Hire to Retire

OVERVIEW

Like local currency or grades, Skills are a means of simplifying a complex concept into a commonly accepted form. And just like grades don’t show the whole story of the student, skills are not a perfect representation of the worker and the proficiencies that workers have and exhibit. Skills are a simplification that works well to communicate different capabilities to a broad audience of peers and workmates.

“Workday's emphasis on technology has overshadowed outlining the practical benefits of skills thinking, leaving customers unsure about the transition.

A lack of consensus on skills definitions and terminology exacerbates internal and external confusion, and the distinction between skills and competencies remains blurred, hindering customer adoption.”

If we refocus Workday’s skills efforts into more of a Skills as an Approach, as George Margrove has suggested, we can break it down into three main areas of focus:

• Skill Inventory

• Knowing Which Skills Matter

• Better Decision Making

  
  

This Skills as an Approach methodology easily allows our client’s to determine which skills matter within their company using existing tools within Workday. Where we need to focus our efforts are within the Skills Inventory area, more on that below.

Once these two things (Which Skills Matter and Skill Inventory) are adequately propagated, it will directly aid in Better Decision Making around hiring, promotions, performance management, as well as to help their employees with their own growth and development within the company.

BUSINESS NEEDS

Workday’s customers in general have three main goals:

• Reduce Costs

• React To Changes

• Seize Opportunities To Help Their Company Grow The Business And Increase Revenue

How can UX help in this and what role does skills play in it all?

By focusing on the Worker experience around skills we can directly and positively impact the three main goals of the company by increasing the capabilities of the company’s skill inventory.

WHICH SKILLS MATTER

Clients need ways in which to determine which skills matter for specific roles and teams help companies make better decisions. This is currently possible through auditing their own skills within Skills Cloud and the specific roles and skills needed.

SKILL INVENTORY

In order for clients to be able to successfully determine which skills their employees need and/or have, they need a reliable means of tracking employee’s skills.

At the base, Workday offers Skills Cloud as a means to reliably manage all skills within a company (there is also the additional support for tenanted skills relevant to each business only). Although this technology is robust, it is lacking in several aspects, namely categorization.

Currently, Skills Cloud is just one pool of skills for the Worker to sift, including:

• Suggested Skills when editing their Skill Profile

• Skills acquired from Learning or Flex Teams

• Skills required for select opportunities (Flex Teams, Jobs, etc.)

• Skill Interests for helping to build their path for their next steps in their career

A basic categorization between Hard Skills and Soft Skills would help aid in easier cognition of what suggested or acquired skills are and how they pertain to the company’s goals. It would also help with easier management of Skill Levels in that Hard Skills are easier to measure a Worker’s proficiency.

BETTER DECISION MAKING

By understanding Which Skills Matter and having a clear view of the company’s Skill Inventory, clients already have the two main keys to Better Decision Making.

The problem, however, is that the Worker has no real incentive to manage their skills on a day-to-day basis. As such, no matter how well a client’s management team understands Which Skills Matter, they will never have a proper Skills Inventory.

In order for Workday to provide customers with a proper method for being able to determine which skills their employees have, we need to help bridge the gap for the Worker on ways to incentivize them to maintain their skill profiles and to rate themselves and gather peer feedback on their skill profiles.

AREAS OF OPPORTUNITY

Basic categorization of hard vs. soft skill for all of Skills Cloud

Inventory of Skills (see more below)

THE STORY OF THE WORKER

The Worker, as pertains to their career/job, wants “a sense of purpose, room for growth and development, and professional feedback”.

The Worker has no real incentive to manage their skill profile or to rate themselves on (or get peer’s to review) their core skills, beyond trying to get a promotion or new role.

In addition, they have “skepticism over whether these ratings [are] completed by knowledgeable experts”.

With no real incentive to maintain their individual skill profiles, innate skepticism around skill ratings, and the difficulty of translating how maintaining skill profiles will lead to more sense of purpose and room for growth and development, how do we get workers to manage their skill profiles? How do we help Workers with maintaining a sense of purpose, with creating incentive to maintain their skill profile, and with helping abate their sense of skepticism?

