Skills Intelligence: How Skills-Based Organizations Are Redefining Workforce Growth

As technology evolves faster than organizations can respond, the value of skills over titles continues to heighten. More organizations are re-evaluating their approach to hiring and internal mobility, focusing less on roles, credentials and tenure, and instead recognizing high performing individuals for their inherent capabilities, learning agility and ambition for growth.

We spoke with Nina Huntemann, former Chief Academic Officer of Chegg and a seasoned educational leader with over two decades of experience building evidence-based learning experiences. She discussed the shifts in how people build skills today, the role of L&D leaders in making learning stick, and skills as the true currency of work.

Why Course Consumption Isn’t Enough

Traditional learning models measure activity, like enrollments and hours of training, rather than knowledge acquisition. Huntemann points out that these metrics are not proof of skill building, as consuming content doesn’t necessarily translate into skill development. 

This misconception, she says, is one of the most common conflations in the learning and development space, as the concepts of knowledge acquisition and skill development get packaged into the same performance indicator: completion data.

What we’re seeing is that we’re finally moving away from content consumption as a proxy for learning into something more authentic and measurable.

Nina Huntemann

To count a skill as “developed,” employees need to demonstrate that skill through changed behavior and improved performance. Huntemann suggests that, after an employee completes their training, you ask yourself if they can: 

• do something that they couldn’t do before 
• apply that skill consistently in their work 
• produce better outcomes 

This way, you’re not measuring metrics on the surface, but also diving into what they mean for on-the-job applications.

Making Skill Development Stick

According to Forbes, 40 years ago, the average lifespan of skills was at least 10 years. Today, that number has shrunk to four years, with more technical skills averaging around 2-2.5 years. With AI accelerating skill decay, it’s imperative that employees are not only upskilling in the right areas, but also ensuring that the learning is lasting.  

Huntemann says that, in order to make learning experiences stick, all learning and HR leaders responsible for creating them must consider the following best practices behind learning science: 

• Embedding retrieval processes into the experience:
  “The struggle to retrieve information, literally having to catch it from our memory, is the work of creating long-term knowledge and long-term skills,” she says. This is a process that needs to happen over time, repetitively. If you’re asking employees to retrieve information only once in order to complete their course, you’re unknowingly placing them in the forgetting curve, which is the rate in which learners forget new information if not exposed to situations that prompt them to retain it.  
• Application in authentic contexts:
  Knowledge is built by constantly exposing employees to situations in which they’ll need to access what they learned. Ensuring that the learning doesn’t stop at theory will equip employees with the skill to recognize the real, on-the-job moments in which the content they’ve learnt is useful. 
• Reinforcement through feedback:
  Providing actionable feedback that suggests better alternatives for next opportunities is key, with the intention of creating spaces where employees can practice and improve as they progress in their learning journey. 
• Personalization of pathways:
  “You can identify a skill that is a gap in an employee or in an organization,” Huntemann says. “But have you done the assessment to understand where are people on the bridge today?”
  Understanding employee’s inherent skills is critical to discovering the heights they can reach in the future. Tailoring learning to each individual is one of the main driving factors of adoption, engagement and growth, as it fuels employees with purpose and clarity on what to do next. Tools like SkillsWave’s Guide feature easily automate the process for you using the latest labor market data. 

Managers As Development Beacons

Huntemann urged L&D leaders to explore a potential skill gap they might be overlooking: a manager’s ability to guide employees in their development. “The skills that a manager needs in this area overlap a lot with the skills that a great teacher or a great coach has.” Managers require a framework to champion employees in their learning, talk about skills, steer career conversations, and link learning to real growth in the organization.  

Our research matches her stance. We surveyed 1,000 employees in Canada and the United States and found that 56% of employees heavily rely on formal feedback from their managers to help them identify their own skill gaps, but they lack the knowledge and/or experience to navigate employee learning conversations. Enabling managers to understand how to do so is key to making learning meaningful.

Creating a Skills-First Ecosystem

“You aren’t your title, you’re your skills,” says Huntemman. “Internal mobility is freed up much more [as a result].” With companies shifting their focus from retention to high potential (HiPo) employees, degrees and job titles are steadily losing their once-coveted position and being displaced by skills and the drive to learn.  

As such, L&D leaders need to have a strong grasp on what skills their employees already have, identifying what gaps remain and building a personalized development plan.  

This change, and the need to make evidence-based decisions about talent development, requires L&D departments to have a solid skills intelligence strategy. This gives learning leaders higher visibility on skill inventories and helps them identify skill gaps earlier. If you’re looking for more information on skills intelligence and where to start, check out our free Skills Intelligence Playbook.