assignments of personnel against customer jobs that are a better fit. Or my customer’s business strategy is changing, they’re going into renewable energy. I need to take all my wind or my electrical turbine mechanics and turn them into wind turbine mechanics. Whatever, that goal is, there needs to be a true business outcome that you’re measuring and trying to achieve.
If not, I would say sure, there are different ways of kind of accomplishing skills management. It can be as nebulous and loose as, you know, going to open source skills cloud or skills ontology and making all of that available to your end-user or worker. And then they can self-direct their, you know, choose your own adventure when it comes to skills. That’s one end of the spectrum.
The other end of the spectrum is, again, these hard business outcome-driven skills initiatives that have critical skills identified per job role. And you really validate the user proficiency and have trust in that data to drive that outcome. And I think we see programs throughout that spectrum. My bias is that the ones that are more geared towards operational outcomes are the ones that are going to be around in 5,10,15 years because they will have made your workforce a competitive advantage.
Michael Thiel
John, what about you on this? Are you tracking with that? Do you have a little different perspective?
John Plusquellec
No, no, I totally track with that. And I know I’m about to say something that’s really shocking, but, you know, even more fundamental than that, you know, like with any HR Technology implementation or initiative, it has to have executive leadership and sponsorship. And so to even get to the point, the point that Jai was making, this is all driven by executives that have a vision and understanding of where their organization’s going, what information they want to be looking at to be able to make strategic decisions.
And so it’s then going to HR and asking for help and support. And, you know, what I will say is that you know, my experience in the past is that when HR isn’t able to support these types of initiatives, those executives are going to go somewhere else where they can find somebody that can get that, whether it’s operations or finance or whoever, that can give them very tactile responses in terms of the information that they’re looking for.
So it really is about executive leadership and understanding what it is, where the organization is, where they’re headed, and providing that guidance and direction for being able to pull together these programs and understanding the next steps. It’s not rocket science, it really isn’t. And it’s a function of just having a vision and being able to have the right consulting partner and technology partner to work with you to pull these things together.
Michael Thiel
As somebody is driving right now, they’re listening to this podcast and they go, I like this idea of skills management. It sounds kind of exciting. What would be some of the first steps that you both would recommend?
Jai Shah
I think, again, once you have a clear vision as to why you’re doing this, then I think it’s, as John said, it’s a question then of going through a pretty focused exercise of identifying critical roles within the organization and what skills and capabilities align with those roles. And there’s a way to do that, there’s a methodology, and that’s where a partner like GP Strategies really comes in in terms of helping you structure a really good way of getting to that content if you will, that skills framework, the governance, that the ability to define those job task analysis and break down those roles into the critical elements, and then marrying that up with technology to
bring it all to life. And there’s a way there’s a methodology to that. There are best practices to do that. It doesn’t have to be a big, weighty three-year exercise. You know, we’re helping organizations create that in very quick turnaround times.
John Plusquellec
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s the last comment that Jai made the one to me that’s most important is that you know, a lot of times people can feel like they’re getting crushed by the weight of just the thought of a program like this. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be that way. You know, to take a shot across, you know, the big strategic consulting groups that love to get as many people in the door to help out with these types of things. And it’s in their benefit for these things to belong, protracted, you know, development cycles in terms of pulling these programs together. You know, my suggestion is always, you know, don’t try to boil the ocean. You know, a lot of times…
Michael Thiel
I love that, it’s great.
John Plusquellec
What works really well with this is to pick a critical area of specific job roles or skill sets that you know, there’s going to be some traction. For instance, you know, engineers who love stuff like this. Engineers, you know, typically what I was saying earlier about wanting knowing where you are and where you’re headed, that’s engineers to a tee.
So you can usually find groups within an organization that naturally will gravitate towards these types of programs. And you can pick a subset of job roles out, do those mappings, and move forward. And you know, obviously, in terms of looking at the technology, you know, it’s not looking for technology that that is an all-singing, all-dancing elephant that can do everything. This needs to be something that is very specific in terms of what you’re trying to achieve. Can I assess my employees against the skill sets that we require? And once we identify the skill gaps, what is the result of that output, and can it easily map and integrate into a career development program moving forward?
Michael Thiel
Gentlemen, this has been a thrilling conversation. We appreciate your insight today.
Jai Shah
Thank you, Michael, very much.
John Plusquellec
Michael, appreciate it.
Performance Matters Podcast Closing
A Performance Matters podcast is brought to you by GP Strategies. Together, we can create a world where business excellence makes possibilities achievable. You can subscribe to the show anywhere you get podcasts or listen on our website at GPStrategies.com.