“Skills do not tell the whole story of me”

Workers are not defined by the skills which they have obtained with their years of experience. Their Skill Profile is but a chapter of their work selves. Like a country’s currency does not tell the whole story of the country’s level of well being, skills are just a part of the story.

To the Worker, skill profiles are akin to their resume. It is something that is managed and maintained only at those times when they need it: when looking for a new role or job.

In order for Workday to provide customers with a proper method for being able to determine which skills their employees have and at what levels, we need to help bridge the gap for the Worker on ways to both incentivize them and simplify how to help them to maintain their skill profiles.

Incentivization is not directly within Workday’s proverbial wheelhouse. But the things that are in Workday’s wheelhouse are leveraging data, machine learning, and generative AI, which can directly be applied to help lessen the burden we are placing on the Workers by pre-seeding their skill profiles based on their day-to-day work experiences.

TL/DR: To incentivize the Worker and simplify how to maintain their Skill Profile.

WHAT A COMPANY WANTS/WHAT A COMPANY NEEDS

What Workday user’s companies are ultimately needing to do is react to change and seize opportunities to grow the business and increase revenue.

To do this, they need to know which employees have what skills and at what level. They need to know if they need to hire new employees that have these skills or if they can grow or reskill existing employees to gain these skills.

In short, they need:

• To motivate/get employees to maintain their Skill Profile

• So that they have accurate skill data for employees

• So that they can aggregate employee skill data

• So that they can report on skill the business currently has

• So that they can compare current skills to skills needed (or will be needed in the future)

• So that they can identify specific skills needed no or in the future

• So that they can develop create coaching, mentoring, or learning opportunities to bridge existing skill gaps

• And/or they can identify what skills they need to hire externally

• So that they can develop hiring practices to hire external workers with the skills that can’t be built from within

• So that they can upskill employees by providing them with customized coaching, mentoring, or learning opportunities

• And/or they can reskill employees

• So that they can change employee behavior and incentivize them to learn new skills

• So that they can effectively hire qualified workers who have or can learn the skills needed by the company

  
  

All of this is so that the company can react to change and seize opportunities to help grow the business and increase revenue.

So if the overall goal of the company is to grow their business and increase revenue, the easiest way to do that is by helping the employee maintain their skill profile. Serving the Worker is serving the needs of the Manager/HR Professional when it comes to skills.

AREAS OF OPPORTUNITY

• Unified Skills Experience across all of Workday

• Utilize Automation in Maintaining Skill Profiles (Skills, Skill Ratings, etc)

• Implement Skill Level across more applications (Learning, etc.)

• Incentivize the Worker to Maintain their Skill Profile

• Historical Accounting

• Portability of the Skill Profile

UNIFIED SKILLS EXPERIENCE

The ways in which a Worker experiences skills across Workday differs greatly. In some instances, skills are:

• Simple text display of a skill the Worker may acquire via the opportunity without any context of whether that skill will be added to their Skill Profile

• Pills with appended numbers showing a number of Skill Sources/Evidences

• Pills with appended numbers showing a Skill Level

• Suggested Skills with no context as to why the skills are being suggested

• Lack of additional information about each skill (definition, criticality, skill level, related skills, etc.

• Cards with definitions and CTAs to display further details about the skill (Criticality, Opportunities to acquire the skill, Mentors, etc.) through Career Hub

A unified skill experience is needed where we no longer rely on a simple component (i.e., a pill) that was never intended to contain so much data to explain a skill to a Worker. We need to be able to show the user:

• Interactions available (Add, Remove, Dismiss)

• Definitions/Details (Click through, hover state displays, etc.)

• Display Details (Skill Level, Criticality, etc.)

MAINTAINING SKILL PROFILE

When a Worker is hired, we help to create their skill profile in Workday by parsing their work experience and job history using Text2Skills to create a list of skills for their Skill Profile.

