Skills based organisations: a new way to connect talent to work 

Welcome, everybody to today's webinar. My name is Anne Le Blanc, and I'm part of the Mercer Workforce Solutions team, and I'll be your host today. So I hope you enjoy today's session. So let's begin.

Thanks, Anne. And it's great to be with all of you today and even more of a pleasure to have Rovin and Andrew join me on panel. The topic today is about skills and it couldn't come at a more important time for us here in Australia, and New Zealand, and in general globally, but certainly in this part of the world. So I think that I speak for many of you today.

If we take a look at the headlines at any point in time over these past several months in particular, what we know is that the need to rethink work and to really consider different ways to address the acute labor shortage crisis that we're facing into in Australia is not a nice to have, this is a must have.

And many of you when we talk to you and discussed in our global talent trends study that we published earlier this year, it certainly indicated that you are feeling this pinch too. And this is happening right across all sectors at this point whether automotive, whether public sector, tech sector, mining, and so forth.

It's quite clear that it's record unemployment lows here in Australia, in particular the skills shortage is a real challenge for all businesses today. But when we boil this down and we look into what this means for individuals and organizations today, I'd like to talk us through a couple of key stats about what this means from a workforce challenges perspective on this next childcare.

As I mentioned earlier, Mercer produces a study called the Global Talent Trends. This is the seventh year of that study. And what we found unsurprisingly particularly in the Australian respondents to this survey where we had about 10,000 voices represented globally, the Australian component showed us something unsurprising.

I'm sure to many of you we know that the majority of you are facing into a labor shortage crisis, as I just mentioned and showcase in the headlines. We know that we're acutely worried about hiring and finding the right talent, and even more so at the right price.

It's no surprise in our inflationary environment at this point in time coupled with record low unemployment that the war for talent is hotter than ever, so certainly finding the talent. And then getting that talent into the door and doing it at pace has become an increasingly challenging set of activities for us across all organizations.

And then even more worrying for many of you as you told us in the study is that 97% who responded to the question about plans to transform whether that be digital transformation, business model transformation, culture transformation, workforce transformation, 97% of you are undergoing that transformation right now and/or planning major transformation projects this year and into the foreseeable one to two years.

Many of us were thrust into that transformation obviously as a result of pandemic. So those transformation initiatives have only just accelerated. And so while that's the case for many of you, 38% of you also stated that you're concerned about the lack of workforce capability and skills needed to drive that transformation. So I know I paint a slight picture of gloom and doom here. I don't mean to do that at all.

In fact, there's real excitement. I think if you are like me and the members of this panel, fellow HR practitioners, and thought leaders in this space, and optimists at heart, there are some really important messages and really neat things that organizations are pursuing today particularly around the rethinking of work, and what that means, and the opportunities it presents to not just address the talent and skills gap, but also what it means for workers globally, what it means for all of us globally to be engaged in the content of our work to be constantly evolving and learning, and most importantly, to continue to be a thriving workforce.

So I'm really excited that whilst we present many challenges to you in this opening that we dedicate the majority of our discussion today to the recipe that may in fact be one that could work for many of you as think about transforming your skills into a skills-powered set of talent practices and a way of thinking differently about that work.

So before we get to that, I'd like to just hear from many of you. And this is, again, important to note that what you're seeing here in this question about, what are your plans to ensure you have already full of skilled talent now and into the future?

These five options aren't the only options clearly to address that question. But what we've done in this poll, and we would love you to select this multiple choice, you can select all, or one, or two, whichever apply to you, but we'd love to hear from you. These are the top five answers that we received in the global talent trend study this year. So we thought we would present these five to see where you're at this point in time, what your organization is pursuing.

So it would be wonderful to have you give us an indication and then I'm also going to, if I can, just flip us to the next slide and give you a sense of how others both in this market and globally responded to this same set of questions while you're answering yours and we'll, of course, display the results of this poll once we've had most of your input answered.

