The skills employees need today might look quite different from the skills they’ll need even just a few years from now. In fact, The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs report found that 44% of workers’ core skills are expected to change in the next five years.
To stay competitive, it’s imperative that organizations map the skills their employees need to be successful not only in today’s business environment, but also in tomorrow’s.
In this episode of The Business of Learning, we spoke with Rose Cartolari, founder and CEO of RC Consulting, and Lisa Paulson, CPTM, L&D manager at Nesnah Ventures, to learn more about skills mapping, and how it can help improve workforce readiness.
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Additional Resources:
- Article: 4 Skill Sets Employees Need for the AI-Driven Future
- Article: Every Employee Needs Sales Skills to Thrive
- Course: Training Needs Assessment Certificate
- Wiki: Professional Development Plan
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Hi, welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Egleston Schwartz, Editor-in-Chief at Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
And I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor. Today’s episode of The Business of Learning is brought to you by Training Industry Research.
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Sarah Gallo:
Today, the skills that employees need to be successful in a given job role are by no means static. They’re constantly evolving alongside business needs and market shifts, many of which are fueled by advancements in technologies, most recently in artificial intelligence. This has led to what’s called the “skills-based organization,” a business model that considers job roles in terms of the skills that employees need to execute key tasks and activities through a process called skills mapping to learn more about skills mapping and how to ensure that all employees and leaders have the skills needed to support the business. We’re speaking with Rose Cartolari, founder and CEO of RC Consulting, and Lisa Paulson, L&D manager at Nesnah Ventures. Rose, Lisa, welcome to the podcast.
Lisa Paulson:
Hi, hello!
Rose Cartolari:
Thank you for having us.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Yes, welcome. I’m very excited for this conversation today. To get started, can you both share how you define skills mapping?
Lisa Paulson:
Skills mapping is really just mapping out the skills, knowledge and abilities in each role that is needed for that person to be successful in their role, but also how they can be successful for the organization. It has to bring value to the organization.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, I wouldn’t add much to that except that it sounds deceptively simple,
And so a lot of people kind of nod their heads and say, yeah, we got that. The problem is identifying some skills that we don’t know we have, and then more importantly, thinking about what are the skills that we’re going to need for the future and is that a skill or is that just a personality and how do I tell the difference? How do I assess it? So that’s the tricky part, right, Lisa?
Lisa Paulson:
Definitely. It is quite a process once you begin and it can take a long time to make sure that it aligns with everything within the organization.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, absolutely, the future goals and future objectives
Sarah Gallo:
For sure. I love how you phrased that Rose, as it’s deceptively simple. And now that we’ve kind of touched on the what is skills mapping, I kind of want to dig into the how, because this isn’t easy, like you said. Do you have any best practices on how our listeners can actually go about this process and really determine those skills that are needed for a given job role?
Rose Cartolari:
I guess I’ll just jump in right here. There are some best practices. It’s kind of evolving because I think, as I said, we know what skills help us get here, but there’s not always clarity on what are those skills that we need moving forward. So what I have seen in the marketplace is the skills, the best practices involve having a real 360 view. So it’s understanding what are the skills that help me perform well today, but from a 360 perspective, from the person who’s actually doing the work to the people who are using the work, supervising the work, and will actually then have to deal with the outcome of the work. So it’s a real sort of broad stakeholder view of that. Then it’s also important to understand, well, what are my assessment criteria? Is this true if I change the situation? Is it true if I change the person, if is it true, if the market changes, if the market grows? And so all of this is really all about aligning that, as Lisa said earlier, to what are your business objectives? What is it that you want to reach? And again, as we said before, the trick is we don’t always know what that is because all kinds of changes are coming our way. So how do I build that flexibility into my skill identification, assessment, planning? And so all best practices that I’ve seen, and I don’t know Lisa, if this is, I assume this is consistent with what you’re seeing as well, is that it has to be flexible and enough and sort of wide enough that we’re getting multiple perspectives.
Lisa Paulson:
Exactly. I totally agree with you on that, Rose. We do need to make sure that we’re talking to many people. And one of the best practices that I would say too would be to do your research before you start talking to those experts, really get yourself into what that role is and how it affects business, how it brings value to the business, so that when you’re discussing that with them, you really have an understanding of the terminology that they’re using because we all have our jargon within our different departments, and you want to be able to understand that as well. It helps to have the conversation with them. They’re able to contribute more if you come with something already kind of on paper because then they can either say, oh, yes, you’re on the right track. Or they can say, “Oh, no, that’s not it at all.”
