Learning from our Skills Journey

Technology companies like Ericsson are blessed by constant new possibilities but also challenged by the need for reinvention. Knowing this, 3 years ago we started to consider whether skills could be part of that creative engine that drives business performance and improves the employee experience. Could this focus help us better understand the skills we have and need, increase the rate of internal mobility, improve career development and grow the right skills through recruitment and learning?

Although we started with this vision, it was also a program to solve perceived problems within the business. For example why do we spend time assessing an individual’s capability in the recruitment process but once hired we don’t retain that knowledge of a person’s skills – we throw away the receipt! Our shift to skills program was born. At the same time we looked at our current job architecture which was complicated, static and full of manual processes.

2 years later we have simplified, digitalised and partially automated our job and skills architecture. Now we have over 1100 new job profiles with up to 15 critical skills for every combination of job role and  level. These profiles we have digitalised by putting them into our HRIS and making them available to all our employees through a new app. Our old competence model is replaced with a simpler skills model and a dynamic skills taxonomy that is refreshed every month thanks to our partnership with Techwolf. We can now have new insights into the skills supply, adjacencies and external market through new skills intelligence dashboards.

However all this infrastructure does not solve business problems or create value in itself – it has to be put to work. In short, we have to get beyond the infrastructure.

The experiences of the last couple of years has led to some areas of learning which is what I want to share with you in this article.

Learning No. 1. Its not jobs or skills; its jobs and skills.  Most organisations use Job architecture to define the work they need but rigid governance is now out of step with the dynamic nature of work. This has led to some calls to replace jobs with skills. However its not necessarily about ditching jobs but rather rebalancing between jobs and skills. It is a shift along the continuum towards a recognition that skills are the driving force behind a person performing across a wide variety of activities enabling them to engage in meaningful work. In a pure gig based organisations it is possible to exist with few or no job roles but that’s not the reality in most organisations. Last year we kicked off our talent market place – this demands that we know the skills needed vs the skills each person has to enable sensible recommendations. We have found that bringing skills into the organisation becomes a natural progression in making the talent marketplace a practical reality.

Learning No.2. Value is the starting and end point. We have found getting our HR team on board with skills is not an easy task and when faced with the annual salary review, performance management, engagement surveys then getting any attention on skills, particularly infrastructure, is tough. We started with considering the design of our job and skills architecture and this was a mistake – we should have gone straight to the second step which was to demonstrate value. Small scale experiments and testing new ways of working needs to be part of the proof points associated with this. For example, we demonstrated that if you bring skills into recruitment advertising you can improve candidate quality. We picked one skill where we had a shortage and showed that we could automate the creation of a taxonomy for that skill better than the SMEs. So starting with a platform built on a solid business case demonstrating value. However now it’s a matter of squeezing out the value from the infrastructure and we have identified workforce planning, recruitment, career mobility and learning as the key target areas. So far we’ve started with bringing skills into recruitment shortlisting and self-assessment for career development. Company wide critical skills have been identified and learning journeys have been built to deliver skills progression in some of our most important skills. Individual focus skills to control learning recommendations as part of year end performance and development meetings have become part of our regular annual cadence.

Learning No.3. It’s a whole organisation activity. We only made the progress through the engagement of our HR SME areas and a business led resource planning team. First basic rule here is that you need all the HR expert functions involved as in the end you have to bring the job and skills infrastructure into the processes and activities – better to have everyone on board from day 1. However it’s the business involvement that really matters as leaders and stakeholders should be convinced that the right skills have been identified within the taxonomy and the job roles. Its for this reason that we have business based job role and skill area owners who really understand the skills needed to succeed.

Learning No.4. Digital automation makes the difference. The usual challenge to work on skills is that we have always been interested in skills so what is different now? One answer is the technology to source, manage and manipulate the skills data,  the LXPs, and talent marketplaces that are making the difference. Digitalising the job roles and skills into our HRIS (SAP) has been the obvious first step but this has the main benefit of enabling the data to be brought into other HRIS modules as well as applications for learning (Degreed) and talent mobility (Eightfold). Avoiding getting lost in the systems architecture and staying focused on the employee experience is key to getting this right. Ultimately enabling APIs (application programming interfaces) and keeping the data updated and in sync across all systems is about creating a seamless employee experience. Employees don’t care about individual systems but more about their next job, how to develop and build a career. The tech contribution is to make the difference between a positive and negative employee experience.

Learning No. 5. Less is more with Skills. Creating a new skills architecture is partly about making decisions about the skills that matter to your organisation. We have done this by looking through 2 lenses: firstly, the skills that matter to our current and future business and secondly through the lens of enabling performance in different jobs. This has led to 2 types of critical skills: global critical skills that enable the fulfilment of our business strategy but also job role critical skills that make the vital difference between success and failure in a job role. The big learn for us in selecting these skills is that they should all come from our company skills taxonomy. In our case we made the mistake of selecting global critical skills prior to finishing the work on our skills taxonomy. So the order of activity matters in that it makes sense to establish your skills taxonomy before you select the skills that are important in an organisation or jobs context.

Learning No.6 Data drives value. Knowing the skills you have and the skills you need is a data game informed through skills intelligence and understanding of the business. The skills you need at a basic level can be driven from the job roles or business driven skill requirements but for this to be effective those requirements need a level of consistency across all activities. So whether I’m exploring jobs as part of my career development, seeking a short term assignment for a new experience, applying for a new job, developing new skills through formal learning then there should be consistency in the requirements. The data we have on skills can also enable workforce planning get to the next level of creating a more precise understanding of what an organisation has to much and too little of in the short, medium and long term.

Creating this value is the prime focus for 2024 through using skills in workforce planning, recruitment, learning and mobility. Its when we will need to get truly practical in our use of skills from using them in the advertising of vacancies, to match people to project opportunities and helping people learn in a more targeted way. Its all about getting beyond the infrastructure and putting skills to work.

All this focus on skills means that people will start to care about their skills profile – what we call a skills signature. The very definition of a signature is that it is distinctive and consistent – one that  identifies the core of your skills – our next challenge!