So you can see that from a global and Australia perspective we're thinking very similarly to our global counterparts and there's no surprise there. Now certainly ensuring our talent processes are specifically geared towards recognizing the role of skills, particularly as we talk about how we pay for skills or rewarding the acquisition of new skills.

And again, I don't want to steal Rovin's thunder, so I'm not going to go too far into that. But it's really neat to see that Australia right on to that and that we can also see in the way that we have been engaging with many of you over the past several months. We know that in Australia, in fact, again, ahead of the curve here in terms of targeting reskilling and upskilling, and there's no surprise here.

We are in, again, a very tight labor supply market here. And so many of you turning to reskilling and upskilling as an investment for now and into the future is no surprise to us as well. And again, ahead of the curve on hiring, promoting, and using those trends to help us continue to push the agenda on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So again, a neat comparison there.

And again, when I look at the poll results just now, we can see that we're actually not too far. If anything, more than likely the passage of time has probably shown that ensuring talent processes are indeed attuned to skills against this poll that we've just taken with all of you here today, which show that it's even increased over the time period from which we were collecting this data globally for this study over the last eight months.

So really indicative, I think, Rovin, isn't it? Of just how quickly the conditions have changed and that's, again, not a secret to anyone that no one would have predicted the current environment geopolitical, economic, and so forth that we're in right now. So no surprise to me either that many more now are focused on ensuring these talent processes are aligned to skills.

I could go on and on, Rovin, I think, but I feel like I have built up a lot of suspense and excitement over the possibilities that you might present to us today and also share with us how things are shaping up globally, but certainly things that we know that we could take back to our organizations here in Australia and hopefully apply.

So I might just hand over to Rovin who can talk to us about what organizations, great ones are doing particularly in the space of resetting the work operating system.

Great. Thank you, Cynthia. It's such a pleasure to be here with you, and Andrew, and Anne, and obviously with all of our honored guests here. So what I thought we might do over the next few minutes or so is share a little bit of the context for the book that my co-author, John Boudreau, and I just wrote, Work Without Jobs, why we wrote the book, the underpinnings of that operating system.

And the data that Cynthia has just shared is such great continued validation, if you will, for the timeliness of some of these ideas as we're seeing with companies around the world and maybe end up with a couple of case studies before I hand off to Andrew.

So if we jump to the next slide when John and I were writing this book, and believe it or not, we actually started writing the book in March of 2020. Could not have picked a better time since neither of us was traveling, I suppose, and we had lots of time on our hands.

But as we were writing this book and watching the tremendous response from companies, many of them on the call today, many other organizations, the response to this pandemic, the ways in which they transformed, the way innovation really took hold, the way that human spirit really adapted, it was absolutely fascinating.

And it validated two things that were core principles that underpinned the reason we wrote the book, the reason that MIT asked us to write the book, which is as we look at this evolving world of work, they were the two most pivotal questions we see ourselves as business leaders and as HR leaders facing and dealing with for the foreseeable future.

The next 10, 20 years, what you see on the slide, how are we going to redesign work to enable talent to flow to it as seamlessly as possible beyond the frictional cost of a job, which increasingly is proving to be one of the most fundamental impediments to the transformation of many organizations?

And at the same time ensuring that we are sending the workforce, employees or otherwise, the right signals, assets, and resources to enable their perpetual reinvention. And then secondly, Cynthia talked about how important DNI is. And one of the things that we observed is when you go beyond the job, and you'll see this in one of the cases I'll share, that the opportunity for a much more inclusive work environment accelerate exponentially.

But that second question, I think, is equally pivotal, which is how do we re-envision the talent experience so that we're meeting more and more talent increasingly on their terms as opposed to forcing them to comply or fit a one size fits most model, which is what has often characterized the value propositions of organizations for decades, the better part of 150 years? Because the fundamental building block was that notion of a job and that one-to-one relationship between a person and a position.

