What if learning new skills and navigating your career was as simple and individualized as your experiences using smart apps in your personal life?

A key reason there is such a disparity between our personal and professional digital experiences is because collecting and managing data about employees is more complex than configuring an app. To leverage advanced, intelligent tools to elevate the talent experience, we need data that is simpler, clearer, commonly understood, and applicable to both the work and workers—data about skills.

Employee and job data resides in various organizational systems. It is not always accurate or current, and companies have historically used it to manage employees—not for employees to access and use themselves. Many organizations have used the job or position as the unit of measurement to organize data, and information about employees is related to the jobs they hold or perhaps the job’s competencies. However, job and position data is often unreliable or incomplete, and competencies are typically descriptive and challenging to use in intelligent applications.

To confidently use data to inform and enhance the talent experience, the data must be generated and curated using a rigorous, systematic, and disciplined process. Using skills data that is not only designed and defined specifically for the organization, but also confirmed and validated by employees and managers, enables the integrity, validity, and utility of the data to inform the human talent experience. Skills data allows us to more effectively connect information about work and workers, opening up new possibilities for a more agile and versatile talent experience.

Technology Enables the Use of Skills

Skills-driven talent technology is an enabler of these data-informed experiences. Without the right framework, policies, and tools in place to enable the effective use of skills data, it’s just another data source.

There has been an explosion of skills tech fueling learning experience platforms, talent marketplaces, career growth and development tools, skills-based talent acquisition, and even skills-based compensation. The heart of these solutions relies on skills data, which is organized by skills taxonomies and ontologies and is connected to people, roles, jobs, learning content, development opportunities, gigs, projects, and more.

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