Beyond “one size fits all”: How to create a sustainable skills taxonomy that is perfect for your organisation 

We are in the midst of a massive upheaval in the workplace, one that is seeing skills evolve and change at an unprecedented rate. 

Indeed, almost 45% of workplace skills are expected to be disrupted within the next five years. In response, forward-thinking companies are working to create skills taxonomies that will stay relevant and tailored for their future needs. To help such companies, Mercer's Skills Map offers a dynamic, AI-powered solution to customise and keep skills taxonomy current. Use it and you will always have a skills library that is easy to update, and perfectly calibrated for your organisation’s needs.

Is your skills taxonomy keeping up with the pace of change?

Skills are the new key currency of work — and that makes your skills library your “central bank” for workforce management.

According to Mercer’s latest Global Talent Trends (GTT) research, skills have been catapulted into the top-five list of HR priorities, and skills-based hiring is on the rise. This makes a well-crafted skills taxonomy table vital for managing change — and delivering the following benefits:

  • Enhancing attraction and retention of key talents
  • Boosting workforce productivity and agility
  • Expanding career paths, promoting employee development
  • Cultivating a culture of continuous learning
According to our recent Skills Snapshot research, HR is also plugging skills into the rewards process in an effort to:
84%

Attract and retain premium skills

64%

Incentivise skill development

54%

Incentivise career progression

As your organisation gets serious about skills, the first step must be to establish a foundational single source of truth: an up-to-date skills library and taxonomy. Some providers in the market make this sound simple, but we know it is not. Every organisation is unique, so out-of-the-box skills libraries are rarely a perfect fit. Building skill taxonomies from scratch is a time-consuming and tedious task. Worse, the sheer manual effort required to keep a skills library up to date is Herculean. It is a task that diverts valuable HR resources away from strategic initiatives and towards an endless cycle of updates and revisions.

It's no wonder that our research has shown that only:

45%

of companies possess even a rudimentary skills library

14%

monitor market demands formally

51%

monitor informally and the remainder not at all

The combined burden that this work can place on an HR team is sometimes too much to manage. Indeed, our Skills Snapshot shows that a lack of HR capability (or capacity) is the #1 barrier to becoming a skills-powered organisation.

So, the key question is this: How can organisations create an efficient and scalable skills infrastructure that not only is current, but which stays current?

Navigating the skills labyrinth

Organisations that choose not to prioritise the need for a skills-powered organisation risk falling behind, as they will not deal optimally with:

  • inefficient talent management
  • skill silos
  • challenges in workforce planning
  • maintaining a competitive edge

Your agility to adapt to market changes, attract and retain top talent, and foster employee engagement and development also hinges on having a robust skills infrastructure.

You can immediately create value for your organisation by initiating the first step on the skills-powered journey. You can do this by establishing an accurate, evolving central source of truth on skills — one that helps inform recruitment, succession, talent processes, upskilling and reskilling, and workforce planning in your company.

Skills mapping is the best place to start. Depending on your organisation’s commitment level, the table below highlights some different approaches to skills mapping:

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Mercer’s optimal alternative: a tech-assisted hybrid approach

A tech-assisted, automated approach to expanding and customising your skills taxonomy will allow you to map and customise the skills you need to meet your organisational needs and objectives — without sacrificing the benefits of a curated source of truth to use for a baseline.

Benefits of an automated approach include:

  • Time efficiency,
    drastically reducing the manual labour of skills mapping
  • Enhanced consistency and accuracy,
    ensuring a consistent and error-free skills taxonomy
  • Improved governance,
    with built-in workflows to maintain quality control
  • Validated content
    to feed HR and Talent Management functions such as talent acquisition, career pathing, and learning and development (including technologies like Workday, Degreed, Gloat and Eightfold).
We believe that a tech-enabled hybrid approach is best. We are so certain of this that we have invested in a software experience that delivers all of the above benefits — introducing, Mercer Skills Map.

Mercer Skills Map: revolutionising skills taxonomy

Mercer's Skills Map provides a practical, AI-powered approach to skills taxonomy, enabling organisations to adapt their skills libraries with precision. Recognising the complexity of skills management for today's fast-evolving workforce, the solution leverages Mercer's depth of HR expertise to offer a straightforward process for assigning proficiency levels and facilitating stakeholder validation. This approach not only aids the accurate mapping of market-relevant skills, but also ensures that the skills taxonomy can evolve in line with organisational strategies.

With its AI-powered mapping and customisation features, Mercer Skills Map offers:

  • AI-sourced and augmented, expert human-curated skill baselines — ensuring your skills taxonomy is both current and relevant.
  • A seamless workflow, from skills mapping to assigning proficiency levels, all validated through stakeholder engagement.
  • Integration with Mercer's extensive Skills and Jobs Libraries, so providing unparalleled flexibility and insight. 

Mercer Skills Map provides a powerful engine for keeping any skills taxonomy effortlessly up to date. And if you are using the Mercer Skills Library or Mercer Jobs Library you will enjoy immediate integration with your relevant library. The Mercer Skills Library, with its extensive and carefully curated database, provides essential insights and benchmarks that are crucial for developing a relevant skills framework. Our Skills Map complements this as it has the flexibility to quickly and efficiently add organisation-specific skills in a consistent, centralised and workflow-enabled environment.

Designed for practicality and ease of use, Mercer Skills Map guides HR professionals through each step, from offering skill mapping recommendations to assigning proficiency levels and engaging with stakeholders for validation. This streamlined approach minimises the learning curve and operational burden, making it simpler for organisations to keep their skills taxonomy current and relevant.

Mercer is committed to enhancing its Skills Map with future updates that include further organisation-specific configurations, multi-level skill mapping and dashboards for ongoing skill reviews. 

Uplevel your skills approach with Mercer Skills Map

As we look to the future of work, the need for a robust, adaptable skills taxonomy has never been more acute. You will find that Mercer Skills Map provides a huge leap forward in your ability to initiate, manage and customise your skills taxonomy. More than a tool, Mercer’s Skills Map is a strategic partner in crafting a skills-first approach that can propel your organisation forward — without over-burdening your team. 
About the author(s)
Peter Stevenson

Go-to Market Leader, Skills-Edge

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