So as we reflected on this, what we started to do is we were writing the book was a start to illustrate the art of the possible with some of those case studies and examples. If we go to the next slide underpinning this response to these two pivotal questions is this shift from jobs to work.

This pivot from that traditional one-to-one relationship between a person and a position, and you could even extend that back to a degree because the degree was that singular marker of capability. So that one-to-one relationship between a degree, a job, and a job hold to increasingly the possibilities of the many-to-many between skills and capability and work.

And you can see that pivot or that transition, if you will, from left to right where on the left when we think about development, as we've known for years that the options are very limited because you're either moving up or you're moving sideways.

And as you transition to an environment where you've got the many-to-many between the unique bundle of skills that is Cynthia versus Andrew, the many different ways in which they could contribute be it in a job, on a project, on an initiative, and engagement, a team, et cetera, and the many different ways in which they could grow and develop.

And what you start to see is, and this is where the power of AI really comes to the fore, is where AI becomes that uniquely powerful tool that acts as a mechanism for helping to guide the individual's growth and development across not just that binary choice of vertical or horizontal change, but potentially dozens and dozens of uniquely bespoke reskilling, and upskilling, and development pathways that are unique to each of us.

We also start to see as the traditional markers of capability i.e. degrees and limited experiences start to give way to seeing the whole person. We start to see how I can actually help us transcend many of the traditional markers of bias. And I'll talk about this when we talk about one of the examples and case studies in the book, Unilever, and what they've done to create a much more inclusive organization.

So really this pivot from left to right is at the heart of what is going to be a fundamental retooling of work and organizations as we see it. If we jump to the next slide, I want to just spend a few minutes talking about the full principles that underpin Work Without Jobs and the new work operating system that John and I described, one that is underpinned by the fundamental tasks, and activities of the organization, and the skills and capabilities of the workforce as opposed to one that is underpinned by jobs.

And if you think of the way our organizations operate today, everything about what HR does, everything about what finance does, and everything about what it does, if you step back and think about it, is based on that basic building block of that one-to-one relationship between a person and a position. All of the elements of our talent lifecycle based on that notion of a job.

Everything that we know about how businesses account for success financially is based on that basic building block of a job aggregated into job families, into functions, into divisions, into organizations. Everything about the technology infrastructure, again, based on that notion of a person in a position if you think about ERP systems.

And what John and I laid out were all of the impediments that come in the way when you have that basic currency and the opportunities for driving an ever more agile organization by transcending the job and having those basic building blocks of tasks and skills as the currency.

And as we were writing the book, there were four principles that emerged to us as we were doing that work. The first was as we looked at the organizations who are really successful in being future proofed, if you will, that they started with the work, not the way the work was organized. One are the elemental tasks and activities both the ones that exist today and the ones to come as opposed to how those tasks and activities are organized.

Secondly, by starting with the work, they achieved a much more optimal combination of humans and automation. Some of you may have read my third book, Reinventing Jobs, that John and I wrote that was published by the Harvard Business Review. And in that book with about 130 case studies, we illustrated how companies that led with the work as opposed to lead with the technology achieved exponentially greater outcomes.

They saw where human endeavor could be substituted, the highly repetitive rules-based work, where critical thinking, empathy, care, and concern, innovation could be augmented. And that individual almost made superhuman in their productivity by using technology to augment those skills and then where the presence of automation actually created the demand for new skills and the space for new human work. So a much more optimal set of outcomes.

And then thirdly, once you've considered the optimal combination of talent and technology, what's the best way to connect talent to work? As you'll see in a second, the job is still relevant despite the title of the book. Albeit the percentage of work as we see being done in full time jobs is shrinking dramatically and exponentially.

But what are all the other ways in which talent could connect to work? Should it be a gig worker? Should it be an employee, but one who connects to work through an agile talent pool? Should it be the employee of an outsourcer, an alliance partner, or some other part of a broader ecosystem for work options?

