Skills visibility: Why capability is now a business metric

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. Today, learning leaders are expected to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before to strengthen teams, scale training, and to show results. Because when learning works, businesses move forward.

Together, we’ll explore what that really means for L&D in growing organizations, what to rethink, what to refine, and what to double down on. I’m your host, Gina Lionatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that helps growing businesses launch faster and see results sooner. [00:01:00] Learn more at talentlms.com.

On today’s episode:

Shannon: One’s gonna have a stronger balance sheet than the other, that’s for sure. One’s going to have a stronger organizational culture. One is going to have employees that go, “I love working here.” The other won’t. 

Host: If skills are the new currency of business, then why are companies still failing to keep track of them? Joining us to talk skills visibility is learning strategist Shannon Tipton. We’ll look at what makes an effective skills map, the blind spots your company might not be aware of, and how to turn static data into real-time business metrics. Stay with us.

Shannon, thank you for joining Talent Talks [00:02:00]. I’m very excited to have you here to talk all things skills visibility.

Shannon: Well, thank you for having me. I am very excited to talk about skills. It’s something that we don’t pay enough attention to, so this is gonna be a great conversation.

Host: I couldn’t agree more.

And it’s really interesting you mention that because I think at the moment we’re seeing, let’s say, disconnected bits of information out there when it comes to the appetite for skills. So we recently kind of ran a survey among HR managers here at TalentLMS, and we recently uncovered in that research study that almost 8 in 10 HR managers said that they’re moving towards a skills-based framework for hiring, for training, and for career development, which is very encouraging to hear.

But the thing is, we’re also hearing, according to Gartner, that only 8% of organizations have reliable data on the skills that are within their workforce. So there’s clearly a bit of a disconnect there, and I think it’s an area where [00:03:00] people are still trying to find their way, obviously. From your experience, Shannon, where do you think skills visibility usually breaks down first?

Do you think it’s that teams don’t know what skills they have, don’t know what skills they need, or perhaps just don’t have a simple way to connect the two?

Shannon: That’s a great question, and I think it’s all of the above, really. You know, and it’s still surprising to me. I’ve been in this industry now for 30-plus years.

For organizations, it seems to me that we should always have been talking about skills, you know, when it comes to increasing organizational effectiveness. So when we think about where does it start and where is the gap in that, when I say all of the above, it really is all of the above because it’s holistic, isn’t it?

So unless you start hiring for [00:04:00] skills, then you can’t work towards skill development. But you can’t work towards skill development unless you fully understand what skills are needed within your organization, right? So, those things all go in a loop, and if you break that loop, if there are gaps in that loop, then the whole thing falls apart.

And so I believe what happens is we do great work, and HR does great work in regards to competency models, but they don’t connect those necessarily to skill-based frameworks. So, what are the skills that are going to support those competencies, right? And that is where really the big breakdown is.

Host: Could you give me an easy example of a competency and what skills would lead to having that competency?

Shannon: Sure. So, when we talk about competencies, let’s just [00:05:00] say leadership, right? So, leadership development; very popular to have a competency model around leadership development. And what happens is that the organization, I won’t say HR specifically or L&D specifically, the organization conflates what is a competency versus what is a skill.

So then you have that competency of financial acumen, and then they say, “Okay, we need to hire towards financial acumen.” But they leave out the parts of what does it mean to have financial acumen, and what does one need to do in order to show that they have this or be able to perform that successfully?

And then the further part of that is they don’t break down what it takes to have that skill within their own unique organization. So we think financial acumen. Now, a skill towards that might [00:06:00] be the ability to read or successfully storytell a P&L. So your profit and loss statement. You have to be able to tell that story behind a P&L statement.

That’s a skill. Now, what does that skill look like within the organization? What sort of storytelling applies there when it comes to financial data? And so you see that there are layers there within skill mapping as it connects to competency mapping. 

Host: Love that. So it’s not only the skills that lead to the competency, but it’s also thinking about the skills within the unique world of your organization. I think if we talk about the costs to an organization that doesn’t have that skills visibility in place, what do you think are the main kind of business impacts, when a company has that lack of skills visibility? Maybe it’s a negative impact, but maybe it’s also the lack of a positive outcome.

Shannon: Well, first and [00:07:00] foremost, if you have a lack of skills visibility, that means you’re not addressing it.

