Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly—the weekly newsletter for human resources practitioners, bringing together insights about work, the workplace, and the workforce from various sources.

If you find value in this issue or any of its resources, please share them with your network by using the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Have a great week, and I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Brian 

Brian Heger is a human resources practitioner with a Fortune 150 organization and has responsibilities for Strategic Talent and Workforce Planning. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

• Report: Shifting Skills, Moving Targets, and Remaking the Workforce | Burning Glass Institute, Emsi, & BCG | A new 44-page report that analyzed 15 million jobs to determine the extent to which skills are changing across various occupations.

• Report: Human Capital at Work: The Value of Experience | McKinsey Report | A new 104-page study that looks at longitudinal data to trace the career trajectories of approximately four million workers across the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and India.

• Addressing Employee Burnout: Are you Solving the Right Problem? | McKinsey Health Institute | Provides ideas on how leaders can explore and address the systemic causes of worker burnout within their organizations.

• What Leadership Development Should Look Like in the Hybrid Era | Harvard Business Review | Shares learnings from how HSBC revamped its leadership development program to make it more suitable for a hybrid work learning environment.

• Managers' Prior Work Evaluations Can Affect Diversity Efforts | MIT Sloan School of Management | A study showing how managers’ prior career experience shapes their approaches to evaluating merit and talent, ultimately impacting equity in the workplace.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Report: Shifting Skills, Moving Targets, and Remaking the Workforce | Burning Glass Institute, Emsi, & BCG 

Much has been written about how the skills required to perform various lines of work continue to change at an alarming pace. To better measure how new skills are emerging, others are disappearing, and which skills are shifting in importance, this new 44-page research study analyzed ~15 million online job advertisements posted between 2016 and 2021. The authors looked at the skills employers requested in job postings each year and compared those skills with those requested for the same occupation in 2016. Using a Skill Disruption Index (based on the emergence of new skills and the change in the importance of skills), the report shows the skill disruption score for 680 occupations (see pages 34-38). The index uses a scoring of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least amount of disruption and 100 being the greatest). For example, a Data Engineer has a skill disruption score of 100, whereas an Attorney has a score of 50. A few other statistics from the report include: 1) 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average US job have changed since 2016. However, in the most disrupted jobs, 76% of the top 20 requested skills have changed since 2016. 2) One in five skills (22%) requested for the average US job is an entirely new requirement in that occupation. 3) Nearly three-quarters of jobs changed more from 2019 through 2021 than in the previous three-year period. Practitioners can use the various insights from this report to stay informed on how skills are changing while determining the workforce and talent planning implications for their organizations.

Report: Human Capital at Work: The Value of Experience | McKinsey Report 

This new 104-page study looks at longitudinal data to trace the career trajectories of approximately four million workers across the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and India. While the report contains far too many insights to summarize, a few I found interesting within the context of “talent shortages” reported by many firms are: 1) The average person in the data set changed roles every two to four years. 2) However, over 80 percent of these role moves involved someone moving from one employer to another. And, even far fewer moves involved people being promoted into more senior roles or branching into different specializations within their existing organizations. This high level of external movement holds true across all cohorts. These insights underscore the vast opportunity organizations have to tap into their internal talent marketplace to meet the organizations’ talent needs while supporting employees’ career development. Page 65 begins a section on practices leaders and managers can employ to enable internal talent movement. A few recommendations center on identifying “hidden talent,”—those workers in an organization that desire to take on new opportunities and have the potential to be successful in a role or work opportunity, but whose experience or credentials don’t precisely match the requirements. Leaders that are able to uncover this hidden talent segment will unlock a source of competitive advantage for their organizations. For more on “hidden talent,” check out this 74-page report by Harvard Business School, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent. 