And then the fourth principle being, how do we consistently reduce the frictional cost of work? How do we allow talent to flow to work? And creating a mindset and a capacity to keep perpetually reinventing work. I often say to my clients, the good old days we could do a transformation once every seven years and reset our business models. I don't think we have that luxury anymore.

And the organizations that really are thriving are the ones that have that mindset of perpetual reinvention where they don't separate run the business from transform the business, it is one holistic cycle. And against that we laid out three ways in which we're seeing companies connect talent to work.

On the left is where we've been for 130 years of the world of work where employees are in fixed roles. And think of these three models as, and not to be too cute about it, but fixed, flex, and flow. So fix is, again, where we've been forever, but there are many good reasons why that job will still be with us. There's just a convenient volume of work that justifies that being bundled into a job.

And for many of you there are compliance and control reasons because of the regulatory nature, because your businesses might be regulated, you might have oversight from different third parties, et cetera, and the job is that mechanism for oversight. Now, the infrastructure that enables that are the things that we are all intimately familiar with, our job architectures.

Again, with the job as the currency of work, that is the fundamental means through which work is organized. Workforce planning tends to look more like position-based planning as we look at the flow of talent from one job to another to ultimately leaving the organization.

And our systems, this is where the ERP systems, your workdays and your success factors are the basis for enabling that job as the currency of work. What we're seeing more organizations do though is if you go one click to the right is where talent might still be-- sorry, we could actually go back a slide. Sorry, I shouldn't have said one click to the right there.

But in the middle of that with the flexible model, work might still be organized in jobs, but the talent has the flexibility to express their skills in other domains or to go acquire new skills in different domains.

And this is where we're in this interesting hybrid position because you've got the combination of the job and skills becoming the currency of work. And it's where we see companies augmenting their ERP systems with internal talent marketplaces like Gloat, Eightfold, Fuel50, Hitch, just to name a few of those marketplaces, Reejig, just to name a few of them that because the organizations are starting to see that these marketplaces are essential for connecting the skills of the workforce to the work while sending the workforce the signals as to what skills are being demanded and how they can close their skill gaps.

And workforce planning, to the question that Cynthia asked in the poll, which I was quite intrigued to see that there was a rather small percentage of you that were planning to have skills-based workforce planning, but we are seeing that start to come to the fore in many organizations around the world. And I'll illustrate this example in a few minutes.

And then on the far right, this is what I think of as being agile on steroids. We know many organizations have gone down the agile pathway, but one of the things that has often stymied that progress is this notion of work being bound up in jobs. Even as they move to squads and tribes, the job is still the currency of work.

And you'll see shortly an example of an organization that moved to a completely skills-based system. All the work was still being done by employees, but they were being connected to work through the marketplace. So the marketplace really does become that central orchestrator, if you will, for connecting people to work. So three models that we're seeing many organizations embrace.

And if I think of the distribution of work increasingly with some of the most progressive companies that have had the chance to look at, if at the beginning 100% of work was done in the far left, we're seeing organizations where potentially 30% of work may be on the left, 50% to 60% might be in the middle, and potentially between 5% to 15% or 20% might be on the far right where you've got these completely agile pools that are connecting to work through skills architectures.

And if we go to the next slide, the thing that is compelling many organizations to act and to move to the right, frankly the exponential gains they've seen along the lines of the metrics that you see on the bottom of the slide. So whether it's reduce time to fill.

In one of the initial starting points for many organizations who use these marketplaces is, boy, this is a way to supercharge our job boards and make emerging positions more visible to the talent we have today and match them up. So it's a way to fill jobs.

But as they move towards more agile ways of working, as they move towards skill-based architectures, we're seeing exponential gains in productivity, and speed, and agility. And I'll share in a second an example with you of one organization that saw 600% gain in productivity of their digital talent. So I'm hoping these three models make some sense.

