Skills Straight, No Chaser
How Pernod Ricard Reshaped Their Internal Skills Architecture Using A Data-Driven Approach
Pernod Ricard: Serving Up The World's Favourite Drinks Brands
Pernod Ricard is the world’s leading premium spirits company. It features a comprehensive portfolio of more than 200 brands, from local favourites to global behemoths, such as Absolut, Beefeater, Glenlivet, Jameson, Avion, Malibu, and many more.
Founded in 1975, Pernod Ricard now operates in over 60 countries with distribution of its spirits in more than 160. Their mission is to unlock the magic of human connection to grow their business, transform their industry, and make a positive impact on the world. They use a term to embody this ethos— they talk about creating convivialité. They note that convivialité is the glue that binds us together; inspiring authentic moments of sharing.
Therefore, it’s evident that Pernod Ricard takes the employee experience seriously. And with over 19,550 employees, including those who have joined through acquisitions, Pernod Ricard needed to get a complete view of the skills they had across their organisation, in order to optimise roles and plan for the future.
How could Pernod Ricard create a usable skills architecture encompassing all their branch office workers?
Pernod Ricard launched a transformation based on data and AI four years ago and is now using it to transition to becoming a skills-based organization. Through the internal talent marketplace using AI, the group has pivoted towards becoming a skills-based organization to face the increasingly dynamic challenges of talent management.
To do this, Pernod Ricard needed a skills architecture, to integrate seamlessly with Workday. A skills architecture acts as the blueprint that defines and structures the skills within an organisation, unifying skills language and moving beyond traditional job descriptions to establish an agreed-upon nomenclature. It’s the foundation on which a centralised Skills-Based Organization is built, pulling together skills data across teams to form a larger, more strategically malleable and precise view. Many companies have a jobs architecture but at Lightcast, we think it most helpful to bring a skills lens to that job architecture, because skills are the building blocks of the labour market and the connective tissue for learning, people, and work.
Pernod Ricard’s existing skills architecture was built from internal surveys and was a mixure of several different frameworks. They recognized that having a global employee base meant that even people with the same title, in a different market may require different skills to do their job. They wanted to reshape their skills architecture with a data-driven approach, not a meetings-driven approach.
Using Lightcast skills data to build a new skills architecture, and Talent Transform™ to maintain it
Once Lightcast was engaged, we needed to map the Pernod Ricard version of skills to our taxonomy, Lightcast Open Skills™, which has become the standard in the market. Our model not only normalised their skills library, but also enriched it with the newest data, as the Lightcast Skills Library is refreshed on a monthly basis. Using Talent Transform™, we were able to suggest skills to inject into roles, allowing for Pernod Ricard to augment job descriptions for recruiting and develop training programs to upskill current workers.
The architecture was complex, as Pernod Ricard is a multinational organisation, but in a few months, we were able to collaborate to construct a skills foundation for all employees grouped by band, job family, and even down to specific roles.
Additionally, all this had to integrate seamlessly into Workday. Pernod Ricard, like many other large multinational companies, use the Workday Skills Cloud as part of their HRIS. In this engagement, over the course of months, Pernod Ricard rigorously tested and verified that Lightcast Talent Transform™ could pass the necessary data back and forth to Workday systems.
Lightcast understood this need from Pernod Ricard, and many other large corporations, and as such has become Workday Certified, and an official Access Partner, ensuring our platforms seamlessly integrate.
Operations complete. Pernod Ricard now needed a solution to drive skills strategy.
Now that Pernod Ricard had a revised skills architecture and Talent Transform + Workday powering the operations of it, how would they keep tabs on how the operations were working via analytics?
For that, Lightcast built Pernod Ricard a custom dashboard. This dashboard allows HR leaders to track skill usage and attrition so they can stay on pace and ahead of the curve on emerging skills, such as Generative AI.
With skill velocity increasing each month, it’s critical to keep tabs on what’s next to construct a future-ready workforce.