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, I was going to say Lisa, so you are making me think of … so putting it down on paper makes you put it down very carefully and to be very accurate in what it is that you’re asking. But the other thing it does is it also brings out your biases in black and white so that when people are reacting to it, what they’re also reacting to is a specific point of view or a specific business need or whatever those things that we don’t see. So I think that’s right on the mark, and I think this is where a lot of HR departments, but a lot of leaders I see fall down is that that discipline of not kind of winging it, just going for it, but actually the discipline of doing your research. What are other companies doing? What are companies that are ahead of me doing? What are my competitors that are ahead of me doing and writing that down? Because otherwise it’s just as we say in Italy, “fried air, just everybody speaking.”
Lisa Paulson:
Definitely. I would totally agree with that.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
I love those points. L&D leaders really need to do the research, put it on paper, really be strategic, and have those conversations with stakeholders and make sure they’re aligned and on the same page. So going into those conversations, being prepared for that. I love that. I would really love to hear both of you share your own experiences with skills mapping or maybe facilitating skills development in your career and experience.
Lisa Paulson:
We just launched our program for skills mapping this year at our organization and we call the tool that we developed for this a role card. It’s a one page overview for employees and their managers to be able to use to help them in creating value for themselves and for the organization. It shows transparency on those competencies that you need for that role. It’s based on the role and not the person who’s currently in the role, which is something that Rose had talked about earlier. We really need to make sure that we are looking at the role itself and not the person who’s currently in it. And then it also maps out what the possible next steps in the career could be and what you would need to have for competencies or behaviors to be able to go to that next level. It’s really helped us to not only start our skills assessments, but also we’ve been able to incorporate it into other programs such as succession planning, recruitment. Our recruiters have taken those competencies and skills and used them to help create their scripts for interviews. So we’ve been able to apply it in all different areas. It’s really helped employees see what they can do for themselves, and it helps them to start that conversation with their supervisor as well to be able to improve in those areas and what they would need to do to improve.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, what Lisa says completely resonates with me in terms of understanding what is required for role rather than is the expert, is Susie doing it or is Jack doing it the way we need to do? And that’s a really difficult thing to do. And of course the big challenge when you’re looking at a role is the more technical your job is, the more part of a larger process it is, the easier it is to define. I wanted to, you made me think of this example. I tend to work with very senior leaders, so these are people who kind of feel like I’ve arrived, and of course they have that was smarter and they got promoted and all of these things. So we don’t tend to think of, oh my goodness, perhaps my role is changing and so therefore the skills that I need are changing. So even this idea of skills mapping is actually new when you get to certain levels of leadership. And the example that I was thinking the other day is one of the things that HR brought forward from a survey was the skills needers need today as we’re going to this hybrid work. When we were all at home and everybody was there, we kind of all survived and we did the best we could, but now we’re going into this permanent model of we’re kind of at home, we’re kind of in the office, but how do you manage people? And specifically the young generation, we have an organization that I’m working with, they have huge retention problems because all the new entries, so kids who’ve never worked in offices before are really, I think languishing was the word I read in the Atlantic or somewhere, but these, they’re not getting the leadership, the vision, the understanding how they fit in, how their work fit in. So they’re quitting jobs and they’re immensely unhappy and a lot of mental health issues, depression and leaders are going, but that’s not my job. My job is to get this done. So it comes back to what Lisa was saying is as your roles change, you first have to identify that there’s a change, and then you have to say, so now what do I need to do? So people who are trained to do one thing are finding themselves in roles where they’re asked to do something else. And so that’s a huge disconnect. So this is one of the problems that I’m seeing happen. I mean, we’re talking about this hybrid as one way, but this is a problem that keeps coming up is this constant evolution of roles, constant evolution of skills, requirements. I’m talking a lot, I’m sorry, but it’s just been on my table a lot these days.
Lisa Paulson:
Well, and like you said, the disconnect, especially when we have someone who is a wonderful driven expert and then they get promoted to be that people leader. It is quite that transition in being able to outline what it is, those skills would be better, help them to prepare for that role and understand that role better. And that’s what we’re really hoping that our program is going to do.
Sarah Gallo:
I want to touch on what you were saying, Rose, about how it can be hard for people to understand how their role really does contribute to the bottom line, and not only that, but more importantly the business’s vision and mission. Do you have any recommendations on how to connect skills to where an employee fits in achieving a business’s mission and goals? How can you help employees see their value and position in the business in that way?
Rose Cartolari:
So I am a big believer that people that we need to empower people, and actually I’m not a big hierarchical person. I think leadership is important, but I think part of leadership or one of the most important aspects of leadership is listening. So I think a lot of times people themselves can tell you how they fit in and how they add, how they contribute, how they change, how they modify, how they impact the business vision. So I think the biggest key to this is this constant 360. Again, I keep insisting on the 360 conversations, we can no longer live in these huge vertical organizations and then putting processes in place to make sure that there’s constant feedback loops.