What I'd like to do now is maybe jump into two examples before I hand off to Andrew who is going to take us deeper into the marketplace. So I talked about the flexible model. And the story I love to share about this is Unilever. I've had the privilege of working with then CHRO, Leena Nair and the great HR team at Unilever since 2017, and was asked originally to help the organization develop their framework for the future of work.

And the reason that I was asked to help work with them on that was Alan Jope, the CEO, and Leena Nair had this narrative that every day our business model is changing. We've got new competitors, we've got startups, we're making decisions about our portfolio, we're making technology decisions. So our business models are perpetually reinventing yet somehow those signals don't get down to all of our talent.

How do we ensure that our talent understands and has that mindset of perpetual reinvention while ensuring that they can meet the needs of themselves and their families? And so they started with reinventing and rethinking performance management. I haven't met the CHRO yet who isn't dissatisfied with his or her performance management process.

And what Unilever did was to say, we're going to have these four questions, which are going to be raised with our talent every year and these four questions about indexing to our purpose. And some of you may know Unilever is an organization that is quite steeped in purpose, whether it's their brand, or their company, or their talent.

And these four questions lead to a future fit plan that's made up of essentially two parts, how you'll ensure the continued well-being of yourself and your family, and then secondly, how you'll ensure your continued professional relevance.

Will you be upskilled for the job that you're in today? Because that job is going to change, it's never going to be static. Or could you be reskilled for an alternative job within the organization? And what are the skill gaps that you have and what are the learning resources you need to close those skill gaps? Or alternatively, if you decide to move elsewhere, how do we ensure that are equipped to move to a position where you can successfully contribute?

So instead of traditional outplacement, how do we give you a stipend? And how do we ensure your continued relevance by upskilling or upskilling you? That then led to the introduction of the internal marketplace. And as some of you may have seen in Alan Jope's latest letter to his shareholders last year, 40,000 people at Unilever in 2020 actually took on projects, assignments, and gigs at the height of the pandemic and it allowed the organization to respond to the pandemic in a fundamentally different way.

Now, most of this talent are in full time jobs, but they have the space, and the time, and the capacity to express their skills in different projects, assignments that were mission critical for the organization or to go acquire new skills, and experiment, and learn new things, and understand where their passions might take them within the Unilever construct.

And the last thing that I'll share about Unilever is this journey of perpetual reinvention and moving to greater flexibility is now led to the uFLEX program. And uFLEX is a program, to go back to where I started, of basically trying to get to meet as many people as possible on their individual terms, the flexibility really being at the heart of the model.

So if you're a retiree, who's choosing to transition out, can we give you a stipend to stay as a part of our community and provide you with project-based incentives as you contribute, as you mentor the next generation, et cetera? So this journey towards flexibility all based on the notion of giving people access to opportunities to express their skills and acquire new skills elsewhere.

So that's that middle column of flexibility. OK. Go to the next slide. I'd like to then share and we can probably go one click forward, I think, thank you, an example of that far right model, what was the flow model, what I call agile on steroids. And this is a story that I was really, really privileged for John and I to be able to tell in the book.

So this organization is one of the largest insurance companies in the world. And they were increasingly being stymied by how little leverage they were getting from their data scientists. So that customer analytics function, which did really cool and sexy work was able to get the talent, they could pay the market premiums, but HR couldn't get any data scientists, claims and underwriting couldn't get any data scientists.

And so what they saw were these pockets of immense wealth and pockets of poverty in the organization and the recognition that data science was going to be foundational to everything they as a company did. And so the leadership team made the decision to blow up this job family.

They pulled them out of the geographies and the functions and they created this virtual cloud-based organization. And in their desire to move towards a skills-based structure, did not replicate or recreate this job family in this cloud-based structure. Instead they put all of the talent into one job code in workday, but the idea being that job code would establish a baseline for compensation against which they would flex actual pay based on skill-based premiums.

And now the talent would connect to work through projects and assignments. They were all employees, they just weren't going to connect to work through jobs, they were going to connect to work through projects and assignments. So let me give you an example.

