Realise your skills-powered future with Mercer
Looking to scale your skills-powered practices? With capabilities across workforce transformation, data and tech, and digital enablement, we’re on hand to support your skills-powered journey.
Organisations most commonly embed skills into talent acquisition and learning and development. Notably, 68% of organisations report that they have initiated their skills journey and have established ways to track and manage skills. However, only 43% leverage a talent marketplace to connect talent to work — an opportunity worth tapping into, to increase internal mobility and match talent to work at scale.
While skills are incorporated across multiple talent practices, the amount of manual work still required may hold some businesses back or eat into ROI. Talent marketplaces and internal hiring (both 26%) are the areas where skills are most likely to be populated/suggested automatically by skills technology platforms. Meanwhile, most organisations are still manually mapping skills within learning and development and performance management practices (both 38%), demonstrating opportunities to further leverage technology in this space.
of organisations don’t incorporate skills into rewards and recognition
don’t incorporate skills into performance management
This speaks to ongoing efforts to eradicate bias or unfairness within these processes. If managed correctly, AI can help here, while also doing its part to increase productivity. Business leaders see the potential, with over half (54%) of executives believing that augmenting systems and processes with AI is a top business priority over the next year. Plenty of organisations with a high level of skills maturity have already seen the positive impact from embedding skills in rewards.
Another area ripe for development is strategic workforce planning (SWP), where 30% of HR leaders say skills are not yet incorporated. Given that improving SWP is within HR’s top five people priorities for 2025, there’s an opportunity to embrace skills as the currency of work to improve short- and long-term planning.
The chart presents data on how organisations incorporate skills models into various practices. It categorises the extent of skills usage into four groups:
Key Insights:
Ongoing transformation calls for effective change management. To benefit from skills-powered practices, organisations will want to focus on perfecting their adoption and engagement strategies.
Get in touch to learn more about Mercer’s approach to change management
Nearly three-fifths of survey respondents are uncertain about the success of their talent marketplaces. This points to a lack of clarity surrounding success metrics and the underlying vision driving the skills initiative.
In a complex tech landscape, establishing a shared vision, clear objectives and an evolving roadmap is essential for getting stakeholders on the same page. Being open to flexing how you reach your end goal, while grounding skills initiatives in the overarching problem you want to solve, means businesses can better keep pace with vendor innovations and keep stakeholders bought-in along the way.
Looking to scale your skills-powered practices? With capabilities across workforce transformation, data and tech, and digital enablement, we’re on hand to support your skills-powered journey.
The Global Skills Technology and Adoption Survey is an exclusive survey for organisations that are early adopters of skills technologies and platforms — talent marketplaces in particular.
This report provides insight into how a sample of HR leaders infuse skills across their workforce and HR infrastructure, including by leveraging skills data to drive people decisions and using technology to enable skills-powered success.
The survey ran in August – September 2024 and includes insights from 47 organisations.
Work & Skills Solutions Leader
Singapore Skills Practice Leader
US Transformation Practice