The Skills-Powered Global Financial Giant
How Lightcast Helped a Fortune 500 Financial Services Company Transform Workforce Decisions by Building an Organization-Wide Skills Ecosystem
Building Better Workforce Decisions Through Skills.
Lightcast worked with a well known global financial company to build a skills ecosystem across their entire organization. Although we can't share the name of the company, we can share the five key steps we took to transform their workforce, giving them a single, unified source of truth that is now helping them make better talent and business decisions.
Step 1: Creating the Roadmap
Before introducing new frameworks, technologies, or processes, skills-powered workforce transformation starts by getting complete clarity on what the business is trying to achieve and how this aligns with its broader vision.
In this case, the organization had three main goals: to foster a more market-led approach to workforce decisions; to use external labor market data to inform planning; and to empower employees to take greater ownership of their careers.
OUTCOMES: Working with leaders across Total Rewards, Human Capital Management, Strategic Workforce Planning, Enterprise Skills, and Learning and Development, our experts created a clear roadmap for building the skills infrastructure, data, and technology to turn these ambitions into reality.
Step 2: Simplifying Job Architecture
With the vision defined and the roadmap in place, the next step was to examine the company's workforce infrastructure, focusing particularly on its existing job architecture.
We found a framework that had become highly complex, outdated, and unable to provide meaningful skills insights. Using the company's existing job architecture and headcount data, we applied the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy to map skills to roles, creating a simplified structure that better reflects today's labor market.
OUTCOMES: A consolidated framework, reduced by more than 30%, with over 1,200 skills profiles providing a modern architecture geared to supporting hiring, compensation, career progression, and workforce planning decisions.
Step 3: Building a Common Language of Skills
A common language of skills is essential for understanding talent. Without a consistent framework for defining, categorising, and measuring skills, workforce planning, learning, hiring, and career development can become fragmented and difficult to scale.
To address this, we used our Talent Transform solution, appending tailored skills profiles to every future-state role in Workday. Working closely with the organization, we customized the number and type of skills, benchmarked them against industry peers, and built on existing business unit work wherever possible.
OUTCOMES: A unified skills ecosystem across the business, providing a single source of truth for workforce decisions.
Step 4: Embedding Skills Across the Business
To unlock the full potential and value of this common language of skills is only the beginning, it must be embedded across the systems and processes that shape workforce decisions every day.
By integrating the new framework into both Workday and the organization's learning platform, we were able to embed a common skills language across recruitment, learning, workforce planning, and career development.
OUTCOMES: Teams across the company can now draw on the same skills data and Lightcast labor market insights to make more informed talent decisions, while employees benefit from a more connected and transparent skills ecosystem, empowering them in their career progression.
Step 5: Powering Better Workforce Decisions
With a unified skills ecosystem in place, comparing the company's workforce skills with the external labor market – particularly its competitors – is now much easier.
The organization uses Lightcast's Talent Analyst platform – offering access to more than 80 billion labor market data points from across the globe – to connect its internal skills data with real-time labor market intelligence. This enables it to benchmark against competitors, identify emerging skills, understand talent availability, and make more informed hiring and workforce planning decisions.
OUTCOMES: A far more agile organization, where workforce decisions are driven by skills, informed by market intelligence, and aligned with long-term business strategy.
Our source of truth is always Lightcast. It’s the common skills language across our systems. Lightcast’s insight keeps us at the bleeding edge of skills in our sector.
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