Lisa Paulson:
So one of the things that we are doing at Nesnah is making sure that with these role cards and the skills assessments and mapping that we’re doing is that they are lined up with the organization’s goals for the future. You really have to look at the strategy for each company and what their end goal is. One of the examples that I use is we have one objective that is being data centric. Well, how do we get to be data-centric and where does that begin that skill, the start or spark of that skill should come with the entry level employee and build and build and build as you go into the organization more and depending upon the role of the person, somebody in accounting is probably going to be a lot more trained in analytics and data and those things. But we need to make sure everybody is so that everybody can understand all of the business reports and really understand the ROI of what they’re doing so that they see their value.
Rose Cartolari:
This is where leadership is also changing, and this is where the way we work is actually changing. When we talk about the future work, it’s not just about hybrid in the office at home, it’s also the nature of how we interact together. And so when you’re no longer the owner of all the technical expertise, you have to rely on people that no more than you or no different things than you. And so this whole thing that you were saying of, what am I saying consistently, what is the message I’m saying consistently? How am I measuring that it’s done? How am I involving everybody and all the things that we talked about earlier become very key to making sure that the process works.
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Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Circle back to a point you made Rose around. The way we work is changing and that includes leadership development. The role of the leader is constantly evolving, as we know with the pace of change accelerating. So I’d really like to focus on and hear what you both think in terms of what role do leaders play in their team members’ skills development today? What does that look like?
Lisa Paulson:
That is a really important role. It’s one of the most important roles other than the person themselves. Having that support and that encouragement can really transform a person and empower them to really search for what it is that they want, especially if they don’t know what that is right now, and help them explore those areas where there may be an interest or a spark.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, I mean, look, our world has changed so much, right? We’ve gone from an environment where the person who got promoted, right? You were smart, you did your work, you did it well. You knew more than everybody, so you got promoted. But now the people who, and so therefore you’re the smartest person in the room. Now the leader is no longer the smartest person in the room. You’ve got maybe some young kid or somebody from a different country or different functional skills coming in who knows more and who can solve your problems and better yet solve the problems you don’t know yet that you have, right? So what does that mean? That means a role of the leader is no longer being the smartest person in the room and telling everybody what to do, command and control as we used to say. But it’s a person who has the skills now to motivate, to inspire, but most important to mobilize all of these different skills around a common vision around that business objective, whether it’s a market objective, a customer objective, whatever. So there’s a shifting set of skills, and the problem is these new skills that we’re looking at, we’re not great at measuring. We’re not even great in many organizations and many industries to even give them value soft skills. So if I work with a lot of people in the finance industry, in the sciences, they like the facts, the data, what are we doing? What are my deliverables? So it’s really hard to now change that mindset to say no, performance is much more than solving today’s problem. It’s about retention. It’s about long-term ROI. It’s about sustainability, creating a future that’s not here today that you don’t even know what it’s like.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
You definitely touch on some of those skills, Rose. You touch on motivation. Leaders need to inspire. I’d love to hear are there any other skills that leaders need today in order to support the growth and development of their employees and how can they develop them as leaders?
Lisa Paulson:
Coaching skills I think is the one that really comes to the top of my mind, being able to coach, because like Rose said, you’re not the smartest person in the room anymore, but how can you help bring out things that are hidden within your employees and help them solve problems? Coaching skills, being able to ask the right questions and listen and not give any input to that is a skill that a lot of people don’t understand, and it’s again, one of those skills that can’t be measured. It’s one of those soft skills, but yet it is so important as being a leader or even just being a team.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, absolutely, Lisa, to those, I would add a couple other skills. I think part of coaching, you talked about listening. I think listening is a key skill, but listening means something different today because in a world where no one expert person can be expert of all the stuff that’s going on in the world today, you need to be listened, be able to listen even to those weak signals in the market to all kinds of weird sources of information, people that you don’t agree with. I had a client, they were leaders in their market. I won’t get into details otherwise you’ll know who the client is, but there were leaders in their market and their engineers said, “No, ours is the best product.” And they actually were today. Well, they’re doing something else, but their market has been completely overtaken because a small little company started to do different things to the product, and so now the product has completely changed and they miss the boat. So this ability to hear voices that are not like yours that are bringing different ideas. And then the third thing I would add to the other third skill that I think is really important is sensemaking that ability to hear a huge range of data input and be able to make sense quickly in a way and communicate that in a way that makes sense to people and they know what they need to do to mobilize themselves and their teams and then be able to do it again when the input changes, because again, we know it will change.