That means that you are missing big gaps in your organization, and the issue becomes you don’t find that out until it’s too late. And what you see is the trickle-down there, where the business suddenly stops being competitive in their market. So if you find that you are behind your peers within your market, it’s most likely a skills issue because now what’s happening is your organization is being dragged down, and you’re spending more time trying to fill those skills gaps than you are trying to find what’s the competitive edge from a marketing perspective to help you keep up.

Then there is the keeping your employees, especially right now. There is a huge ocean of [00:08:00] employees from which to choose, and it goes both ways. They can choose you or not choose you. And if it seems as though you are not paying attention to developing the skills, employees are going to go elsewhere.

There’s enough work for everyone, and they’re going to find the place that best suits their skill needs, especially with today’s generation. I see a variety of studies of employees coming into a workplace and leaving less than a year later because they don’t feel that they’re getting the skill development that they need within that organization to rise to what their potential is, and then they take those skills elsewhere.

You know, I believe that one of the first areas of impact that an organization is going to see is in their revenue stream, [00:09:00] whatever that looks like. So if your revenue stream depends on manufacturing or sales or product development, you’re going to see that impact there. And managers speak dollars, and if you can connect those dots for them, then it becomes apparent.

And one of the ways that we can do that, first off, is stop talking about competency models because I’ve been in many a meeting where HR is talking about competency models and the face just glazes over and they are automatically thinking about, “Okay, where else can I be? What else can I be doing?” So I think it’s about, first off, it’s a vocabulary shift, and second of all, it’s a refocusing on helping the manager see what skills are.

These are skills. [00:10:00] They know what skills they need. They know what gaps they have. I don’t believe that we listen hard enough, and we don’t really ask the “what if” questions enough. So as HR people, as L&D people, if we asked a manager, “What would happen if you didn’t have certain skills within your department or within your product line?

Would you fail?” Asking them like that. “What would create failure in your department from a skills perspective?” And then they might say, “Well, if they don’t know how to organize their pipeline, if they don’t know how to negotiate, if they don’t know how to tell the story between our features and benefits.

If they can’t do those things, then we’re going to [00:11:00] fail.” Now you are onto something, and now you’re speaking the manager’s language. So it’s not about, they need to show leadership qualities. It’s about what is the direct application, and if we do not have that application, you’re going to fail. Now you’ve got their attention.

Host: Yeah, right. So it’s really all about asking those questions and speaking their language, like you said. I think also as the trend of L&D becoming decentralized within businesses as well carries through, I think that these conversations will be a lot more, let’s say, accessible. Managers will become more accessible to L&D, and these conversations will be a lot more frequent.

Fingers crossed. I think also something that I’d love your take on, I think it’s an obvious benefit to the skills-based approach, is internal mobility and redeploying internal team members versus hiring externally.

Shannon: Right. That is so important for [00:12:00] organizational health. You have the minds, right? You have shared knowledge.

You’ve got shared culture, right? So we’re all, you know, rowing that boat in the same direction. And when we can cross, working across departments, right, either laterally or moving up, then this becomes a seed that grows. Now, what happens here, again, is that we don’t necessarily skill map appropriately. So again, it’s looking at what does it take for a person to work in sales to move over into marketing?

So, a lot of times, and we know this as L&D people, right, we get this, “Well, that person is really good at their job, so that means that they’re going to be really good at this job.” They’re not really taking into consideration, again, it’s that [00:13:00] marriage of competencies and skills that gets confused, where they’re really good people.

They get along great with other people, so they must do really well here, but they don’t necessarily have the skills to back that up, and this is because we don’t adjust a skills map appropriately or even have one, right? So here’s what I do. When I meet with a client and we have this discussion, it’s walk me through the process flow of your department.

In order for you to have X happen, whatever your department is, a certain thing needs to happen for that department to be successful. Now walk me through that process. They oftentimes don’t think about it that way. They’re just like, “Well, this is just what we do.” Now every department has a process, so let’s map that out.

All right, so you’ve got the process mapped out. Now, what kind of skill [00:14:00] does it take to keep that process humming? What does a person do every day to keep that process humming? Now that’s the skill. Those are the skills. Now, again, where’s the break? And so where you have a break, can Joe from, you know, marketing fill that break?

Does he have the skill to fill that break? If not, then maybe we need to look at Betty. Maybe Betty has the skill to fill that break. And if we look at it this way, then what will happen is movement becomes seamless. People simply just shift and flex and adapt, and it’s a beautiful thing to see that kind of dance, if you will, happen within an organization.

But once you start mapping it to a competency, you’re gonna find more [00:15:00] breakage because they have that one ability that doesn’t necessarily apply, and now other things break around it.

