#2 | Using Skills Taxonomies in Workforce & Scenario Planning

How can you tackle upskilling challenges and prepare for the future of work? Find out how the Co-Founder of Huneety bridged the skills gap with workforce taxonomies.

Welcome to The HR Dialogues with Dr. Dieter Veldsman! Join AIHR's Chief HR Scientist to learn from People Practitioners as they navigate the changing world of work.

In this episode of The HR Dialogues, Dr. Dieter Veldsman sits with Simon Carvi – Co-Founder and CEO at Huneety – to explore how you can implement a workforce taxonomy that will help your organization identify and close the skills gap.

Simon is an HR tech startup founder with an extensive background in talent acquisition and business development. With Huneety, he supports organizations navigate the skills and talent shortage with HR data-driven solutions.

In this episode we’ll discuss:

• The difference between skills and competencies
• What are workforce taxonomies
• Using data to stay competitive on the market

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Transcript

Welcome everyone to this episode of the HR Dialogues. I'm your host, Dr. Dieter Veldsman, and today I'm joined by Simon Carvi as we talk about skills-based taxonomies and how that can help you prepare for the future of work.

Welcome to the HR Dialogues, where we learn from people practitioners as they navigate the emerging world of work.

Good day everyone and welcome to our podcast where we talk about human beings in the workplace and discuss the topics that will influence the future of work. My name is Dr. Dieter Veldsman and today I'm joined by Simon Carvi, the co-founder of Unity, a very exciting start-up helping organizations solve the skills challenges that they face to be ready in this new world of work. Simon, good day, it's great to have you with us.

Hi Dieter, thank you for having me, and likewise, quite excited to discuss today.

Perfect, Simon, I'd love us to jump right in and maybe to give a bit of context to our listeners today on the topic, I think skills has been such a big conversation in the organizational domain, especially due to firstly, the covid pandemic, I think the manner and the way in which organizations are also changing, and it's interesting for me to see, and there was a report that came out from the world economic forum that estimates that 40% of workers will require reskilling that will take up to six months or more. And I think it's such an interesting statistic for us to start thinking about that organizations are continuously thinking about lifelong learning for their people. How are we going to transition our people towards this future state that we need from a skills point of view? And I also think that jobs are starting to change and that's something that I would really love to discuss with you today to see what are you seeing with your clients and what are you seeing in the market? And there was a very impactful quote that I read from an article in HR Dive from Sheryl Estrada that says that skills are becoming the currency of the future. And there's a lot of global initiatives. I know Microsoft, LinkedIn, et cetera, are extremely involved in various things around being able to think about what skills look like in the future and how are we going to make sure that our organizations are ready? 
We know there is a global talent shortage that is happening and it will only get worse. So that's why we are helping companies to develop a strategy right now. You mentioned skills scarcity, and the fact that this is more and more in demand and especially soft skills, actually. The answer is quite simple. It's a matter of survival for companies to learn and adapt. And we have seen during the pandemic that companies that thrive and survive are the ones that develop strategies in place to pivot and to learn skills. 
I want to take a step back because I think when we talk about skills, there are various interpretations what we are talking about. And especially when I speak to HR professionals, they use a lot of these terms, competencies, skills, behaviors, they use them interchangeably. And as well as also looking at more traditional concepts, such as things like skills taxonomies, and skills libraries. Can you give us a bit of insight when we talk about skills, what are we talking about? 
So the skills taxonomy, to put it simple, it's a classification system that guides your skills and competencies in a way that makes sense to run the business. I know there was a lot of misconceptions about what is a skill, what is the competency? So to put it simple, competencies are a combination of skills, abilities, and knowledge to solve a business problem. So if you look at, for example, the competency objection handling, where you will find some critical thinking skills, communication skills, as well as active listening. The skill is a capacity to perform a certain task, right? So skills are more fine-grained and because they are more fine-grained they are easily certifiable and measurable. So you look at the example of Adobe Photoshop. That's something that you can be trained on and you can even measure the skillset level of these specific skills. So we see skills are dynamic, right? We live in a world that is changing fast. The pandemic just showed us. They must be connected to learning and development. They must be connected to KPIs and they must be assigned to the right positions across the company and to the right people. So skills are not sleeping on an Excel sheet anymore, and they must be like agile and easily deployable to people.
I think a lot of criticism in the skills taxonomy space comes from this fact that, you know, we go through these big exercises in organizations to try and define what do our skills, libraries or taxonomies look like. And yet that becomes outdated within a couple of weeks as the business shifts and changes or has to respond to this ever-changing environment. How do we bridge that gap? 
It's very rare to have a business that says, okay, I want the skills taxonomy for my entire business overnight. And the reality is that to start with skills taxonomy, we start with the strategy. So what is the most urgent priority for the business? It can be a digital transformation project. It can be another business unit or another business that's the company wants to go for. So this is one side. Another thing would be to during the acquisition of an HRIS system, for example. It's pretty much like an empty box. You need to fill the HRIS yes with data, you need to fill it with job description and so on. So companies are thinking about that skills taxonomy during that moment. The other recurring case we are facing to is thinking about skills taxonomies for a targeted population across the country. The high performers or high potential talents, whatever we want to call them are the first one priority to trigger a project like that. 
I love the fact that you talk about prioritization because I think that's often where we get stuck. We've tried to be so comprehensive and so complete that we sometimes miss the point around and something that I often speak about with the team as well, is what are you really trying to solve for? Where does this fit? And how are we going to roll it out in a way that it's still feasible? There's that saying, you know, rather get it done than get it perfect.

