Rebuilding reward and career frameworks based on skills 

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Measure for impact: 2023 Skills Snapshot Survey helps you benchmark your skills-based transformation progress 

Reskilling employees is the #1 workforce initiative for executives, and HR ranks and re-designing talent processes around skills as their second highest priorities, according to our latest research. Leading organizations are already looking at ways to weave skills into their established performance-based approaches. Do you measure up?

Mercer’s annual Skills Snapshot Survey collects benchmarking data from multinationals worldwide to uncover key trends, challenges and opportunities around skills-based talent practices, gauging market progress year by year. The research report will provide you with actionable insights and data to benchmark your approaches against peers and optimize your efforts. 

Five key questions we address in the research

The survey will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses across the five key areas for successful skills-focused talent strategies:

  • What skills do we need

    and how will we incorporate a skills taxonomy into our job architecture?

  • What skill proficiency

    level do we expect for each role?

  • How do we assess the skills

    that will drive our business forward?

  • How will we reward

     those with top skills?

  • How will we operationalize

     our skills-based strategy?

Highlights of last year’s Pay for Skills survey findings                                                                                     

In Mercer’s 2022 Pay for Skills Survey, more than 650 organizations from around the world shared their experiences attracting, retaining and rewarding people with the skills they require to advance their business strategies
Traditional pay-for-performance approaches are not going away anytime soon, but many of the more skills-mature companies are looking for ways to weave skills into their established performance-based approaches.

What’s driving skills-based talent strategies?

With more companies than ever before prioritizing skills over education, all organizations need to think about developing their skills-based talent management capabilities.

Competition for top talent is fierce. About 45% of companies report a pressing need for skills that are generally in high demand, which makes the search for talent (and talent retention) especially challenging.

Overall, the need for certain skills has moved to the forefront of the hiring process — in some cases ahead of education and experience. As a result, skills-based pay practices are often deployed to attract new talent. However, even though organizations are assessing skills when hiring (with a view to achieving their strategic goals), many companies still have no formal skills-based rewards in place to recognize and drive in-house skills development.

This poses the question: are companies over-focusing on skills during the hiring process, while under-focusing on building and retaining the skills they need to advance their business priorities?

Get the 2022 Pay for Skills survey report

Access insights and benchmarks to accelerate your skills-based talent strategy. Learn why pay for skills is important strategically but difficult to operationalize across an organization.
Download the report

Key strategic purposes for using skills-based pay

  • Strategic necessity to revamp an organization’s key technical skill sets
  • Implicit need linked to strategic goals
  • Entry into new markets
  • Development of new services/products that require a new/enlarged technical skill set 
  • Aggressive strategic policy of hiring high-end professionals (e.g., AI and digital)
  • Explicit goal present in the strategic plan
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Download the 2022 report

Mercer’s latest Pay for Skills survey report offers insight into how your peers are progressing on the journey to develop skills-based talent practices. It highlights the most common approaches to building skills taxonomies, tracking skills (both within an organization and in the market), developing proficiency scales, and operationalizing pay-for-skills strategies.