Workplace Stories by RedThread Research Stacia Garr & Dani Johnson

The mission of Microsoft is to empower every person in every organization to achieve more. An enterprise-wide skills focus is one way they’re fulfilling their mission.

It’s about moving beyond job titles and fixed roles to give freedom and flexibility to apply skills and expertise where they matter the most. And it’s all in service of creating an environment where growing one’s career is the top reason to join and stay at Microsoft.

They’re using human verification to give the individual control over the data that’s included, who it’s shared with, and how it’s shared.

Shweta Srivastava and John Mighell share how Microsoft is implementing skills on a large scale in this fascinating conversation.

“Skills are like oxygen, invisible but necessary.” 

This mindset shift is the brainchild of Vidya Krishnan, the Chief Learning Officer, and Peter Sheppard, the Head of the Global L&D Ecosystem at Ericsson.

Much of their job is identifying the oxygen and making it visible so they can do something with it. To do this, they’re taking a top-down and bottom-up approach. They’ve worked with senior leadership to define seven key skills they think everyone in the organization needs. They also work with the job leaders who own the skills to make sure their skills taxonomy is continuously updated.

Vidya and Peter are passionate about what they do. They’re working tirelessly to systemize learning to take care of and serve the individual. Because, ultimately, systems-first means people-first.

How do we define work and the skills needed to do the work? The way we view and assess skills is often through assessing and appraising someone’s output. But the problem is that most organizations aren’t capturing the right data and using it to gain insight.

According to Matt Donovan—the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at GP Strategies—Job descriptions and skills in general describe the baseline. They are not what makes someone great at what they do. 

So how do we define the work and the skills needed to do the work? How can we capture a high-performer’s secret sauce? What are they doing that’s making it a successful experience versus what’s written in the job description?

We dive into a fascinating conversation about where we are now, how AI is going to both help and disrupt organizations, and what the future of skills assessment could look like. 

GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. They aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030.

In her role as the VP of People Data & Analytics, Angela is responsible for generating value from their people data. She has the opportunity to shape thinking and inform strategy. Her job is to translate skills so that everyone can do what they need to with the data.

She shares more about GSK’s scientific approach, how they’re using AI to gather information, and how skills verification ties in. Don’t miss this fascinating conversation.

Sandra Loughlin is the Chief Learning Officer and the Global Head of Talent Enablement and Transformation at EPAM, a software engineering and consulting firm. Unlike many of the organizations we’ve spoken about, EPAM has been on a skills journey since its inception over 30 years ago. Building a skills-based organization has been the backbone of everything they do. In this conversation, Sandra shares why the juice is indeed “Worth the squeeze.”

When Oliver (Ollie) Drury joined Booking.com, they dove into digital transformation by simplifying their tech stack—and reducing variables—using a middleware to stitch everything together. That enabled them to have a simpler set of variables from which to create their skills ecosystem. Their driving goal was to solve skills for the entire organization. In this conversation, Ollie shares how they’re working to accomplish a skills-based transformation by first focusing on digital transformation.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...Join the RedThread Research Community [5:01]Learn more about Ollie Drury and his work [5:59] Why they’re creating a skills-based organization [7:09]Why they focused on digital transformation first [8:00]How they’re building for reversibility [18:04]Major obstacles they’ve overcome [24:08] How they’re measuring effectiveness [26:08] The lightning round [27:58] Who leads skills at Booking.com? [34:29]Why employees own the skills data [38:05] How culture impacts the journey to skills [42:38] Steering away from the reward use case [47:53]The biggest thing Ollie’s learned [49:35] Why Ollie is passionate about this work [50:22]
Resources & People MentionedJoin the RedThread Research CommunityMuleSoftTech OffWorkdayGloatNeilsoftCrunchrBOOK: Work without Jobs BOOK: InspiredBOOK: Hidden PotentialBOOK: The Technology FallacyConnect with Oliver DruryConnect on LinkedInConnect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn Twitter
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