Around the world, people consume about 117 billion gallons of alcohol per year. It’s a big business with thousands of firms, but it’s dominated by very few: two thirds of all beer sales, and half of all spirit sales, come from the ten largest producers. The nine largest alcohol companies annually gross about $141 billion, consolidating dozens of well-known beer, wine, and spirits brands under relatively few corporate umbrellas.
These few multinational companies have billions of dollars in market cap and annual revenue, which means they also have large international workforces to produce, distribute, and market their products. One of these companies, with tens of thousands of employees, operating in dozens of countries, needed a comprehensive approach to workforce planning that accounted for its complexity and international reach.
At the beginning of the project, the spirits company’s management knew they wanted to avoid an inefficient “meetings-driven” approach, and that they would prefer the reliability and efficiency data-driven approach. So they turned to Lightcast.
The Challenge: Managing International Workforce Complexity
The spirits company didn’t become a global powerhouse overnight. Instead, it expanded steadily over the course of nearly 50 years through both organic growth and international acquisitions. These include gin and scotch brands in the UK, vodka and aperitifs from Europe, rum from the Caribbean, tequila from Mexico, and wine from the US, Australia, and New Zealand, among many others. Each new acquisition has meant new employees and offices added to the global cocktail of the overall company’s workforce.
The corporate human resources team needed a way to understand and assess the skills its international workforce possessed, in order to better allocate resources and plan for future needs. This “skills architecture” would serve as a shared framework throughout the organization, pulling together disparate data from different locations and business functions into a comprehensive whole. If the entire company’s workforce information could be standardized and centralized, future workforce planning and global talent strategies could be planned and carried out much more effectively.
But the company’s existing skills architecture was built from internal surveys and was a hodgepodge of several different frameworks, carried out at different times and different locations around the world. They recognized that having a global employee base meant that two people with the same title might have very different jobs if one was based in North America and the other was based in Europe; perhaps a marketing specialist in one country might need expertise in digital platforms, while another might require traditional advertising experience. If jobs were ineffective as a method for understanding workforce needs, then the company needed a skills-based solution.
Without a unified skills architecture, the organization lacked the clarity needed to align employee capabilities with business goals.
The Solution: Building a Data-Driven Skills Architecture with Lightcast Talent Transform
The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy uses the real-world vocabulary of job postings to provide a shared language for understanding skills across the labor market. This system designed for normalizing skill names was the perfect solution for creating a unified approach for the liquor company.
Three steps went into this process:
Skills Taxonomy Integration:
Using the Lightcast Open Skills Taxonomy, the organization mapped its existing skills to a standardized framework. This process not only normalized the data but enriched it with up-to-date information from the labor market, ensuring relevance to current and emerging trends. Monthly updates to the taxonomy allowed for continuous improvement.Technology Enablement with Talent Transform™:
The Open Skills API is free to access, but the process of building a market-optimized custom skill-to-job taxonomy was where Lightcast could provide additional value and ensure the right skills were assigned into their job architecture, enabling a more targeted recruitment strategy and tailored employee training programs.Seamless integration with Workday, the spirits company’s HR management platform, ensured that these enhancements became part of the organization's ongoing HR operations and leveraging the capabilities of Workday's skills engine, Skills Cloud, and connected modules. This was especially important because the company had been promised Workday integration from other HR technology vendors before, but without success. Lightcast is a gold level Innovation Partner with Workday and Talent Transform is a Certified Integration, promising the highest validation of technical performance within the platform.
Collaboration Across Teams:
The redesign was a collaborative effort involving Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, HR business partners, workforce analysts, and leadership teams across regions. By aligning global perspectives, the organization ensured that the new architecture was both comprehensive and adaptable to local needs.
With the foundational skills architecture in place, the organization turned its focus to leveraging analytics for strategic decision-making. A custom dashboard was developed to track key metrics, such as skill usage, emerging trends, and employee attrition.
The dashboard offered real-time insights into workforce dynamics, enabling HR leaders to monitor the velocity of new skills entering the market. For instance, as generative AI began reshaping industries, the organization could quickly assess its workforce's readiness and address any gaps through targeted upskilling initiatives. This proactive approach ensured that the company stayed ahead of the curve, maintaining its competitive edge in a rapidly evolving landscape.
The ultimate result was a unified workforce ready for the future.
The redesigned skills architecture delivered transformative benefits. Through its redesigned skills architecture, the organization now operates with a clear, unified framework that aligns employee skills with business objectives. Key outcomes included improved workforce planning, better employee development, career pathways, and global consistency with local flexibility. By building a robust skills architecture and leveraging advanced tools, the organization achieved clarity and agility in its workforce strategy. Its ability to monitor and adapt to emerging skills trends ensures sustained growth and a competitive edge in the global market.
For organizations facing similar challenges, the lessons are clear: embrace data, prioritize skills over job titles, and invest in tools that enable both operational efficiency and strategic foresight. The future of work demands it.
