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Future of Work Reinvented: Shifting Talent and Skills

Published 19 October 2022 - ID G00776524 - 13 min read

By Helen Poitevin, Lily Mok, and 4 more

Enterprises face three talent challenges: (1) skills needs change rapidly, (2) it’s hard to find
talent even when it’s available, and (3) the best talent has many opportunities to leave.
Executive leaders can turn these challenges into opportunities with an approach we call talent
agility.

Overview
Impacts
Skills needs change so quickly that it’s hard for talent to pick up skills fast enough to keep up
with business demand.

Hybrid work and distributed workforces make it harder to find talent.

A tight labor market creates opportunities for the best talent to leave the organization.

Recommendations
Executive leaders addressing today’s talent challenges should:

Embrace dynamic skills building by sensing shifts in the organization’s skills needs in real time,
developing skills at the time of need and making skills decisions dynamically.

Introduce the dynamic distribution of work by deploying a gig platform or an internal talent
marketplace to connect talent to work opportunities.

Turn workers into advocates for your organization by collecting more information about the
employee experience, measuring the employee experience and acting on these insights.

Introduction
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“How can I possibly get the talent I need today, let alone tomorrow?” Leaders know they can’t
achieve their business objectives without talent, but securing it seems impossible:

Attrition is going up. High demand gives people with the most valuable skills many
opportunities, and record numbers are quitting their jobs.

Workers demand flexibility. Remote work during the pandemic, and the pandemic itself, reset
employee expectations. Increased flexibility requires new ways of connecting talent.

Skills are changing fast. The rapid emergence of impactful technologies continually changes
what skills are in limited supply and high demand. Yesterday, it was cloud. Today, it’s AI.
Tomorrow, maybe it will be blockchain.

Leaders see talent as a key challenge for their enterprises to get ahead in times of uncertainty.
Workforce ranks consistently high in Gartner’s annual CEO Survey, coming in third among CEOs’
top strategic priority areas for 2022-2023 (see 2022 CEO Survey — The Year Perspectives
Changed). However, instead of thinking about talent as an obstacle to success, leaders should flip
the question around into an opportunity: “How do we get talent working for us?”

Leaders must understand three ways that talent challenges are impacting their ability to deliver on
their strategy. They should address these impacts with what Gartner calls talent agility. Talent
agility is key for enabling business agility. It is a skills-based approach to navigating diverse
sources of talent.
Impacts and Recommendations
Skills Needs Change So Quickly That It’s Hard for Talent to Pick Up Skills Fast
Enough
By 2024, 33% of the skills that were present in an average job posting in 2019 will no longer be
needed, according to a Gartner TalentNeuron analysis of IT, finance and sales jobs. 1 Many
leaders fear that talent won’t learn fast enough. The speed of change in skills defeats the two
traditional approaches to managing skills within an organization:

Predictive — Forecasting needed skills a couple of years in advance and planning how to
acquire them

Reactive — Waiting until skills needs emerge and then quickly moving to fill them

To achieve talent agility, executive leaders should take a dynamic approach. Dynamic skilling has
three parts:

Sense shifting skills in real time.

Develop skills at the time of need.

Make skills decisions dynamically.

Dynamic skilling leads to twice as many new skills being applied as the predictive approach (see
Figure 1).

Figure 1. New Skills Applied Over Time, by Skills Approach

Sense shifting skills in real time. Leaders need much better knowledge about their teams’ current
and emerging skills (see Note 1 for further details on skills versus competencies). Skills data
informs task allocation and can help improve capacity utilization. In some cases, it is used to
determine whether a worker is permitted to enter a given work environment or perform a specific
task. HR systems, in general, can be very inadequate data sources for understanding the
capabilities of workers because they lack sufficient context about day-to-day work activity.
Leaders should work with HR, applications and AI technology teams to tap into many more data
sources, including:

Communication/email/meetings

Collaboration tools

Knowledge bases

Performance feedback

Project tools
 HR systems, including learning systems

Expertise location tools

Labor market insights and skills trends

Develop skills at the time of need. Traditional approaches to training are too slow, and people
lose most of the newly acquired skills before they can apply them. Leaders play a critical role in
enabling employees to gain new skills by making a variety of learning opportunities available.
Agile learning links motivated employees to the enterprise’s strategic priorities and provides
training at the point of need within the flow of work (see Agile Learning Manifesto). This includes
learning through work assignments, cementing the acquisition of new skills.