Due to a lack of incentivization for the Worker to maintain their Skill Profile, there are key areas we can aid in helping them maintain their Skill Profile on a day-to-day basis with minimal input on their part, such as:

• Job Profile: A normal and gradual increase in experience of a skill based on performing the tasks critical to one’s job profile

• Opportunities: Participation in extended opportunities, such as Projects, Flex Teams, Goals, etc. automatically updates their skill profile

• Feedback: Through peer or management feedback with or without additional direct skill level rating

  
  

Requires a fail safe of human interaction to approve/dismiss maintenance requests.

AUTOMATICALLY ADD SKILLS TO SKILL PROFILE

Whenever a worker completes a Learning or an extended Opportunity, we can add additional skills based on their Job Profile, the Opportunity’s Role Profile (i.e., a specific role within a Flex Team), or the details of the completed Learning.

Each of these checkpoints of adding skills automatically to their Skill Profile would require a human interaction to confirm or decline the suggested additional updates to their Skill Profile using existing Workday applications like Notifications.

Additionally, we can tie into routine occurrences, such as Career & Progress Check-ins to encourage (or require) updates to the Worker’s Skill Profile, both to add content, and also to remove/edit content that may no longer be relevant.

AUTOMATED SKILL LEVEL

We can apply general Skill Levels to each skill based on simple determinants such as Relevance, Recency, and Duration during their initial onboarding into Workday.

In addition, we can maintain this throughout as they perform their day-to-day duties as well as take on additional opportunities (Flex Teams, Goals, Projects, etc.) as well as complete Learnings.

Each of these checkpoints can also have a human interaction to confirm or decline the suggested updates to their Skill Profile using existing Workday applications like Notifications.

One of the main critiques of Skill Level is skepticism from Workers. We need to improve how we explain both the individual levels and their definitions as well as where the ratings are coming from (peers vs. manager/leader) to help abate this skepticism.

HISTORICAL ACCOUNTING

One complaint common amongst our client’s is that many Worker’s have too many skills on their profile, thereby diluting the insights that can be taken into account. For instance, many clients in a recent DPG (Design Partner Group) mentioned that they had found 15-20 skills to be the ideal amount that a Worker has on their Skill Profile.

What happens when a user moves from an IC (Individual Contributor) role to a Management role? Their required skills would be quite different and so some basic culling would need to take place. What happens to those skills that are removed from their Skill Profile?

Skill Profiles should be able to track information historically about a Skill Profile, allowing for views from different times to better understand the career path of a specific worker as well as allow for searchability of skills across historical markers. This would allow for better understanding of what skills a workforce actually has so that there is better understanding around both current and previous matches for Skill Profiles and Job Profiles.

PORTABILITY

Each time a Worker retires from one company and moves to another, they must start from scratch to create a new Skill Profile. They will use all of the same data that they compiled at their previous company, but there will be no assurances or sources of experience beyond what the Worker enters into their Skill Profile.

If we could allow employees to manage and take with them their Skill Profile - and maintain the security of both their data and certifying their records - they would have a much greater sense of ownership over their Skill Profile, helping to alleviate the issue of not having an incentive to maintain their Skill Profile.

They could take their existing Skill Profile, with all of their experiences, historical data, and ratings, export it into a secure file format and upload it into their new employer’s instance of Workday.

Further, if their new employer doesn’t use Workday, they could still manage a version of it through a paid self-service portal for Workers to own, edit, and maintain their Skill Profile throughout their career.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our primary areas of focus should be around Skills Inventory. In order to allow clients to truly view, manage, and act upon their employee’s Skills Inventory, we need to create tools and means that more readily help and incentivize Workers to maintain their own Skill Profile.

The primary product focus should be on simplifying how skills are managed at the Worker by adding in automation, generative AI, and Machine Learning to help add, manage, and upkeep their Skill Profile.

Additionally, we should be spending significant efforts on helping Workers understand the importance of maintaining their Skill Profile for their own benefit (namely, career pathing, promotions, etc.).