Sarah Gallo:
I want to touch on another aspect here, which is how to identify the skills that learning leaders themselves, our listeners need to take the next step in their careers. What tips do you have for identifying your own skills??
Rose Cartolari:
So for me, I think a lot of people in learning and development have been traditionally placed in a little part of the organization and expected to wave some sort of magic wand and make things happen for everybody else. I think moving on out, we’re going to see a lot of learning and development folks having business skills, and I think we’re going to see, Lisa, you talked about coaching earlier. I think we’re going to see emerging. I’m actually already seeing a lot of this emerging of business skills with the skills related to how do people learn, how do people grow, how do people grow personally as well? And I think moving on out, that is a single most important sort of mindset change. And then of course, learning to use the technology to get rid of some of the work that that’s difficult or that could be biased so that you can focus on these bigger ship changes, I think are going to be the two trends that we see for learning development folks.
Lisa Paulson:
I completely agree with those two rows. One thing that I would add is finding a mentor, someone outside of the company and someone who is not within your field because you get a completely different perspective and it helps you to see those business acumen concepts and things like that that Rose was talking about that can really help open up opportunities for yourself and really discern which skills it is that you need.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
Definitely learning professionals need to be able to speak the language of the business, and so that business acumen piece is really going to be key moving forward to gain alignment, to have more productive conversations, be able to have those discussions as Rose mentioned about discussing the data in the metrics. And so all of that is definitely going to be necessary. Well, before we wrap up today, are there any other key takeaways that you’d like to lead our listeners with?
Lisa Paulson:
A few things that I would also suggest as you’re doing skills mapping within your organization, make sure that you define the skills. If you use a word, someone else is going to have a different definition of that word. And so really bringing together and digging deep and challenging people on what they mean by certain words and certain behaviors and skills is really going to help open up. It does take a long time. It’s not an easy process, but that is really what is going to help make you successful and making sure that those definitions are there for people to look at. And also for the people who are going to be assessing those skills, if you have an assessment as part of that. The only other, I guess area that I would reiterate, I know we talked about it, but it’s really making sure that you get that buy-in from the top because that is going to help you in really making sure that it becomes part of your organizational language and being able to incorporate it into all of the other aspects of your people services and people leadership. At our organization, we tell everyone that everyone is a leader, and so what does it mean to lead yourself and what does it mean to lead others and organizations? So we use that model and talk about everybody being a leader, and that way we’re empowering everyone to put that into their own hands. And coming from the leadership at the top is really what helped to launch our program.
Rose Cartolari:
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think you can do anything without visible and active leadership. You’re right. I totally get that, Lisa. I think the two things that I would talk about, one is I see a lot of people, a lot of companies use skills mapping almost as a photographic tool or an assessment tool. We’re going to do a report card on what we know how to do, and have we passed fifth grade? And I actually think given sort of these mindsets that we’re trying to move towards, it’s much more effective if it becomes an exercise more in mapping for potential rather than an existing skills. So if the exercise becomes a discussion about how do we grow as an organization, so it starts with the vision. What are the skills that we need for the vision? What are the skills you now need in your job to get there? And then you do the actual, let’s say, mapping. And so where are you? How do you move to there? I think you change the type of conversation that you have. So it becomes what you were saying earlier, Michelle, about motivational and inspirational rather than, I don’t think organization deliberately tried to do that, but it sometimes feels like I’m being evaluated. I’m going to get a report card and I’ll either fall short or I’ll be one of the lucky ones who don’t, and that’s not what anybody means. The second thing is I want to go back to what Lisa said about leadership, and I think at all levels, this issue of modeling is really important because when you’re talking about skill, you’re talking about growth, right? I’m here today and that’s fine, but I want to grow and it’s good to grow and it’s I as a leader, whether I’m the CEO or whether I’m the regional manager or whether I’m the office manager, here are the areas that I’m going to grow. So that communications of this is my journey too. This is all of our journey. If this is where we want the company to be, do we all agree that we all need to grow? I think that modeling makes a huge, again, visible, committed, consistent modeling of that makes a big difference.
Lisa Paulson:
Having that growth mindset within your culture really important.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
How can our listeners get in touch with you both after the episode if they’d like to reach out?
Lisa Paulson:
My email address is lpaulson@nesnahventures.com. So I’m also on LinkedIn.
Rose Cartolari:
I was just going to say, I think LinkedIn is the easiest way to get ahold of me easiest, but I also have a website, RoseCartolari.com and there’s a contact me [page] there as well.
Sarah Gallo:
To learn more about skills mapping. Visit the show notes for this episode@trainingindustry.com slash training industry podcast.
Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:
And if you enjoyed this episode, let us know. Leave a review wherever you listen to your podcast. Until next time.
Speaker:
If you have feedback about this episode or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.