Host: Yeah. I understand. I think it’s such a huge mindset shift for majority of businesses who have never really, let’s say, formally thought about the workforce in this way.

I wonder what are the first steps that we can take as businesses beyond L&D, because L&D needs to help others within the business kind of understand the need. So I know you’ve done a lot of work, as you were also mentioning, helping organizations map skills in practice, and I think the in practice is really the main part of the story.

If we were to try to think through, like, a real-world scenario, whether it was onboarding new hires or, you know, helping our sales team try to hit targets or, you know, managers dealing with an underperformance, all [00:16:00] examples, I would love to hear from you, where do you typically see the clearest need for skills visibility?

Shannon:I think sometimes starting with the clearest need is often the best and easiest way forward. 

Certainly within onboarding, that would be the easiest part, right? So rather than to try to teach the old dog new tricks, let’s start with the new dog, right? Let’s, let’s start at the beginning. And if we aligned our onboarding processes with skills development, then we’re going to see a likelihood of people being more successful on the job, and then also they’re going to hang around longer, which is an issue for a lot of organizations right now.

So my advice here would be, again, is we take that cookie-cutter onboarding program, right? So, and I see this often within [00:17:00] organizations, is they may have one onboarding day, right? So, they bring everybody in, however many people it is, they bring them all in for that one day, and then they get that endless PowerPoint presentation, right?

Here’s who everybody is, here’s the history of our organization, and here is the 50-year background of our CEO, to which incidentally no one cares about, but okay, you do you. However, if we took those people and really thought about where they’re supposed to land, so now we’ve got people in different stages and different departments, and if we brought them together, you still bring them together for that one day, but what if it were a skills-focused day?

What if it were a day that said, “All right, today we’re [00:18:00] working on communication skills as part of your onboarding, because we wanna see where you are, because we want to put you into the culture and help you understand the culture from this perspective,” then that rolls over into something better, because then a person sees themselves in the role, which is quite hard.

And so then after that initial onboarding, then they go directly into wherever it is they’re supposed to go. And what if, oh my goodness, what if they had a skills map that they could literally follow in their first 30/60/90? These are the skills we need you to focus on, because that has been mapped out with the manager already.

So it’s not, let’s just get to know Sally and Joe and where to park and where to find great lunch, but it’s also, these are the skills that are [00:19:00] important to our department, and this is where we want you to improve and embrace. And so that’s the easiest flex that HR or L&D and management working together in tandem can make that happen.

Host: I think the managers play such a key role here, or can play such a key role here as well. Also, just even speaking from experience as a manager, just thinking about new hires coming in, it does seem like something that addressing it from the get-go versus trying to retrospectively look at a team member one, two, five years down the track, I think it really makes sense as a starting point.

I have a question in my mind. I think I already know what your answer’s going to be, but you can always be surprised.

Shannon: Sure.

Host: In our recent report, so we at TalentLMS, we run quarterly research reports, and our latest one was in fact about skills [00:20:00] visibility, which is why we’re really unpacking this topic at length.

And in that report, 61% of employees say that they’re expected to keep skills up to date on their own, and I would really love your take. What do you make of this? Who should be, quote-unquote, responsible for managing skills as a live business metric? Do you think it’s on HR/L&D? Is it on the managers? Is it on leadership?

Is it on the individual? Talk to me.

Shannon: Well, I think you suspect that I’m gonna tell you it’s everybody’s responsibility.

Host: Absolutely.

Shannon: Everyone has a role in that. And again, we can’t keep people updated if we don’t know what they’re supposed to be updating about. Now, here’s the issue. So the issue is that 30/60/90 onboarding, 30/60/90, plop.

Okay, now you’re on your own, and they don’t know [00:21:00] what that means. What’s my next step? So after 30/60/90, am I supposed to do this path? Am I supposed to go down this path or this path, right? And so they need help with that. Now, when it comes to skill development in and of itself, this is where a skill map does come in handy.

So if we had a skills map that said, in order for you to get from rookie salesperson to a high-performing salesperson, that’s not even positionally, that is you’re moving from rookie to high-performing, these are the skills you need to have, and you give that to the new hire and say, “This is where we’re going to help you. We have classes for this. We have a newsletter for that. Listen to this internal podcast. Watch our internal YouTube channel, and we’re gonna help you get there. Now, what you can do [00:22:00] is you can take this course or read these books or, take a class at the community college,” right? So then the learning paths become interwoven yet independent.

