Workforce Skills

What are Workforce Skills and Why Do They Matter?

Workforce skills refer to the full collection of technical, professional and soft skills that employees inside an organization need to perform their jobs successfully and drive business outcomes. A strong workforce skills taxonomy and methodology includes both traditional skills and the underlying competencies, behaviors and abilities that influence how employees carry out their work. When leaders have consistent tools and processes in place to understand and manage workforce skills, they can lead organizations in a more agile and resilient manner.

Against a backdrop of accelerated business and workforce change, organizations can no longer afford to acquire new or emerging workforce skills in a haphazard way. Traits that were once deemed to be "future skills" are increasingly essential and needed now to future-proof organizations from trade disruptions, digital transformation, shifting weather patterns, and other complexities.

Why is Managing Workforce Skills a Challenge for Organizations?

Managing workforce skills is no easy task. Consider the existence of varied skills taxonomies and methodologies — even within the same organization — that oftentimes don’t talk to each other. What you are left with is a lack of standardization that renders it challenging for organizations to have a clear and consistent understanding of the skills their employees possess.

Many organizations also have what are known as "skills clouds” — or disconnected collections of skills data — that exist in isolation, hindering the ability to optimize skills across an organization. From the employee’s perspective, a lack of clarity on workforce skills can lead to decreased engagement or motivation and higher retention risks. If the necessary skills required to perform a role effectively are unclear, it can hinder an employee’s ability to successfully navigate roles and have a say in charting their career path.

How Aon Can Help

At Aon, we guide clients through a process of designing and implementing what is known as a workforce skills framework, which serves as a foundation that will enable organizations to identify and acquire essential skills needed for business success. Organizations must consider the cost implications for closing the skills gap — balancing and weighing the cost of finding talent externally or identifying skills that exist internally.

At its core, bringing a skills framework to life implies that the framework will be integrated with the organization’s HR processes and technology infrastructure — which can include job architecture, competency frameworks, performance ratings, career pathing and opportunities, training possibilities and psychometric assessments — to ensure long-term success.

Machine learning and analytics can accelerate the tracking and mapping of workforce skills across the organization. Today, increasingly sophisticated platforms, such as Aon’s SkillsGraph, make it easier to capture critical skills information and align it to job taxonomies for a full-picture view.

Our Workforce Skills Tools Include:

Who Do We Partner With?

We help HR leaders and workforce planning professionals to future-proof their workforce skills strategy and help them build or reimagine their skills framework so it aligns with market trends.