How leaders can keep pace with rapidly changing skills, tasks, and business needs 

As artificial intelligence (AI) and rapidly changing business needs reshape jobs, tasks, and skills required by organizations, workforce planning has become even more important than ever. 

Byron Matthews, CEO of Careerminds, explains why organizations need to look deeper into the task and skill level to identify gaps and make more informed workforce decisions.  

“What’s really difficult is that what the business requires is changing so fast. 

“If you sit down to put together your annual plan, identify your goals for the next 12 months, and determine all the things you want to achieve, the people part of that process used to be more predictable. Now, that answer can change within a quarter or six months. You’ve got to revisit your talent and workforce decisions with more agility than ever before. It’s a constantly moving target. 

“The major challenge is to stop thinking only about high-level jobs and objectives and get down to the tasks and processes underneath them. At a planning level, that’s complicated because you have to live at the task level. You’ve got to have the discussion not just about what needs to get done, but how it gets done and which skills are required. 

“Do we have the right skills to perform those tasks as the work evolves? The role may look the same on paper while the work underneath it is changing fast.” 

“You’ve got to measure skills. 

“You can’t stop at measuring outcomes or looking at roles. You have to get to the “how” level, which means understanding the skills required to do the work. 

“Measuring at the skills level is not general hygiene for most organizations. It’s one of those things that sounds like common sense, but it’s not common practice. It’s very, very hard to measure beyond the role level, but that’s what needs to be done. 

“You’ve got to make sure you have good visibility into the hidden skill sets within your organization, connect those capabilities to what the business requires, and identify the gaps. 

“To measure at that level, you have to make sure you have good visibility into the hidden skill sets within your organization, connect that to tasks the business requires, and identify the gaps.  

“That’s what Workforce Intelligence is designed to help organizations do. The earlier you can see those gaps, the more options you have to address them.”  

“It needs to be a constant discussion, not an episodic one. 

“If you think about an executive leadership team, the conversation is typically focused on financial numbers and KPIs. That’s important, but conversations about talent and skill gaps should receive the same level of attention. 

“It’s part and parcel of how executives think: “What are the KPIs? What are the metrics? What are my funnel metrics? What’s my revenue?” The same level of diligence should be applied to skills and talent. These gaps can mean the difference between launching a product on time and taking twice as long. 

“The insights and data needed to have those conversations should be as important as the metrics that drive the rest of the business conversation. That’s a hard shift for organizations because they haven’t built those muscles yet. The ones that figure it out and truly treat workforce intelligence as an equal will dominate. They’ll get things done faster, period.”

“You need both. 

“Internal data might tell me that I’ve got an engineering team with some skill gaps. That’s important. But are those skills scarce? Should I build them or buy them? Should I borrow them through contractors? Should I automate them with some bot? 

“Now, what if I only had market data? I might say, “Wow, these skills are super scarce. They’re expensive.” But I don’t know how that applies to my workforce or what decisions I should make. 

“You have to understand your internal opportunities and gaps at a real skill level because two people with the same title could have very different capabilities. Forget the title. You’ve got to get underneath it. Once you know where you’re strong and where you’re exposed, you need market data to understand what those gaps mean and how to address them. 

“The two together let you make more precise decisions. Without both, you risk making the wrong call. You have to know where your gaps are, where you’re strong, which capabilities are scarce, and what they cost. Then you can decide whether to build, buy, borrow, or automate. That helps you make the right financial decisions at the people level and optimize your margins. 

“Making the wrong decisions could be costly. Our data found that more than three in four HR professionals said their organizations had laid off employees in the previous 12 months because of technological advances such as AI. Yet nine in 10 said they would approach those decisions differently today. They lost talent and capabilities they still needed because they made decisions without a complete picture.”

“It’s about making internal mobility a core competency. 

“You’re going to solve a lot of retention issues and fill skill gaps that you might otherwise assume require an external hire. Too often, the immediate reaction is, “I’ve got to go buy that skill,” when that might not be the right approach. 

“It should be easier to move around inside the organization than it is to leave. Again, common sense, not common practice. 

“Leaders need to understand how to move talent around to meet skill and task requirements across the organization. If that process is fluid on both sides, employees can pursue new opportunities without leaving, and the business can deploy their capabilities where they’re needed most. 

“Having that business capability is a competitive advantage because most organizations don’t.”

“It’s hard because HR is not viewed or respected as strategically as it should be. Too often, it’s treated as a cost center rather than a function that helps architect the business at the human-capital level. 

“Leaders tend to think about what needs to get done and then assign a person or role to it. But today, the harder question is how the work gets done. That means breaking business processes down into tasks, identifying the skills each task requires, and mapping people to those needs. 

“That’s how you begin to design the business around the capabilities required to execute its strategy. Organizations that truly understand and design their systems at the task and skill level, all the way down to the people, will win, period.” 

“Most organizations jump to buy, but that shouldn’t be the default. 

“Hiring is expensive, especially when a capability is scarce. You’re probably hiring at the peak of the market cost, and you also have to factor in the risk that the person might not work out. If that leads to turnover and you have to start again, you could be looking at about twice the cost. 

“You should only buy the really scarce, strategic skills you can’t build internally. 

“Building is the best option because you’re investing in your own people. It’s cheaper, but it’s also empowering. People get motivated when they see the organization investing in them. Learning and development is going to find a new wave as roles continue to be reshaped.”

“It needs a seat at the table. Period, full stop. 

“If workforce skills, capability gaps, and human-capital productivity are not being measured, monitored, and discussed as part of leadership conversations about business performance, you are not world class. 

“Technology upgrades your ability to make the right decisions. If you’re going to have a conversation about the performance of your business and you’re not bringing in workforce intelligence, that’s a mistake. 

“Workforce intelligence gives leaders the people perspective behind business performance. It connects what needs to get done with the capabilities and resources required to deliver, allowing leaders to make more informed decisions.”

“Employees are going to be more aggressive about their options because they’re going to be more informed. All of this information is easier to access now, and employers need to get ready for that. 

“Annual reviews used to be more about the employer telling the employee how it is. That dynamic is going to flip. It’s going to be more about employees telling employers how it is and what they expect in return. 

“Employers need to take care of their high performers, stay competitive on compensation, and invest in learning and development. They need to understand employees’ skill gaps and show them where they can continue to grow within the organization. 

“Employees will have more visibility into their options. Employers need to give them a compelling reason to stay.”

As employees gain more visibility into their options, organizations need a clearer view of their own workforce. That means understanding the skills already inside the business alongside external market data, and knowing where losing a key employee would leave the organization exposed. 

Careerminds’ Workforce Intelligence brings internal skills data and external labor market intelligence together at the task and skill level. Leaders can see capability gaps and retention risks earlier, and decide whether to build, buy, borrow or automate before a gap becomes costly. 

Byron will explore this approach at HR Tech on October 21. His Solution Snapshot, “Half Your People Are Looking. You Just Can’t See It Yet,” will cover how to identify critical talent vulnerabilities before they turn into unexpected departures. 

If you’re heading to HR Tech this October, we hope you can join Byron for his session on the 21st and visit our colleagues afterwards at booth #2333 for a more in-depth look at our Workforce Intelligence solution.