Skills Based Organization
Five years ago "skills intelligence" was a phrase a handful of vendors used to describe themselves. Today it is a line item in the roadmap of every HCM suite, every learning platform, every talent marketplace, and a growing number of AI startups. Analyst firms now publish landscape reports
Skills Management
Every organization has a skills inventory. Most of them just don't know where it is. Quick reference: Skills Inventory — the short version of this post, with the one table that matters. It lives in the heads of a few senior managers who know that Priya is the only
Skills Management
Ask a plant manager what skills their maintenance crew has and you'll get a list of people. Ask the HR system and you'll get a list of job titles. Ask the LMS and you'll get a list of courses completed. None of those is
POV
Sit through any board-level discussion of workforce and listen for the unit of measurement. It's almost always headcount. How many people do we have. How many are we hiring. How many are leaving. How many can we get to a new region by Q3. How many fewer
POV
A commercial pilot can hold a 737 type rating and not be legally allowed to fly a 737 today. Type rating says she's trained on the aircraft. Currency says she's flown three takeoffs and landings in the last 90 days. The first is permanent. The second
Skills Based Organization
The single most expensive sentence inside a professional services firm is "we don't have anyone available with that experience." It gets said in staffing meetings, in proposal reviews, in week-ahead resource calls. It usually means one of two things: the people who could do the
industry
Walk a manufacturing floor with a quality manager and ask one question: which of your operators is currently qualified to run cell 4 on the day shift, and against which revision of the work instruction? You'll get one of three answers. The first is fast and confident, from
POV
The HRIS sales team will tell you their suite handles skills. The LMS sales team will tell you their content library handles skills. The talent marketplace will tell you their AI infers skills automatically. Everyone in HR tech sells skills now — because the buyer asked for them, because the analyst
POV
Open the homepage of any vendor selling into HR right now and you'll find the word "platform" everywhere. Skills platform. Talent platform. People platform. Workforce intelligence platform. The word has done so much work in the last three years that it's stopped meaning anything.
POV
We started building skills software in 2008. Eighteen years of history and the pattern that surprises me most isn't about features — it's about which vendors earn long-term trust, and which ones quietly get cut at the first re-org. The list is short. Most don&
Resource Planning
Most board meetings used to have one workforce slide. Total headcount, attrition rate, planned hires. Maybe a slide on DEI or engagement scores. The conversation was about cost. That conversation is changing fast. In 2026, boards are pressing CHROs on capability — what the workforce can actually do, where the strategic
POV
Open the talent suite from any major HR vendor and somewhere in the menu, you'll find a tab marked "skills." Open the LMS — there's a skills field there too. Open the talent marketplace — skills again, this time as inferred tags. Open the workforce planning