Upskilling, Reskilling, and Evolving Your Talent with Workforce Intelligence

AI and skills intelligence have fundamentally changed how we discover, hire, develop, and retain employees.

Enterprises that are equipped with the right intelligence can upskill and reskill employees faster — creating a more capable and resilient workforce.

In this session from "Experience Phenom: Talent Marketplace" with Phenom’s own Cliff Jurkiewicz and Kumar Ananthanarayana, we introduce a framework that leverages skills, competencies, data-driven career models, and artificial intelligence to enable talent mobility and career development at scale — ultimately enhancing the employee experience for large enterprises. We also highlighted how workforce intelligence can provide unique supply and demand insights across your business. 

Keep reading for highlights or watch the full session below. 




The role of skills in assessing organizational status 

We’ve always used skills within every industry across the globe. Resumes are full of compilations of soft and hard skills that accurately describe job seekers and what they can bring to an organization. But recently, workforce intelligence has started utilizing skills in a new way. 

By leveraging artificial intelligence to analyze skills, related competencies, and additional contexts, HR leaders can get a better understanding of what their workforce is capable of, who’s available to upskill into future roles, and what state the business is really in. 

Machine learning unlocks skills and competencies data to deliver valuable insights that drive better decision-making across the enterprise, allowing leaders to predict where the organization might be in the future, and what workforce skills are needed to transform ambitious goals into reality. 

With Phenom Talent Marketplace, leaders gain visibility into four key elements within their organization: 

• What their employees and individual teams are equipped to accomplish. These data points allow leaders to assess what skills each individual, team, and department possess to better understand what the organization is equipped to handle as a whole. 

• The work requirements needed to achieve company-wide goals and objectives. Without this set of data, it’s hard to identify any skill gaps in the workforce that might hinder progress toward achieving company goals. For long-term success, it’s imperative that there is alignment between the skills of the organization and the skills that are needed to meet those goals. 

• Collective learning opportunities that foster upskilling and reskilling. By assessing the learning and development offerings that are available for an individual and organization as a whole, leaders can gain insight into how the business can evolve over time. Upskilling, reskilling, and redeploying talent is critical when creating a more agile workforce. 

• What competitors are doing in the verticals the company operates in. Competitor data sets allow for a greater understanding of what’s working well in the market, highlighting room for improvement across the enterprise to stay competitive within the spaces they operate. It also showcases what’s not working to illustrate areas for improvement. 

“In times of economic uncertainty, this data becomes critical to an organization,” said Cliff. With these comprehensive data sets powered by AI and machine learning, businesses can clearly visualize the skills and competencies available within their workforce and what skill gaps need to be filled in order to reach their full potential. 

Related: Futureproof your Workforce: the Importance of Upskilling and Reskilling

How the hiring market has changed for the better

Before the pandemic, companies in every industry were hyper-focused on growth at any cost. The reality of escalated growth was unsustainable, and now, top organizations are realizing that there’s a better way to scale the business. Instead of hypergrowth, efficient growth is much more valuable. 

Leveraging data to make informed decisions about budget spending, hiring dollars, and estimated results create new opportunities for leaders to shift away from the traditional ebb and flow of quick growth followed by contraction periods. 

With improved insight into how an influx of resources drives results in a certain area of the business, enterprises can expand their focus to the second critical aspect of efficient growth: sustainability. 

Benchmarks can be established using data sets to highlight trends for both efficient and sustainable growth throughout the business. Powered by the data collected in the four areas discussed earlier, this AI-powered feedback loop provides real-time snapshots of the business and continues to inform leaders over time about what’s working and not working, creating a reliable foundation for efficient, scalable growth. 

This transition from hypergrowth to mindful and long-term growth is a healthy approach to hiring and business operations, creating a more stable environment for employees, job seekers, and leadership alike. 

The importance of skills for individuals 

Skills identification traditionally is a manual process. Most employees and job seekers list a handful of skills they think they possess to highlight their expertise in a given field — which typically ranges from 15 to 20 skills. 

However, AI and machine learning can add context to those skills to show a bigger picture that more accurately represents each individual and what they bring to the table. It does this by understanding the interconnectivity between certain skills, years of experience, and other inputs. As a result, the list of skills that an individual identifies with can broaden from ~20 to upwards of 100 skills. 

Related: CHROs can nurture employee growth through skills. Here's How.

“By showing them the depth of the skills they have, we give them an opportunity to better represent themselves and give them a higher degree of confidence,” said Cliff. At Phenom, our Talent Marketplace leverages this updated data to highlight career pathing, learning and development opportunities, and potential mentors that align best with each employee. 

This combination of contextual understanding of skills from AI and a user-friendly interface provides a unique opportunity for leaders and employees to understand what upskilling opportunities are available to better prepare the workforce for future business needs — improving visibility across the entire enterprise.

The positive impact of Phenom Enterprise Talent Intelligence 

According to our data, the number one reason for talent attrition is a lack of career development and personal upskilling opportunities. But the current process of department analyses looking at skills, competencies, and proficiencies is a laborious process that creates end results talent managers may not know how to interpret or take action on. 

The biggest issue with this approach is that employees are still left in the dark about their potential opportunities for growth within a company, which can spark their desire to look elsewhere when they’re ready to take on new challenges. 

Phenom Enterprise Talent Intelligence provides an updated solution to this outdated process — putting skills, competencies, and proficiencies data at the fingertips of those who need it the most. We do this by getting the key stakeholders into the same platform to drive the data, provide insights, and share information. 

This new offering “showcases insight into the intelligence that we have developed within a particular organization,” stated Kumar. The framework that supports this holistic solution is made up of four layers: the foundational layer, context layer, feedback or human-in-the-loop layer, and the AI-enhanced experience layer. 

These layers come together to create a greater understanding of a workforce from the ground up — including high-performing individuals, flight risks, skills gaps, required competencies, and more. With these insights, enterprises can understand their business and workforce in greater detail, improving visibility and creating a foundation for efficient, sustainable, and predictable growth. 

Achieve efficient, sustainable growth with Phenom 

At Phenom, we focus on creating valuable solutions that help engage and develop employees while fostering long-term retention. With the right tools and data, your business can achieve ambitious growth in a sustainable, efficient way. 

Pairing skills intelligence with machine learning and AI allows HR leaders and C-suite executives to explore what their workforce is capable of, who’s available to fill future roles, what skills gaps need to be closed, and more. 

Ample intelligent data housed in a single platform supports key stakeholders throughout the business — from employees to leaders — and creates personalized experiences that boost engagement, development, and retention throughout the enterprise. 

To explore how Phenom can improve the way your business engages, evolves, and retains talent, book a personalized demo.