Simon, give me an example of some of the use cases. I am an HR professional. How do I know that the skills taxonomy process is something I need to embark on. You've mentioned strategy, you've mentioned a specific project. Can you give us a few examples of use cases? 
So when we start, before delivering skills sets, what we need to know is what are the jobs and what are the job families. So actually you need to start to draft the job taxonomy first. And once this is clear, then we roll out our tool, so we use machine learning and AI to aggregate data across job boards. And we are able to know for which specific industry or each specific industry, what are the skills required for each. So we give them their competency framework, and skills taxonomy with data from there. And this is just the first step. Once we have done that, then the next step is to make the assessment. What are the skills levels of Mr. A or Mr. B on the job? Once we have done that, we are able to capture the entire analitics for the workforce. 
We led this project with this manufacturing company across Southeast Asia, and we were actually quite flabbergasted to see the gaps across job families. And it was really serving as a base to focus the learning and development. One thing that came across as an output is that when we could talk to the employee and said, well, these are the skills you need to develop to fill your career path. So it's not just providing skills, skills data, skills visualization. It's also working on employee engagement with this skills taxonomy. So at the end of the day, you are able to have a discussion with the employee about skill gaps. And what is the action plan or what is the individual development plan that you need to do to cover the gaps? 
The first one is the concept of using data, because I think very often our skills taxonomies are not necessarily ground in industry data, because I think that's where the relevance question comes in, as well as internally in your context, what does this look like? Because I think a criticism we often get is, you know, taxonomies are extremely generic. But you have to balance generic on the one side with relevance, with context. And I think that's very interesting how you go about doing that. Second thing I hear is the visibility, is really around, and I think we've often been in a situation where competency frameworks live in the domain of HR only. Nobody is aware of them. And nobody understands as an individual what can I do to develop myself into that next step, or into that next level? And what are the skills that I need to be able to get access to or to be able to develop at the different levels of proficiency. Start where the pain is now or start where the priority is now. Because I think the skills taxonomy can also serve really as a strategic discussion to and almost as an instrument that you utilize to help the business understand what does that next step look like for them, to be able to evolve. 
At AIHR, we talk about data literacy and digital dexterity as a core skill and competency that HR professionals need to have to remain relevant in the future. How do you help the HR function position this?
First you need to advocate why make decisions with data. And certainly you need to follow up also on the implementation, the business line needs to understand the value of it. So to do that, we actually work with our clients as an extension of their team. Before the project is happening, we spend time to figure out those priorities, with the CEO, with the top management to make sure we can generate buy-in. And then we have a case to scale the taxonomy. But it does not stop there. Whenever we delivered the taxonomy and the data there is a strong support needed on the implementation of the IDPs too. So usually as we said, the first step is to have the data. And the second step is to know the gaps across the company. So where are the skill gaps? Who has the most skill gaps? Who are the experts? 
How do you help an organization understand the importance of an IDP? I've bought into it, but I come from an HR background. How do you help the business line see the need to actually drive action through the IDP? And how can we start showcasing to them that it's actually providing value, that these gaps that we've identified that they are slowly but surely starting to close. 
When we look at what companies are doing, most of the time are not integrated property. When you look at the systems of the companies, they may have skills in their systems, but they are not computed in the performance management system. Companies have skills, but they are not integrated in performance management systems. So after the employee do not see the value of it. And if he works on the skills development, it's an added workload, because it's not part of his performance management plan. We have skills. We put them in the performance management system. The second thing is how do we make the IDP? What we provide when we provide IDPs to our clients is a 70, 20,10. I am personally a very diehard believer of 70, 20 10. We provide action plans that gather successive on the job experience assignments, mentoring opportunities, and learnings on the floor. We actually copy paste the action plan in their main HRIS. We generate buy in from the employee because these are the gaps to cover for example, the career path, right? These are your skills and this is the action plan. This is how you are going to do on the job as well. 
I think there's been a big shift over the last couple of years around, call it career pathhing or career experiences. And I think, you know, the definition of what is a career is also fundamentally changing at the moment in terms of, it's not just a succession of roles, but it's almost a collection of experiences and skill sets over time that you can apply in different contexts. And I think it sounds like to really get a skills taxonomy to fly in an organization there has to be the organizational level benefit. And then there has to be the individual level, really seeing how this works for me as an employee. I love the point you make around it has to be integrated into some of your other systems. I think that's something in a lot of large organizations, they struggle because not everything is in the same place. So it almost takes more time and effort to be able to get the identified skills that we've spoken about in our workforce planning component right down to the granular level of being captured within an individual development plan. So I think there's a lot of work as HR professionals we need to do to help the business see the value and make sense of that. 
When it comes to that discussion with the CEO, actually, when we step back and when we look at it, when we are able to focus on the skill gaps, we prioritize investments on learning, in a way that makes sense and that we generate value for the business because employees will reach their career paths on time. The second thing is to know what skills you need your business, right? So if you're a CEO or you want to know if you're going to outsource a certain skillset, because you don't have that after we make an assessment, right? The second step is what I'm going to do. So I am going to outsource this, or I am going to to recruit externally and permanently some talents. Or do I invest in learning? Most of our clients choose that route, learning and development to build a competitive and sustainable advantage. 
I think it's going to be interesting for us to also keep an eye on how, talent strategies are changing. I think, especially at the moment we see gig work, we see hybrid workplace strategies. And I think that the knowledge and the understanding of what is the actual skill that I need and require is going to become extremely, extremely important.