So let's say I'm the person who runs Australia and I need to set up a new direct to consumer channel, so in the good old days, I would go on and open a rack for a UI UX designer and perhaps a data scientist. Well, today, I sit down with the head of the new HR center of expertise that is responsible for teaching managers and working with managers to design projects because managers don't generally have the capability to design projects because most of the work is being done in jobs.

So now I sit down with Cynthia, who's my COE lead and we spec out this direct to consumer channel. Well, we need a customer interface, that's going to require a mobile website, that's going to require UI and UX design skills, and it's going to take this long to get that done.

I need a recommendation engine that's going to recommend products to existing customers, well, that's going to require some analytics and it's going to require Python skills to program those analytics. You get the picture. So we spec out this project and then the project is dropped into the marketplace.

The marketplace then is looking at this pool of talent. They started off originally with all their data scientists, but this was so wildly successful they expanded it to all that digital talent after 18 months. So we dropped the project into the marketplace and the marketplace is looking at four things.

It's looking at, who's got the skills to do the work? It's looking at who's got the interest? Or who's going to benefit developmentally from doing the work? So if I'm that five star Python developer, I might go high on interest. But if I've done five direct to consumer channels, I'm going to score really low on that interest quotient because I'm not going to benefit from doing another direct to consumer channel, someone else would.

The third variable is who has the capacity to do the work? Do I have six months at 50% time to do the work? And the fourth screen, probably the most important one, is that diversity, equity, and inclusion screen. In most organizations if you think of work being done in jobs, our ability to address DNI is incredibly episodic.

We do it when we hire someone, we do it when we make a pay decision, we do it when someone's position changes. In a pure project-based environment, you've literally got 100 if not thousands of opportunities to address DNI. And so what the algorithm does is that it looks at the diversity of different talent pools.

So let's say my pool of five star Python developers is all hypothetically Asian men and by giving me that project the diversity of the pool is not at all increased, in fact, it's going to remain what it is. However, we have a four star Python developer who has the skills to do the work, but has never done a direct to consumer channel before and that might be an African-American female.

And by giving her access to this work, she gets elevated into that five star pool because doing a direct to consumer channel was a condition of entry into that five star pool and that in turn drives the wage premium.

And so if you think about it, all of these projects give you an opportunity to assess diversity, equity, and inclusion literally hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of a year. I want to just end the story with three really interesting findings that they did not anticipate.

The first was, and Cynthia alluded to this at the beginning, as work changes the signals we send to our talent so they can reskill are incredibly opaque if visible at all. And what you have with the marketplace is because you've got the volume, and velocity, and variability of work going through the marketplace, now the algorithm is able to infer and send signals.

So because with all the work being done in the marketplace you have a clear sense of demand, the algorithm knows the supply of skills and it's able to assess where the skill gaps are. So I, again, is that five star Python developer, get an email from the algorithm that says, hey, Rovin. Demand for Python on our marketplace is trending down and instead we're seeing demand for Julia trend upwards.

Here's access to two learning resources that will get you upskilled and Julia and you can complete these courses over the next three months. So now you've got that direct signal from demand to supply to the skill gaps and interventions to close those skill gaps. And this was happening literally dozens of times a day with all the projects that were being done.

The second key finding, I mentioned that they had a skill space to pay structure. So base pay was a function of the skills you had and everyone had an incentive, which is tied to the success of every project that you were on. But for those of you who've done this a while as I have, you may remember back in the '90s we had something quite similar, and it was called competency-based pay.

And competency-based pay in the '90s died a quick death because I and many of my colleagues received these nice emails from company CEOs that said, well done. You've put this new competency-based pay architecture in. Thank you for single-handedly elevating our wage structure without a commensurate improvement in profitability or productivity.

And so this organization's answer to that problem was, we're going to get this great massive skills price data for data scientists. But the actual change in pay, the actual skill premium is a function of our ability to commercialize those skills, not just what the market is saying, but what we can actually do with those skills. And because the marketplace knows how quickly or how inefficiently we commercialize skills. The marketplace is the best indicator of what that premium should be.

