Having trouble identifying talent and skills at your organization?

Talent and Skills

If you happen to follow the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Human Resource aficionados, like Josh Bersin at https://joshbersin.com , or any content discussing HR trends over the last few years, you have likely heard about the push for companies to find key talent, drive career growth, and identify trends within their own workforce. The global pandemic we are currently experiencing has only amplified this trend due to many companies experiencing workforce shortages and employee retention has become paramount. Inevitably, within these discussions, you’ve also seen or heard about Workday Skills Cloud. Workday Skills Cloud is a lightweight tool that allows employees to self-report a wide breadth of capabilities that support career growth and foster discoverability for opportunities and projects. This is more than just a new “buzzword” and I will tell you why it is here to stay. 

The Problem?

In 2017, I was working at a client that had been live with Workday for a few years. The CHRO and other HR leaders in the organization felt that the culture was ready to utilize more of the Talent features within the application, and, more importantly, they had a real and quite common business problem. They had some rare and difficult jobs to fill, and simply could not find candidates with the skillset to match these highly unique needs. I remember getting a phone call from an HR Partner that I was working with on the project, and she was asking if we could produce a report from Workday that could help identify anyone internally that may be a fit for skills A, B, or C (for example). My reply was “sure, let me take a look at those employees that have identified skillsets in Workday and I’ll send you the report.”  Unbeknownst to me at the time, this would present a real challenge. 

I was able to produce a custom report, but in doing some routine business analysis, discovered that some of my tests were not populating in the report. Furthermore, I also tried using the delivered “Find Workers” report to do similar searching with limited success. Apparently, Workday was only finding the skill if you typed it exactly as a user had done. So, as an example, if I had 5 employees and all of them reflected some variation of the phrase “human resources”, the report would only retrieve the one exact match based on your search. Workday interpreted the following variations separately:

1. Human Resources

2. human resources

3. Human resources

4. human Resources

5. HR

You can imagine how my attempt to build in logic to interpret the context was next to impossible. So, we were left with suspect reports and leadership that wanted more!  Fast forward to 2021, and we are working with a services and hospitality client that is having the exact same challenges! Thankfully for them, we have a solution! 

Enter the “Skills Cloud” 

In 2018, Workday introduced the Skills Cloud. The Skills Cloud created a needed structure to this universal language of “skills” for use in machine learning. The Skills Cloud is a repository and data system of skills which acts as a foundation for matching and recommendations. It also seamlessly connects and suggests within both Recruiting (i.e., suggested jobs) and Learning (i.e., suggested courses). The Workday Skills Cloud is maintained externally by Workday and is universal across all customers. It works alongside maintained skills (those defined by admins in the system), as well as generic “crowdsourced” skills that users have already created in the tenant. Below is a great illustration of the challenge I mentioned above in my human resources scenario, although they used the programming language JavaScript in this example. The illustration depicts how messy and voluminous the data was prior to the standardization incorporated with Workday Skills Cloud. Utilizing Workday Skills Cloud, it is now much easier and organized and makes both the data and the reporting more efficient and effective (credit to Workday Customer Enablement for the image below). 

By implementing the Workday Skills Cloud, we were able to finally report on and leverage the data in the system and feel confident with the results! Furthermore, as a next step to continue strengthening our internal talent footprint, we began utilizing Talent Reviews (aka Talent Profiles) on an annual basis as a way to stay current with employee’s internal resumes and skills, as well as immediately pushing it out for new hires to complete through their onboarding process. In summary, not only were we then able to report on those unique skills that leadership needed to locate, we also had prior employer details that could be searched/reported on, education information, job interest details, relocation, travel preferences, certifications, languages, etc. This opened up a robust set of reporting capabilities that did not exist before Workday Skills Cloud.

Workday’s Investment in Talent and Skills

Workday is ALL-IN when it comes to Talent and Skills! In addition to the Skills Cloud in 2018, over the last 1-2 years, Workday has announced many new products and have an impressive roadmap which illustrates the path for its customers to target and grow talent. Starting with Skills Cloud, Career Hub, and Talent Marketplace, Workday has realized the push behind this space and has made their stance and commitment clear for how to support their customers’ needs moving forward. 

How Leigh Consulting Can Help?

At Leigh Consulting, we have extensive experience implementing the Workday Skills Cloud. We work with clients to strategize a solution to help them with their business challenges and leverage Workday to facilitate and automate the process. Leigh has also implemented many additional areas under the large Workday Talent footprint, such as Talent Reviews, Succession Planning, Talent Calibration, Mentorship, Assessing Potential, Talent Cards, Development Plans, and the list goes on.  We would welcome the opportunity to discuss the Talent and Skills needs at your organization.