As a country for us to be successful, we need to stimulate the development of certain skills. And we put in programs in place to make sure that we do some grassroots development. How should HR contributes towards those initiatives? Because we all agree the skills deficit and skills scarcity, it's an unsustainable model for us to take the 12 data scientists we have and literally just rotate them through the different organizations and companies. And we keep on hunting those same skills, but we are not necessarily broadening that particular pool. So what advice would you give if I'm talking to you at a country level and saying from a skillset point of view, how do we bridge that? We're talking 10, 15, 20 years. How do I do that? And what should I be thinking about as a leader?
If you were country and you look at skills, you should first take into account, what capability do you need as a country? What should you teach at school and in universities? For example, in Thailand, they came to realize that critical thinking is actually a big bullet for them because they have a very big amount of people joining the workforce that do not know how to be independent on the job, and that cannot make basic tasks without supervision. So critical thinking is an example, but being able to deal with technology very early on at school and university. How do you prepare your people to the reality of the workforce?
I know in a lot of countries, the frustration is people get through the education system and there's various paths and ways of doing that. But when they actually land on the job, we did not breed ready now, talent. We bred almost somebody that can enter the workplace and then their development starts. And I know it is a learning curve, but I do think that it needs to start a little bit earlier. 
I think for me to try and summarize what I'm hearing you say, firstly, as we can't ignore the importance of skills and companies will do so at their own peril. From a process point of view, I hear start with educating the business and start with a strategy. Start with what are we trying to achieve? Give us a view of what do we have currently and utilize data so that we've got an accurate, reflective view of where we are as an organization and what we are missing. Make it real and practical around the impact and how we are going to close those skills, are we going to buy them in? Are we going to develop them over time? Link it into your other processes. We spoke about workforce planning. We spoke about performance management, operationalize it via your IDP. And then I guess the last step then is to be able to say, let's start the cycle again, and let's make sure that we start showcasing the progress that we have made with regards to the development and the acquisition of the skills that we require for the future. 
Any last advice that you can give to an HR practitioner that's listening to us today and says tomorrow I want to get started with the skills. Where do I start? What is the first thing that I should do?
I would say first, look at the topic, invest yourself in it. Have a discussion with the CEO. If you don't know yourself, get some insights about strategy, where is the business going in the next six months, one year and above. You will have a sense of the priorities and maybe start to think about, okay, what skills do we need? Do not treat skills separately in your performance management system, include them in the performance management system. It's even okay to have KPIs related to skills and competencies. So put some objectives in front of them. You will start to see some ownership as well. So it's not just the standalone thing across the company. It's something that has to be embedded in the business objective. Link the skills to the performance management, do not be afraid to put KPIs in front of that.