Matching Internal Skills to the Outside World: Context is Everything

People plans without context are meaningless. Context is crucial for grasping the significance of a message, action, or data. Context influences how we interpret information and how we make decisions. Yet I see skills transformation projects go ahead with a blinkered view based on gaps in the organisation’s internal skills profile or a black box AI model not grounded in reality. 

Unfortunately, these projects are destined to fail. While it’s certainly an essential part of transformation to look at the business plan alongside internal skills data, the only way to achieve sustainable success is to get the full picture, by combining internal skills data with external skills context.

What is external skills context?

At its simplest, external skills context is important when building role profiles to understand what other skills are attached to similar roles in the external market, and to build these into your role and skills profiles. At its most effective, external context draws on labour market data built in the same language as your role and skills profiles.

Why does this matter? Organisations need to understand how they prepare for the future and how they stay relevant. With role and skills profiles that are relevant to the market, labour market data comes into its own - it is then possible to compare like for like.

Let’s consider some questions that may arise through strategic workforce planning: do we build, buy, borrow, or bot?

• Your business plan includes a new manufacturing site which means more specialist skills are required within a certain time line. The external context tells you where those skills are and how much you’ll need to pay for them so you can decide whether to hire talent in or develop it internally through training.

• Your business plan includes office relocations to better match the geographical footprint of your customer base. The context tells you whether your employees will be able to, or will want to, commute to those new locations, and whether there is an alternative form of talent available.

• Your business plan requires more front-line skills, which appear to be available internally already. The context tells you that your competitors are automating these skills, so you can decide whether to continue investing in a declining skill.

Why do so many skills transformations ignore external skills context? 

Given external skills context is such a valuable viewpoint, why is it so often ignored? Because it just looks too difficult! 

We know how it looks; there is some skills data in your ATS, some is in your HRIS, some is in your LMS. All of them have different skills taxonomies and ways of categorising proficiency or value to the business, the data is fragmented and trapped in a specific use case. Even once this is all synthesised, how can you possibly compare it like-for-like with the external market? 

It’s easier than you think. 

We understand the need to bring context to the skills data flowing through your systems. We know that we need granular skills data to define work. Lightcast’s dynamic skills taxonomy works with your enterprise tech or HRIS to bring external skills context into your system, so you can compare internal and external skills data. 

How does it work?

• Lightcast has organised the world's labour market data, structured it in a format that makes sense, and we’ve made it accessible. 

• Our skills taxonomy brings external skills context into your organisation in a common language so you can compare the internal and external landscape. 

• Lightcast is platform-agnostic so it works with the tech you already have to standardise the way you talk about skills.

• Lightcast’s skills taxonomy is dynamic so it can tell you what skills are trending up or down, which are demanding a high salary and which may be replaced by automation or AI.

This combination of internal and external data in one place, in the same language, means you can do a better job internally too. You can define job architecture, plan career pathways, design learning journeys for employees. The external skills context powers up your internal workforce planning.

Contextual workforce planning

In today’s changing labour market, a more agile, dynamic and contextual approach is more effective than traditional strategic workforce planning. For example, in just five years from 2016-2021, the share of top skills requested in the typical occupation changed by 37%. This shows how quickly the labour market is shifting, and the importance of prioritising the right skills. 

In this rapidly moving world, we need to accept that not all skills are created equal.The only way to understand which skills to prioritise is to get the full picture of skills – in context.

When I first started talking about the skills-based organisation (over 10 years ago now!) I enjoyed seeing the lightbulb moment when CEOs or HRDs saw what external talent intelligence data could bring to the decision making process. By giving them external market data about skills supply and demand, we brought a new dimension to workforce planning.  

Fast-forward to 2024 and Stratigens joining forces with Lightcast: we can now take skills knowledge one step further by combining internal skills data with external skills context. 

This is talent intelligence in its most powerful form. It allows contextual workforce planning to happen. I’ve said it many times “when we can combine internal skills data with external skills context, magic can happen!”

Interested in trying Lightcast please click here, or connect with me on LinkedIn for more information on how to bring together the power of internal and external data.