Make skills decisions dynamically. Instead of revisiting the talent strategy yearly, leaders should
work with HR to create a continually adjusting strategy. For example, a cross-HR skills team at
Lloyds Banking Group conducts skills assessments of business units and updates the talent
strategy weekly if necessary (see Figure 2). 2

Figure 2. Overview of Lloyds Banking Group’s Talent-Planning

Approach

Recommendations:

Implement dynamic skilling by combining work planning and learning into one process. With
this combination, the organization doesn’t have to have all skills before work starts, and
learning will lead directly to business outcomes.

Create a more agile talent and skilling strategy by working with the HR organization to set up a
process for continually monitoring skills needs and rapidly adjusting your strategy to changing
conditions.
Hybrid Work and Distributed Workforces Make It Harder to Find Talent
Talent isn’t just more scarce today. It’s also harder to find — not only in the market but also within
an organization. A number of factors, such as the pandemic, digital acceleration and gig work, are
impacting where people work, when they work, how they work, what work they are doing and who
is doing that work (see Figure 3). Consequently, executive leaders have less visibility into available
talent and must adopt new tactics to find talent.

Figure 3. How Work Is Becoming More Distributed

To achieve greater degrees of talent agility, leaders should practice the dynamic assignment of
work. Traditionally, roles and processes dictate who does what. If there’s a lull in someone’s
assigned work, there’s no way to apply the worker elsewhere. Or, if certain skills are needed in one
part of the organization, there’s no way to find someone with those skills in a different part of the
organization. Dynamic assignment of work matches people inside and outside the organization to
work opportunities.

Talent marketplaces are tools that support dynamic work assignment. They are based on
principles coming from gig platforms.

Known gig platforms include rideshare services such as DiDi Rider and Lyft, and delivery services
such as Deliveroo. These technologies:

Handle any worker, no matter their location or labor classification

Define work tasks or deliverables

 Connect customers and workers directly

Automate matching

Manage transactions

For a talent marketplace example, say you are a hospitality company and need a bartender to
staff a shift at a restaurant. The talent marketplace shows 200 people who are available and are
best-suited to do the work. Many are your employees with flexible working arrangements. Here,
two separate algorithms come into play. The first identifies workers who have priority on the
platform (employees first, then people who have worked for you before). As time goes by and the
start of the shift gets closer, the second algorithm adds in the criteria of who will have the highest
chance of arriving on time based on factors such as geolocation and historic activity on the
platform.

You then choose the person. They show up for the job and complete the shift. They’re then rated
for their work and paid (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Example of Dynamic Distribution of Work for Frontline

Workers

Internal talent marketplaces are technology platforms that match an employee’s skills and
experience with available opportunities (see Innovation Insight for Internal Talent Marketplaces).
By 2025, 20% of large enterprises will have deployed internal talent marketplaces to optimize
talent utility and agility. Organizations like Sun Life already do (see Case Study: An Internal Gig
Marketplace for Technology Skills). Enterprises can start with existing employees and later
expand to include contingent workers and public talent pools, such as freelancers.
Talent marketplaces use AI to automate the creation of more extensive talent profiles than those
compiled manually by HR. AI ingests information about workers to infer both technical and
general skills (e.g., application testing and research), compile experiences (e.g., projects worked
on) and map connections to others within the enterprise (including those outside formal reporting
lines) (see Figure 5). Talent marketplaces then match workers to opportunities such as:

Gigs

Project roles

Expertise sharing

Testing

Design contests (e.g., logo or app design)

Job shadowing

Coaching

Mentoring

Stretch assignments

Learning experiences

Figure 5. Internal Talent Marketplace Profile

Recommendations:

Build capability to distribute work dynamically by investing in technology platforms that can
track talent and connect them to work opportunities. Work with HR for cross-enterprise
solutions, or put one in place for a single line of business to optimize job-specific work
allocation.

Support dynamic work distribution by making it a priority to leverage AI capabilities. These

technologies are indispensable to managing the complexity of gig platforms and talent
marketplaces. Most solutions on the market incorporate AI into their platforms.

A Tight Labor Market Creates Opportunities for the Best Talent to Leave the
Organization
Executive leaders worried about top talent leaving need to understand the factors that cause
attrition, which are tracked in Gartner’s quarterly Global Labor Market Survey (see Figure 6). 3 In
2Q22, compensation topped the list — a perennial issue. But other factors pertaining to the
employee experience in the enterprise were featured as well:

Manager quality — The employee’s most important relationship in the organization

Location and work-life harmonization — Flexible working conditions to improve quality of life
 Future career opportunity — A need for paths to growth and advancement

None of these things is an easy quick fix; rather, they are more long-range, consistent areas of
investment, aligned to human deal categories (see Note 2).

Figure 6. Attrition Drivers

Leaders should respond in three ways in order to increase talent agility through an improved
employee experience:

Widen the aperture.

Measure the employee experience.

Act with more ambition.