And the last learning from a leadership development perspective was as more and more work was being done in the marketplace, more of the supervision and coordination was being taken on by the market.

And it left the managers, quote unquote, "free" to focus on the things that we ask them to do all the time, coach, develop, mentor that team that they have within their stewardship for the nine months that project is running, not focused at time on the nuts and bolts of supervision and coordination.

So I'm hoping that case studies is a good example of the power of that more agile way of having a pure skills-based ecosystem versus one that's tied to jobs. I'm going to hand it to Andrew now to take us to the next phase.

Thanks, Rovin. There was some really tremendous insights around those case studies that I'm sure everybody found really valuable. We'll just jump to the next slide. And I mean, what I wanted to do is just over the next 10 minutes or so is really just talk about I suppose the role of technology, and really what's happening, and what we're seeing in the market at the moment.

I'll have to disclose that I am a little bit of a HR technology tragic, I find it terribly interesting. I also find it terribly frustrating that, unfortunately, HR just hasn't really leveraged the technology that is available over the years.

And we've been much, much better, but I think one of the things that excites me most about this place is because while the HRS platforms really looked at automating the key HR verticals, the talent marketplace is really around allowing HR to be a lot more strategic and impacting the business outcomes more significantly than we ever have. So for me it's a pretty exciting piece in terms of where we're at.

Just on the talent marketplace, just even that name, I think one of the things we need to call out first is that has been used interchangeably by a lot of the different vendors at the moment. And broadly the vendors have similar platforms with various different modules.

But in essence we are talking about two key different things. So we're talking about what's referred to as workforce intelligence in the system and the other component is really around the talent marketplace that rather than spoke about.

So let me just talk a little bit about the workforce intelligence piece first because I think that's-- and there was a question that I just read on the Q&A and I might try to answer some of that in this session.

In terms of workforce intelligence, that's really all about the AI and that's really about getting the employee, so looking at your systems, your core HR, getting your employees into the platform, and then the AI, in a couple of different ways having a look and creating that skills framework or that skills ontology within your organization.

So how does it do it? It looks at basically-- it'll scrape the data that's out there that may be linked, other data, but it also has its own AI where it's saying for these roles that you've put into the system, these are the skills that we've got.

There was a question around, how do you validate the skills? And that is something that this is emerging with the technology platforms because there are certain skills that through either assessments or other forms, organizations are going to want to have validated. So the third part of that is really getting the employee.

So the technology platforms will say that they can create that skills framework for you with that employees going in, but that only probably gives you somewhere around 50% to 60% of a total view of your skills within your organization.

The [INAUDIBLE] is obviously having everyone in your organization go in, fill in their view of their skills, and then, as I said, that secondary question of which of the skills you want to try to validate within your organization that are critical to really having that validation process in there?

That then gives you, as I said, what's referred to as that workforce intelligent pace. And how do you use that? So there's various ways. One of the most obvious ways is it can start to inform your job architecture and also your skills framework.

Now, one of the questions we get is, does this replace the job architecture? Now, I think when you think about Raven's model around the fixed flow and flexible, what we're really saying there is that the interrelatedness between your traditional job architecture and your skills framework is something that organizations are going to need to work through and understand in terms of how do they think about skills in an organization.

So certainly that workforce intelligence piece can help you think about your traditional job architecture model, but equally important start to put you down that journey of understanding that skills framework as well within the organization.

Probably most importantly one of the things that will be able to do is with strategic workforce planning. That's always been an area, I think, for most organization that's been the Holy Grail. How do we get to the next three to five years and align our business strategy to our overall skills and where we are today?

So the workforce intelligence component of a talent marketplace gives you that really robust understanding of the skills that you have today if you've done the work around, well, what's our business strategy and the skills that we need in the next five years?

