Here’s a question to start with:

What is a Skills-First Organisation?

The reason for asking is that, with the fascination with reskilling and upskilling and a focus on skills in the workplace, I’ve not seen a really useful explanation for what this means.

It appears to be – in some cases – simply as a shift in language from competencies to skills. Instead of having competency frameworks, a skills framework will decide how a job will be completed. Similarly, the talk is of upskilling and reskilling when what they mean is training and learning.

I did a bit of digging and found this paper from the World Economic Forum and PWC last year about putting skills first. It says, in response to the question, a skills first organisation will prioritise an individual’s skills and competencies over formal qualifications like degrees or job titles when hiring, developing, and redeploying talent.

This means you’re not going to support skills-based or skills-first organisations until you change your whole people practice.; you’re not going to be able to do it simply through changing your learning deployment.

Look at these stages of an organisation’s engagement with an employee:

1. Attraction – why should I work for you
2. Engagement – what you can offer me
3. Application – what I can offer you
4. Acceptance – you’ve accepted me
5. Onboarding – this is how you (and we) work
6. Training – what you need to do
7. Development – what you might want to do

If, as mentioned above, each of these is about skills your learning offer at stage 6 or 7 won’t make you a skills organisation.

The next time someone mentions skills organisations, don’t be afraid to challenge and ask specifically what that means. You can’t afford not to if you want to take skills seriously, and be taken seriously.