Addressing Employee Burnout: Are you Solving the Right Problem? | McKinsey Health Institute 

Worker burnout is at an all-time high, according to various reports. Characterized by a chronic imbalance between job demands and resources, burnout results in extreme tiredness, reduced ability to regulate cognitive and emotional processes, and mental distancing. And while many organizations are admirably investing in mental health and well-being efforts that focus on addressing individual symptoms of burnout, this article provides ideas on how firms can explore and address the organizational causes of burnout. It argues that employers can and should view high rates of burnout as a powerful warning sign that the organization—not the individuals in the workforce—needs to undergo meaningful systematic change. These systemic causes of burnout can range from toxic workplace behavior to ineffective organizational systems, processes, and decision-making. The authors offer eight targeted questions to help identify organizational causes of burnout. A few of these questions include: 1) Do we effectively address toxic behaviors? 2) Do we promote sustainable work and manageable workloads? 3) Are we effectively tackling stigma that impedes people from seeking help for mental health needs? Leaders can use the eight questions to spark discussions that help develop and implement strategies to address the systemic causes of worker burnout. As a bonus article, I am resharing here an MIT Sloan Management Review article that shares research findings on how employees describe five aspects of a toxic culture.

What Leadership Development Should Look Like in the Hybrid Era | Harvard Business Review 

Developing the next generation of leaders continues to be a top priority for CEOs and executive teams worldwide. And according to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workforce Learning Report, almost half of the surveyed Learning and Development professionals expected their learning budgets to increase in 2022—a six-year high since the report's initial publication. As learning leaders invest their budget dollars in the areas that will bring the most significant ROI, a segment of them are reinventing their leadership development programs to support a hybrid work environment. This article shares learnings from how HSBC revamped its leadership development program from a “week-in-a-classroom model” with follow-up work to something more experiential and applied and partly virtual. This new model included an 11-week learning journey that moved 90-participants through three pathways: 1) sensemaking, or understanding how the business world and the organization works around you; 2) experimenting, or testing ideas picked up in a classroom session, from colleagues, or from personal experience.; and 3) self-discovery, or figuring out your own identity in the workplace. The authors share how they structured each week and how technology-enabled parts of the program to be delivered in a hybrid work environment. For one of the most comprehensive reviews on hybrid work in general, check out Microsoft's New Future of Work Report 2022.  

Managers' Prior Work Evaluations Can Affect Diversity Efforts | MIT Sloan School of Management 

One aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that has received much attention is the “E” or equity component. As defined by the Harvard Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Glossary of Terms, equity refers to fair treatment for all while striving to identify and eliminate inequities and barriers. And while there are many determinants of equity in the workplace, this new research by MIT Sloan explores how equity is affected by how managers assess and apply merit when making hiring, performance, and talent decisions. The authors submit that managers’ prior career experience shapes their approaches to evaluating merit and talent. For example, 1) managers who had mostly positive evaluation outcomes in their careers took a diffuse approach to applying merit—where they consider an employee as both an individual and a team member. The employee’s work actions and personal qualities are considered on a quantitative and qualitative level. 2) Managers who experienced mostly negative outcomes as employees tended to be narrower in applying merit. They employ a focused approach that assesses an employee on an individual level and quantitatively evaluates their work. And while one limitation of the study is that it’s based on a small sample of MBA students, the findings reinforce how important it is for organizations to build managers' capability to fairly assess talent; this capability enables organizations to achieve more equitable talent outcomes. The article includes a link to the academic version of this research, which can also be accessed here.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

How to Spot — and Develop — High-Potential Talent in Your Organization | Harvard Business Review 

Presents a model anchored in three observable and measurable behaviors that indicate individuals’ ability to grow and handle increased complexity in new roles.

CHRO APPOINTMENT OF THE WEEK

This past week, 22 Chief Human Resources Officer announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go – a subscription that provides the easiest way to stay informed about CHRO hires, promotions, and resignations. This week's CHRO highlight is:

• Zoom Hires Matthew Saxon as Chief People Officer 

To learn how to gain access to all 22 detailed Chief Human Resources Officer announcements from this past week and +1600 archived announcements, visit CHROs on the Go .

If you are already a member of CHROs on the Go, you can log in to access all announcements and site functionality.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

You can see several book recommendations by clicking the image below.

OUR RESOURCE LINEUP

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​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6PM EST.