It’s this is what we are going to do for you, and this is how you can help yourself. Again, moving directionally. It doesn’t have to be, you know, okay, you’re a manager, then you’re a director, then you’re a VP, which is how most people look at this. But this is how we’re going to get you to a place where you’re going to feel good about your mastery of your role.

Host: Do you think that that’s kind of would be the key motivation to drive people to keep their skills up to date without it becoming reactive or last minute? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for the individual, do you think?

Shannon: Well, I think that’s a great point. So within those paths, there should be triggers or checkpoints that say, okay, they’ve done this.

They are displaying [00:23:00] that they have enhanced their skills or have gained mastery of these skills, and this is how we’re going to reward them. And it could be through, okay, we’re gonna give you a raise. It could be positional. We’re gonna give you a promotion. It could be, you know, it could be something along the lines of if you master this, we’re going to pay for the next conference that you go to, or some other sort of reward that is not a coffee cup that says world’s best salesperson or a pizza party or some crazy thing like that that means nothing after the moment.

Host: I think we spend a lot of time thinking about what data to collect and how to go about collecting, but something that I think is often overlooked is how we present that data. So, you know, in the world of L&D, we know design really matters. What would be your advice in this respect? [00:24:00] How do we stop skills frameworks becoming overly complex or theoretical and actually make them usable within a business?

Something that businesses will not shudder at just hearing the words skills map or skills inventory.

Shannon: Well, one, don’t use those words. Please don’t use those words.

Host: Good starting point. Don’t use those words. You’re absolutely right.

Shannon: But what we can do is also stop depending on annualization.

Oftentimes we think, we have your yearly performance review, and this is where we’re gonna talk about it. We also have our annual organizational reports, and this is where we talk about it. And by the time you get to day 365, you are 364 days behind. So now let’s break this down. What if we looked at skills, quote unquote, “measurement” from a [00:25:00] topical perspective?

And so now every time something happened within your organization, so let’s say you rolled out a new product line, or you are in a new vertical. Now let’s look at the skills needed for that new vertical to be successful. We identified skills for that new vertical to be successful. Then what you do is you go back and say, “All right, we adapted this. Did it work?”

That’s simply put. Did it work? Let’s say it’s a sales market, so then we’ve got salespeople in this new vertical, and we’ve given them the skills to talk about and to sell this new vertical. Did they do it? Did it happen? And that’s something that can be revisited whenever the checkpoint is identified.

And again, it’s not a year later. Maybe it’s six months later or three months later. And it’s just then about presenting [00:26:00] that particular sales data. I really put a lot of importance into the idea of telling the story of the data because people just aren’t… A lot of people just aren’t data-driven. Don’t give them a spreadsheet.

Tell them what the story is that the spreadsheet’s supposed to tell. So then organize that particular skills data to tell the story of success or failure, and this is where we can start. And again, it’s all in that vocabulary, right? So if we don’t call it a, “Where did our skills map fail?” No. “Where did people just fall down, and how can we help pick them back up?”

Host: I think that’s such a great way of thinking about it. Honestly, it’s not something I had ever considered before, but attaching it to moments or milestones. Business, I think always attaching to business-level priorities is what is going to obviously have the biggest impact. But yeah, the concept of moments I think is brilliant, and I think it’s can really be a helpful trigger for [00:27:00] those, smaller kind of units that don’t have the, let’s say, luxury of being able to check in every few months, on where we’re at when it comes to competencies and the skills that get us to those competencies.

Shannon, I’ve heard you say before that, you think, I’m quoting you now, so tell me if I’m wrong, that completion rates are a bit of a trap. And while I think… I mean, I think it’s of course necessary to keep track of how much of a training program is completed, but I agree, it only gives us a small piece of the puzzle, right?

So if completion rates are a trap, what kind of things should companies be measuring if they care about capabilities and skills? Is it retention? Is it, inward mobility? Is it something altogether different?

Shannon: I would look at employee progression. You know, so what are your retention levels? Are they [00:28:00] leaving you?

If they’re leaving you, have you done an exit interview? Surprising how many organizations don’t do exit interviews or appropriate exit interviews, ’cause those can tell you a lot. But catch them before they leave, you know. Now, how we support that is things like focus groups. That’s the other, that’s another metric that you can gain.

So every four months, again, let’s go every four months, grab new people and people who have been around for maybe three to five years, and then grab your tenured people and do three small focus… You don’t have to do anything large and elaborate. Three small ones. See how they’re doing. If they knew then what they knew now, what would you change?