Widen the aperture. Most leaders look at compensation and the primary attrition factors when
they evaluate the employee experience. However, to act on them generally involves cross-
enterprise investments led by HR. A leader may have more direct sway over day-to-day factors
contributing to employee experience. But employees’ actual experience encompasses a wide
range of personal (e.g., commute, family, ambition) and workplace (e.g., processes, technologies,
co-workers) factors. These involve subjective feelings, which can change over time. Leaders
should strive to maintain as comprehensive a picture of employee experience as possible, though
4
not all factors are visible, measurable or even addressable.

Measure the employee experience. Many leaders only have access to survey data about
employee experience satisfaction if their enterprises conduct regular surveys. However, surveys
can only be run so often, and they give a partial picture of how employees feel. Leaders should
therefore work with their HR and IT teams to look into more broad sources of insight, including:

Applications — How do people use workplace tools, and do they like them?

Physical workspace — In what kinds of spaces do workers spend the most time?

Interactions — With whom do workers interact, and how satisfying are these interactions?

Meetings — How many meetings do people have, and are they productive?

Calendars — How many or how few engagements do workers have?

Network — What social connections do people have?

Work tasks — How engaging or numbing are the tasks workers perform?

All this behavior data will give leaders a better idea of the employee experience. Nevertheless,
leaders will only ever see a part of what is going on; they can never gain a complete view. Thus,
the conclusions leaders draw will be tentative and must be tested and continually adjusted as new
information emerges through team interactions and conversations.

Act with more ambition. Leaders can start improving talent agility by using the data they gather to
improve the employee experience bit by bit. For example, they can:

Measure the impacts of changing circumstances and moves to improve the employee
experience.

Discover moments that matter to employees, and determine how they feel about the
organization.

Prioritize investments to improve the employee experience.

Build workforce segments and journeys that create paths to career advancement.

Generate alerts when conditions arise that leaders should address.

Ultimately, leaders shouldn’t just aim to satisfy employees. They must go further. Leaders should
continuously invest in an employee experience that is so compelling that employees advocate for
the organization by:

Speaking positively about their employer in surveys or conversation

 Referring friends and colleagues as job candidates

Posting testimonials on career sites

Talking up the organization on social media

Recommendations:

Create a shared vision of the employee experience by working with HR leaders, digital
workplace teams, other stakeholders and — above all — employees themselves.

Find and convert various information sources into insights about the employee experience by
using your organization’s employee experience and engagement surveys. Work with HR to tap
into existing survey tools or, when lacking, consider investing in feedback tools for your teams.

Focus on employee experience improvements to create an environment for attracting and

retaining the best talent. Encourage employee advocacy by enabling career site testimonials
and setting in place clear social media guidelines.
Evidence
1
Build Dynamic Skills Systems and Stop Predicting Future Skills

2
Case Study: Skills-Based Action Planning (Lloyds Banking Group)

3
2Q22 Gartner Global Labor Market Survey: Every quarter, we survey employees across all
functions to offer the most authoritative look at the latest global and country-level trends on what
attracts, engages and retains talent. From April through June 2022, the 2Q22 survey collected
responses from 17,986 employees globally, including 1,379 employees in the technology industry.

4
Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions

Note 1: Skills and Competencies

Competencies are generally defined as a broad set of observable, measurable attributes; they
clarify higher-level expectations and behavioral norms. Skills are usually considered more granular
— the “how to” procedures and techniques that apply to a specific situation. Skills are typically
taught to prepare an individual to perform a job or task.

However, the distinction between skills and competencies is sometimes a little blurry.
Organizations that refer to skills rather than competencies might distinguish between skills that
are broader, more durable and often soft (like those in a traditional competency model) and skills
that are more specific, often technical or task-related, and less durable. What really matters is that
an organization is clear and consistent in the terminology it uses, and that it is achieving the
desired outcomes (see 4 Principles for Creating and Implementing an Impactful Competency
Model)

Note 2: The Human Deal

The human deal is the emotional response to the set of attributes that people perceive as the
value they gain in their life from employment in the organization. It has five components, each of
which aims to generate a specific emotion in employees:

Deeper connections — How HR leaders help employees feel understood by strengthening their
family and community connections, not just work relationships

Radical flexibility — How HR leaders help employees feel autonomous by providing flexibility on
all aspects of work, not just when and where they work

Personal growth — How HR leaders help employees feel valued by helping them grow as
people, not just as professionals

Holistic well-being — How HR leaders help employees feel cared for by ensuring employees use
holistic well-being offerings, not just ensuring they are available

Shared purpose — How HR leaders help employees feel invested in the organization by helping
the organization take collective action on purpose, not just make corporate statements

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