The Skills-Powered Organisation: a conversation with Standard Chartered
Kate Bravery, Global Leader of Talent Advisory at Mercer, is joined by Ravin Jesuthasan, Mercer’s Global Transformation Leader, and Tanuj Kapilashrami, Chief Strategy and People Officer at Standard Chartered Bank, to discuss The Skills-Powered Organisation: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise, their recently released book.
Together, they explore the concept of skills-powered organisations and their transformative potential in the workplace. They discuss the shift from traditional job structures to a focus on skills as the currency of work and highlight the need for organisations to adopt a systemic approach to talent management that aligns with business strategy. Tanuj shares insights from her experience at Standard Chartered Bank, detailing how they integrated skills development into their growth agenda and engaged employees in the transformation process. Ravin stresses the importance of understanding the economic implications of skills-powered practices and the need for organisations to be agile in responding to changing work demands.
Interesting moments:
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Thriving amid uncertainty
A job is built for predictability and stability. However, once we gain insight into the skills we possess, we can understand how they can be redeployed and transformed to remain relevant. This is pivotal for enabling businesses to not just survive but thrive in an uncertain volatile environment. -
Building for reinvention
A skills-powered organisation is one that is built to reinvent itself. It can more seamlessly respond to the dramatic changes in work that we are witnessing, transitioning from the traditional legacy model of large job structures to the micro building blocks of skills and tasks. -
Standard Chartered’s journey
Our journey at Standard Chartered started with us talking about jobs and traditional strategic workforce planning but thinking about jobs that are going away and new jobs that are emerging and overlaying that with skills. We put a dollar number on what it would take us to reskill and redeploy as opposed to hiring externally. -
A culture of learning
Building a strong culture of learning is critical. We do a global learning week where everyone learns together focusing on three or four areas from our Future Skills Academy. It’s systemic skill building around both technical and human skills, and we’ve seen a 10% increase in internal deployment versus external hiring.