What needs to be changed? What’s too much? What’s too little? And though that sort of data, while it may be anecdotal, it’s [00:29:00] still very relevant, because where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? And so that’s the sort of data that I would suggest that you collect. So it’s not, you know, video views, which is helpful, but what did they do with that video?

And that’s where you can go in, and you can even survey this. And so you can take the people that watched that optional video or the people that downloaded that podcast, and then send them a survey afterwards just with one question or two questions. What did you do with this information? Then build on that.

Host: Let’s talk a little then about, we’ve talked about the process of mapping skills. We’ve talked about, you know, some of the things that we could look at measuring and how to measure and how to kind of tell the story behind those findings. I think something that is so key to this process and to the success of this process, we touched on a [00:30:00] little bit earlier in terms of culture within an organization.

And I guess, I suppose there is a cultural shift that needs to happen so that organizations can truly trust this relatively new/different way of getting things done.   What do you think is a roadblock within a company culture that is often what needs to kind of be overcome or addressed to get this way of working, you know, truly into the culture of the company?

Shannon: Well, I think the largest roadblock is the “we’ve always done it that way” people. And that’s true throughout. And if you’ve been in L&D even for a minute, you’ve come across, you know, the we’ve always done it that way people. And so then how do you bring those people into the fold? And then there are the “we [00:31:00] can’t afford this” people, right?

And so you gotta bring them into the fold to help them understand that the future depends on this. And it’s just then about recognizing what your organizational culture is. If the culture does not support change very well or it’s risk-averse, let’s say, then don’t try to dump the whole skills mapping framework on an organization ’cause they are immediately going to back away from that.

So you drop one thing. Maybe it’s the department that seems to have the most issues or the one with the highest turnover, and you’re like, “Well, let’s take a look at this,” without placing blame on the management, because it could be that you have a culture of control, a culture of micromanaging, all of which do not necessarily support skills development. [00:32:00] 

So now we wanna do this without placing blame. And so then it’s baby steps. What’s the one thing we can change? What’s the one thing we can fix? And again, it’s going back to the manager and saying, “Your department is highly successful,” whether or not that’s true. “Your department is highly successful. Where is it going to fail? If it were to fail, where would it fail?”

So I go back to where we started this conversation. Then the manager then has the opportunity to save face and say, “Well, XYZ,” because in that is always a grain of truth, and so now you can dig deeper. And it’s those baby steps to be able to, to really talk to those people that create those barriers.

And I’ll tell you something, and you I’m sure know this through all of the surveys and all the great work that you guys do over there. It’s the middle manager. It’s the middle manager [00:33:00] that’s the roadblock. Always the middle manager with the roadblock because they’re the ones that are protecting their turf.

So now what happens is we’ve gotta get in, and we’ve gotta build that relationship with that middle manager and with leadership. And one piece of advice, just kinda off the wall, off the cuff here, is don’t wait until you need to build a relationship to build the relationship.

Host: Absolutely. Shannon, one final, let’s say, future-facing question.

Let’s get out our crystal ball and look four or five years down the line.

Shannon: All right, let’s do it.

Host: What do you think will separate the organizations that got skills right from those who didn’t or who perhaps ignored it four or five years from now? If you were to look out, you know, these two businesses, otherwise equal, one really got invested in the process and really got into it, got rolled up their sleeves and got into it, and [00:34:00] another just perhaps didn’t touch it at all, or maybe started but didn’t kind of see it all the way through.

Where do you think some of the key differences will lie between these two businesses?

Shannon: One’s gonna have a stronger balance sheet than the other, that’s for sure.

One’s going to have a stronger organizational culture. One is going to have employees that go, “I love working here.” The other won’t. And now with the speed in which businesses come and go, maybe a business that doesn’t have a strong underpin of skills may not even be here in four to five years. You have legacy organizations that have been around for, you know, 50, 100 years, and sure, maybe they’ll still be with us.

But if you’re a new organization or newer, let’s say less than 20 years, not having this [00:35:00] strength is really going to place you in a precarious position in five or six years.

Host: Food for thought there. Shannon, thank you, thank you so much for being on Talent Talks. I’ve really enjoyed what is a very complex topic, and I’ve really enjoyed the areas that we’ve unpacked. Thank you for being part of the conversation today.

Shannon: Oh, thank you for having me. I love having this conversation. I don’t often get a chance to really dig in and really have a discussion about this, so thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Host: Training that isn’t tied to skills is hard to measure and even harder to improve. TalentLMS Skills helps you see your team’s strengths, spot gaps, and assign the right training all in one place, so you’re not just delivering training, you’re building lasting capability.

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