And we're doing and talking with many organizations who are in that position now because their organizations are changing, the skills that they need to drive the organization where they want to be sometimes are 40%, 50%, 60% difference to the skills they have today. So what is that delta between those two?

And then you can start to really work through what are the strategies that you're going to get there. So the traditional buy and build and everything else that goes with that. But what does that roadmap look like around getting to that endpoint around that strategic workforce plan that organizations need?

So there's a lot that can be done in the SWB space. Rovin mentioned the DEI, clearly it's that workforce intelligent component of a talent marketplace can provide some great insight into the DEI of an organization, and where we're paying for skills, and where are we not, and how does that actually look like from an equity perspective.

The other big component about the talent marketplace is what's now referred to as the talent marketplace. And some of the areas that really impacts is things like your talent acquisition. So traditionally we're still hiring for jobs and looking at in a very linear way, what are the types of jobs people have done previously? And then are they able then to do this job and in terms of our organization?

The talent marketplace then can start to say, well, actually can we think about those jobs in terms of roles? And then so then can we actually hire for transferable skills and hire laterally in people who may not have actually done a job that exactly has that similar job title, but has been able to demonstrate all of those skills that we need?

I mean, that then significantly opens up that external marketing of that external market in terms of available resources to fill those jobs. So being able to do that from a talent acquisition from an external, but then obviously there's a lot of discussion.

And Rovin gave both those examples of case studies around the internal pace and how the projects and the gig work can really be leveraged through a talent marketplace once you have an understanding of the skills within your organization.

Similarly around the succession, again, traditionally and for most organizations, succession is based on the roles that you have done. And again, if you think about all the talent pools internally that you might be missing around the roles because there's all this transferable skills that people have got, but they're not on your succession plans because they haven't done the roles that you've identified as being needed to be done.

So it really does open up, again, a significant talent pool, impacts DEI, a whole bunch of benefits around them, how do you move your organization forward from a succession piece. One of the other areas is around careers. And I think I'll put careers and learning together in this of talent marketplace.

So people can start to genuinely think about, what are the skills that I want to develop? But not necessarily in the context of the roles that I want to go to, but more in the context of, what are the skills that the organization are actually saying we need moving forward?

And then if we're starting to advertise for work to be done internally based on skills as opposed to roles, people are potentially more willing to think through different career paths and again, opening up that talent pool.

So the one thing I'll say is that the talent marketplace technology is not about the technology in itself, it really is so much broader that organizations need to think about. There's so many different areas that the technology is going to allow organizations to leverage right across the HR verticals.

And there's a lot of talk about that very small bit around the talent marketplace and that's a great place to start for organizations in terms of internal mobility and moving people around based on their skills. But as you can just see from this one, I won't call it a simple slide part or it's a very busy slide, there are many different things that need to be thought through.

So I'll just go to the next slide and pause on this slide because that is the other question we get asked a lot, and how are we helping organizations get started? So whether it's something as simple as a visioning workshop around we are here today, where do we want to get to in the next three to five years?

Some organizations are looking at doing a value creation study to see a more comprehensive business case to see where and how do we get this off the ground and how do we make sure that the whole organization is bought into this?

Other organizations are starting by understanding their job architecture and then understanding what their skills framework would look like if they move to that fixed flow and flexible model. What does that look like for the roles?

So there are a lot of different entry points for this and there's not necessarily a single entry point that is right. It really does depend on the maturity of your organization and some of the work that you might have done previously to get you to a point that you can start to think about the implementation of the technology to support it.

Some organizations have started with the technology and gone back and thought about, how do we actually think about a skills framework now? So for me, it really is thinking about, well, where do you want to get to? What's the endpoint? What's the next three to five years look like? And then go from there. So I'll throw back to Cynthia, I think it is, or Anne.

Yes, throw it back to me. All right. So I'm going to just rest on this slide for one moment. And we have a few questions coming through the Q&A, which is fantastic to see. So we'll see if we can get to as many of them as possible.