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2022 Donald Taylor Global Sentiment Survey Research Report

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Skills-based talent management Game changer, hype, or something else? The new addition to our list of options this year is Skills-based talent management (SBTM). It entered the global summary table at #6, with a vote of 7.2%, the exact average vote for every previous new option since 2016. Will Skills-based talent management continue to behave in an average way in the future? In one way, it is very likely to: it is highly probably it will see a rapid rise in popularity followed by a dramatic fall. We do not define any of the options on the survey, and were unsure whether respondents would even understand this comparatively new term. In March 2022, a Google search for it returned just 6,140 results, in contrast with more than 18 million for "Learning Management Systems". Perhaps over time another term will better capture this particular approach to individual and organisational skills, but however described, the idea will loom large in the coming years. The aim of SBTM is to replace the current weak relation- ships between tasks, skills, qualifications and experience with closer, more accurate, relationships using a common language. Once this infrastructure is in place, a whole host of things become possible: you can under- stand what skills a person should develop for a role, now or in the future; you can fill positions based on actual ability rather than claims on a CV; you can plan future organisational capability with confidence. There are two issues around this. The first: the infrastruc- ture, both the technical infrastructure and defining a skills taxonomy that links learning assets and roles. That is hard enough. Even more difficult is the second issue: under- standing people's skills. This is where past attempts at SBTM have failed. It is where today's platforms claim to add value, by combining algorithms with huge data sets to give a sense of an individual's skills without them needing to spend time in formal assessment. These algorithms are at the heart of the promise of SBTM. They promise a rapid understanding of your organisation's skills base and, if successful, will make the whole business more effective, not just the L&D department. Any understanding of skills where there was previously none will be an improvement. Success here, however, risks attracting less able vendors. These will over-promise, under-deliver, muddy the waters about the possibilities of SBTM, and before long excitement will turn to disappoint- ment and Skills-based talent management will tumble down the table. For all its promise, it seems very likely SBTM will be one more bright star that fell to Earth. " Successfully implemented, Skills-based talent management will make the whole business successful, not just the L&D department. Donald H Taylor, Global Sentiment Survey 2022 10 SBTM attempts to solve a long-standing issue: the difficultly of knowing what people can do. Traditionally, we have used proxies for this – qualifications, experience (usually on a CV or résumé), or a person's job title, or their length of tenure. In the past, this was acceptable because work needs changed slowly. Now, increasingly, work occurs in project teams, and organisations need to find individuals with the right skills to fill team positions far more frequently. This has accelerated the need to better understand people's skills and to compare them with the tasks at hand.

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