How You Can Use Workday Skills Cloud To Develop and Engage Talent

The World Economic Forum estimates that 40 to 50 percent of workers will need reskilling or upskilling within the next five years. However, it won’t happen using traditional methods. Technology is evolving, and skills can quickly become obsolete. As a result, grouping jobs by type of work and competencies no longer fuels success. So, to stay competitive, your talent development must become agile and resilient, requiring a fresh approach to talent management. 

To close the gap, Workday Skills Cloud can help you shift to a skill-based organization and develop skills in your workforce instead of scouring the market for scarce talent.

Implementation Challenges

Implementing a new talent development system isn’t easy.

First, you must create job descriptions based on skills instead of degrees and certifications, which means you must complete a skills inventory and identify current and future gaps. Making the shift requires you to train managers in hiring and promoting based on skills. In addition, they need to know how to identify training opportunities to help their people gain skills.

You won't make such a monumental shift overnight, but you can achieve your goals with incremental progress.

The Benefits of A Skill-Based Organization

Making the shift benefits your organization in four ways.

1. You will have a more diverse talent pool. The traditional degree-focused approach limits the talent pool, but skill-based talent management grows it and extends its reach.
2. Given the time and opportunity, employees are eager to learn. Companies that offer opportunities for employees to learn in the flow of work will keep their employees engaged.
3. Employee engagement and productivity are linked. Organizations with highly engaged employees are more profitable than their peers.
4. Organizations that develop employee skills and promote from within keep productive employees twice as long as those that don't.

Shifting to Skill-Based Talent Management

The key to shifting to skills is identifying each employee's skill set. Workday Skills Cloud helps by standardizing and organizing skills gathered from many sources. Using AI, it can examine an individual's resume, background, experiences, and training to extract their skills.

Integration with other tools

The Skills Cloud can integrate data from performance reviews, talent management systems, learning systems, and job profiles. It maps these skills in a way that makes sense for all your people, regardless of the language they used to define and group skills.

Identifying gaps

When your organization maps its skills, it will discover gaps. You may need more specific skills to move the business forward. Once you identify the gaps, you can develop these required skills in employees and focus on them in new hires.

A Workday Skills Cloud identifies potential areas of development for each employee. And it helps match those workers with learning and growth opportunities.

Connecting with the Talent Marketplace

Making connections through the Workday Talent Marketplace, the system matches workers with development opportunities inside the organization.

Workers can reach out to potential mentors and team leaders through the skills marketplace, allowing them to take charge of their own development.

The system updates workers’ skill profiles with learning, gigs, and mentors. It adapts its recommendations to either further develop a skill or suggest a new one.

Expanding your skills strategy

You will also need to build skills into your succession planning and reward systems. Recent research from Deloitte shows that while 45 percent of organizations reward their team members for acquiring new skills, only 14 percent plan to implement a skill-based pay strategy.

For a thriving skill-based culture, skills must match promotion and pay. Without that integration, you risk losing many of the skill system’s benefits.

The Skills Cloud enables this shift. Other Workday software, such as Recruiting, integrates Skills Cloud to help match potential candidates with jobs based on their skills.

Skills At the Center

Making skills the center of your talent management strategy fosters business success. Traditional hiring methods based on past performance and credentials won't guarantee a good fit, but Workday Skills Cloud helps your people managers identify team members’ skills, offers training to fill gaps, and better matches people with tasks and roles.

Phenom eCloud is a comprehensive technology solutions provider committed to empowering businesses to overcome challenges, enhance their workforce capabilities, and achieve superior outcomes.