From the course: Building a Data-Driven Skills-First Workforce Strategy

The role of uncertainty in skills

From the course: Building a Data-Driven Skills-First Workforce Strategy

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The role of uncertainty in skills

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- The COVID-19 pandemic has brought on unimaginable change, causing organizations to rethink their strategy. The first question on employees' minds when they hear terms such as "transformation" and "turnaround" is: Will I lose my job? Skills play a key role in an organization's ability to understand its workforce. In times of uncertainty, where companies shift strategy to different product lines and markets, knowing the skills composition of the workforce can lead to significant financial benefits. Here's a simple example. If the new market is in a different country and requires a different language for customer interactions, it would be useful to know which employees possess such language skills. Understanding if the current workforce has the needed skillset makes it easy to decide between buy and built strategy for talent. If no one has the skills currently or not enough people have the skills, you may be better off buying talent if you don't have time to upskill and retrain. On the other hand, if you don't need the skills for another two years and there's a group of employees with adjacent skills, the build strategy could be the better choice. Here's another reason to take good stock of the skills you already possess at your company. It can also help reduce and improve layoffs. Imagine in a data analytics business where the customers are increasingly needing data engineering work and less of data science work, instead of laying off the data scientists, knowing which data scientists have data engineering skills from their prior experience or certificates can mean temporary reassignment and avoid layoffs. Now that we know why skills data are useful, let's move on to how to translate strategy into action.

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