WithYouWithMe Chief Customer Officer Cia Kouparitsas joined KPMG’s Jemma Horsley and the Australian Human Resource Institute (AHRI) for an engaging panel discussion on the power of skills in unlocking business potential and boosting diversity. Below are some of Cia's key insights from the session.
A skills-based model is all about considering the actual skills that are needed for specific jobs or projects. It’s a shift from the traditional qualification or competency model that typically determines someone’s suitability for a role based on their previous experience.
A way to think about it that makes it really clear for me is that the competency framework has its roots in the trade sector – where competency and qualifications form part of mitigating a risk outcome – and then it was retrofitted to the white collar/corporate sector. While there will always be a place for competencies and qualifications, we’re seeing skills frameworks and skills-based models explode because they’re more suited to the needs of the modern, tech-enabled workforce.
We’re a global HR tech company that helps organisations solve their end-to-end workforce challenges, but our journey with the skills-based model started in the social impact space with the vision of solving underemployment.
Underemployment is when someone is employed but not working to their full potential. We see underemployment everywhere in society and in most workplaces. But most commonly it’s in underrepresented communities – people who may not have been afforded the same opportunities to get a foot in the door or followed a traditional prep to year 12 education path. We do lots of work with these groups including neurodivergent individuals, Indigenous Peoples, military veterans and their families, youth, refugees and women in tech.
We know there is a significant demand for digital skills in the market, and our thinking was if we can help people become technologists, then they have a path to a fulfilling and future-proof career.
So, how did we do this? Well, we created a tech platform that draws on an approach honed by the country’s biggest employer: the military. We decided if the military can use aptitude testing, skills mapping and specialised training to get ordinary people doing extraordinary things, so too can other organisations. So that’s what our technology does – it tests, it maps, it trains and it deploys human assets.
And our model has proven so effective in supporting diverse individuals into tech careers that we soon had demand to apply the same approach to organisations’ internal workforces. So today, we’re aiming to solve underemployment at scale, by helping employers uncover and mobilise untapped potential and skills across their workforce. Essentially, we have operationalised skills-based employment.
We’ve been talking about ‘skills’ and hearing about the idea of a skills gap for a number of years – but it’s taken on a new meaning in the past 12 months with the pace of innovation we’re seeing across sectors. Digital transformation and the impact of generative AI means that the skills required to do any role are changing faster than organisations can keep pace with.
It’s a very different construct to the traditional workforce. 50, even 30 years ago, a job was typically for life. Same role, same skills. Today, skills have a much shorter life span – just 5 years according to IBM, and it’s because of the impact technology is having in changing roles at every level.
Every organisation needs tech skills or at least needs to have people who can learn tech skills – but not every organisation has a plan in place as to how they are going to grow or hire those skills – and so the skills gap grows.
A great example of why this matters so much is a project we recently did with the Australian Army into the impact of automation and augmentation on the Army’s workforce over the next 15 years. We did this work with our partners, Faethm AI, and we found that almost 50% of the entire workforce will be affected by both automation and augmentation. And more than 20% of all roles are expected to interact with augmented technologies, providing a 30% capacity gain across the workforce.
This means that more than 50% of Army’s workforce are going to need to upskill to be able to use new technologies as part of their existing roles or reskill into another area in instances where parts of their role have been automated. I can guarantee you this scenario is not isolated to just Defence. It’s happening at different scales across all of our workforces.
We have seen a skills-based workforce model deliver significant value and ROI across the enterprise, from reducing the cost of hiring, through to building engagement, increasing internal mobility and improving retention. The key to achieving these benefits is ensuring you have skills as a thread across the employee lifecycle and we use a process to do this called the ‘3 Cs’: clarity, capability and closure.
The first step is to achieve clarity on the skills needed to execute an organisation’s strategy successfully. We use tools, like the SFIA framework integrated with machine learning, to assist organisations in mapping their current roles based on the skills they require and creating function-wide or organisation-wide skills frameworks. This approach provides a clear, succinct signal to employees about the skills they need to master.
Next, we focus on assessing capability. Our platform, Potential, enables employees to self-assess their skills against the demand signal, and managers to rapidly validate these assessments. This dual approach ensures a consensus on capability.
The last part of the process is closure, where you can either implement precision upskilling to close the gap with existing employees, or otherwise recruit new personnel into the team to fill those skills gaps. In terms of upskilling plans, something that we’ve seen drive success is our product’s unique growth potential algorithm. This algorithm combines Big 5 psychometric results with our own aptitude testing to predict how much an individual will enjoy learning or executing a specific skill – think of it as identifying a person’s natural strength for a skill.
We use the growth potential algorithm to sequence learning plans, starting with the skill gap where the individual has the highest natural strength, giving them an early win and providing a motivational boost as they tackle harder and harder upskilling. This method has proven highly effective – our course completion rates are two and a half times higher than those of traditional MOOCs.
Request a demo to see our skills-based workforce management platform, Potential in action.
