Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #44

December 06, 2020

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

  • State of Skills 2021 Report | Degreed

  • What’s Next for Remote Work: An Analysis of 2,000 Tasks, 800 Jobs, and Nine Countries | McKinsey

  • People Analytics Tech 2020 | Red Thread Research via People Analytics and Future of Work (PAFOW)

  • Three Steps to Turn Your Company Into a Learning Powerhouse | BCG

  • The 2021 Workplace Learning Trends Report | Udemy for Business

  • Best Lessons From the HR Tech Conference | HR Executive

  • Podcast: Conversation with Dave Ulrich | TalentX Podcast by Fuel 50

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The nature of skills continues to shift at an alarming rate. Some skills are becoming obsolete, others are emerging as more important, and some skills are entirely new. To better understand how skills are changing, Degreed surveyed over 5,200 people around the world and organized the data by country, industry, and job role. Overall, skill demand is strongest for technological skills. However, the survey participants are also looking to develop their social (e.g., communication and negotiation) and cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking and decision-making). When it comes to a firm understanding its workforce's skill supply, I have been encouraged by artificial intelligence (AI) platforms that infer these skills based on data from external platforms such as LinkedIn. Interestingly, this report notes that more than a quarter (27 percent) of workers believe the most up-to-date data on their skills is hidden inside documents like resumes and CVs. Another 18 percent say real-time information on their skills doesn't exist anywhere. As firms continue to tap into the potential of AI to understand skills supply, it will be essential to understand how these platforms can overcome the challenges mentioned above.

Now that the pandemic has broken through the cultural and technological barriers that have prevented or limited the adoption of remote work (RW) in the past, many firms continue to evaluate the benefits and limitations of RW moving forward. This in-depth article helps firms make these decisions by looking at RW's potential more granularly through the lens of tasks and activities that can be performed remotely and without a loss of productivity. The analysis also breaks down RW potential by sector. For example, the analysis found that RW potential is concentrated in a few sectors, such as Finance and Insurance, that have three-quarters of time spent on activities that can be done remotely without losing productivity. The study also found that RW potential varies across countries and economies--where labor forces in advanced economies (e.g., US, UK, Germany) have more RW potential than emerging economies (e.g., China, India, Mexico). Overall, more than half of the workforce has little or no opportunity for RW. The article represents the multi-faceted and complex factors that firms must consider when making decisions on remote work.

In the last few months of the COVID-19 crisis, people analytics (PA) has played a vital role in providing critical decision support across many organizations. As many PA leaders double down on the use of PA tools and determine which PA investments to make in 2021 and beyond, this 40-page report helps answer: 1) How did the PA tech vendor market change in 2020? 2) What are the newest capabilities you need to know about? 3) What should you be thinking about when making a PA tech investment? The study has various findings, including that practitioners have more technology choices than ever with 121 PA technologies on the market today--a 35 percent growth rate between 2019 and 2020. Despite the vast number of vendors, many solutions are not as easy to use or user-friendly as vendors believe them to be. Given that ease of use and simplicity is expected by users of PA tools, decision-makers will need to determine which vendors can differentiate on this capability. Throughout the report, several questions are provided that PA leaders can use to assess vendors on various capabilities.

Most organizational leaders understand the critical role that learning and development (L&D) plays in enabling employees to learn, adapt, and acquire the skills they need to achieve company objectives. However, only 15 percent of leaders believe their organization has fully delivered on this capability. This in-depth article provides a series of tools and questions that can help firms assess and identify opportunities for enhancing their L&D capabilities. Among the various tools is a 5-component framework--consisting of 18 dimensions--that depicts the L&D ecosystem. Sample questions for assessing each of the 5 dimensions include: Strategy. Does your company have a clear purpose—a "why"—for learning? Organization. Does your company have a learning culture that the senior executives promote? Offering. How well does your company assess and address individual and collective learning needs? Enablers. Does your company have the tools and technology—to measure, support, and continuously improve the learning ecosystem? Learnscape Integration. Is your company taking advantage of the entire learning landscape (e.g. external networks)? The article also includes an L&D maturity framework that consists of four maturity levels that can be used to further identify improvement opportunities.

As we enter the final weeks of the year, many learning and development (L&D) leaders are asking: What will workplace learning look like in 2021? To shed light on this question, this study surveyed over 500 global experts to understand what L&D professionals can expect in the new year and how they can best prepare. It offers six trends including 1) Amidst uncertainty, self-mastery is a valued skill, 2) Remote work makes collaboration a priority, 3) Data literacy is the new computer literacy, 4) Automation skills let data scientists focus on strategy, 5) Farewell silos, hello hybrid tech roles, 6) Cybersecurity training takes on a new urgency. Regarding trend #1-- self-mastery being a valued skill--the report indicates how this trend reflects employees' desire to master their minds and take control of their time--especially in this uncertain and stressful environment. Therefore, organizations are likely to devote more development resources to enabling employee wellbeing. As noted in the report, "this mindset is a fundamental shift to focusing on the whole employee, rather than simply the technical skills related to their outputs or deliverables.”

With the pandemic disrupting work and workplaces worldwide, many organizations continue to reimagine how technology can support new ways of working. With this as the backdrop, this year’s HR Tech Conference (which was virtual) was especially timely for many organizations. Industry leaders spent the week exploring the challenges of 2020 and the opportunities to come. This article provides a summary of the key takeaways from the conference. One of the takeaways is that the internal talent marketplace (ITM) space is thriving. ITM– usually hosted on a technology-enabled platform–connects employees with opportunities both inside and outside the organization. The concept goes beyond just matching people with full-time roles and provides access to gig work, mentorship, rotation programs, and volunteering assignments, to name a few. As many firms seek to employ flexible talent models that leverage their own internal workforce, ITM continues to be a growing area of interest. For those interested in learning more about ITM, you can also check out: a 15-minute podcast by Josh Bersin, an article by Deloitte Insights, and the book, The Inside Gig.

In this 20-minute TalentX Podcast published on December 3rd, 2020, guest Dave Ulrich shares several insights on how organizations are coping in this world of tremendous change and uncertainty. Dave talks about how effective business leaders can harness uncertainty and use it to create opportunities for innovation. He also talks about how HR professionals can use this time to reframe long-held assumptions on how HR creates the greatest value within the organizations they serve. Other ideas are discussed.

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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