Bridging the

skills gap
Get the skills you need through
a culture of internal mobility
and learning

Bridging the skills gap 1

Today, technology “Our most important priority
in HR is finding talent for the
is disrupting nearly future, not just for now. We’re
every industry at focused on the formidable
challenge of attracting,
a pace never seen
developing, and retaining
before. Half of today’s employees with skills we
Fortune 500 is haven’t yet determined.”
– Gina Dellabarca, General Manager of
expected to turn over Human Resources for Westpac
New Zealand4

in the next ten years.1

This disruption has big consequences for jobs and skills.

The reality is that as many as 375 million people around the

world may need to change roles and update their skills by
2030 in response to evolutions in technology and changes
in business.2 We used to talk about word processing
and spreadsheet skills, now it’s cybersecurity, big data
analytics, and coding. Tomorrow’s workforce needs to be
equipped to navigate technologies like AI, blockchain,
automation, and new innovations on the horizon.

Skills, and how fast employees and companies can learn,

are quickly becoming the competitive advantage—and
the biggest risk. This is why 80 percent of executives say
they are worried about the availability of key skills when it
comes to competing in the future.3 And this is why talent
development centered on skills and experiences needs to
be a priority for us all.

Bridging the skills gap 2

Skills are the new currency and there is simply no • Build a culture of internal mobility to reduce
precedent for this volume of reskilling. In a tight labor skills shortage: Career mobility is not only critical
market, in which every company is competing for the same to sustaining a great employee experience, but 80
talent, the employee is now in the driver’s seat, not the percent of HR professionals believe that a better
employer. internal talent mobility strategy would reduce
recruitment costs and help them find candidates
The good news? No one has the potential to understand the (and make those candidates productive) faster.5
people and skills needed across the business as much as The key is moving from the idea of internal talent
HR. This is the ideal moment for HR professionals to take mobility into action.
charge to create a culture of talent development. To reduce
• Develop employee skills through personalized,
skills shortages by increasing internal hiring and education.
consumer-grade experiences: Your company’s
To build the workforce of the future from within.
success depends entirely on having the right
Let’s look at three critical steps to achieving skills success people with the right skills doing the right thing
through talent development: at the right time. This is the new HR imperative.
But skills development takes ongoing upkeep and
• Understand the skills you have (and potential maintenance, and it’s important to empower your
skill gaps): With business and technology workers to take action and ownership over their own
transforming at the speed of light, an understanding of careers.
the skills you have and the skills you need has to be a
priority now to keep up with the pace of change.

Bridging the skills gap 3

Understand the skills you
have (and potential skill gaps)

Bridging the skills gap 4

Almost half (44 Your skills framework should not only be about technical
skills. We know they’re important, but the technical skills

percent) of executives
of value today may not be what you need most in the
future. In fact, when we can’t always predict what we’ll
need tomorrow, it’s just as important to look at soft skills,

consider their like whether someone is creative, a continuous learner,

or comfortable with change. Those kinds of attributes are

workforce plans to often what make people really successful in a job.

be driven by finance
Rest assured you don’t need to start from scratch on your
skills framework. ArcBest, a multibillion-dollar freight and
logistics company with over 13,000 workers, knows that

and do not take it’s equally important to understand the specific behaviors
that make top performers, in addition to their technical

talent dynamics into and functional skills. Its HR team recognized that writing
job profiles from scratch was not an efficient use of their

consideration.6 time, so instead they started with a library of industry-

specific competencies and skills from IBM and customized
each job profile to reflect the factors that made its leading

Do you know what skills you have in your organization? Did employees so special.7

you know that Sam in finance actually designs websites

In a small organization, it might be quite easy to gather
for his kids’ sports teams in his spare time? It may sound
the skills data on your people. But in large organizations
obvious, but knowing what skills your employees currently
like ArcBest, with new hires and leavers adding to the
have, and at what levels of proficiency, is the essential first
complexity, it can feel like a daunting, and potentially
step in skill planning for the future.
never-ending, task. And that’s exactly the kind of challenge

Start with a skills framework. Think of it like a blueprint for that technology loves. AI solutions can look at the kind

a house. Without one, contractors wouldn’t know where of work each employee is doing and suggest a number of

to put the windows, which kind of windows are needed, adjacent skills and attributes that are linked to their job.

where the bedrooms go, and how all the various rooms All the employee then has to do is to agree or amend the

fit together. It’s the same for your workforce. A skills AI suggestions. It takes hours out of what was once a

framework provides an understanding of the skills you have, laborious, spreadsheet-driven process. And, crucially, it can

how they fit together, and where you have gaps. It can be help you find out what Sam in finance is truly capable of!

fairly extensive, depending on the size and nature of your

business. Think of the difference as a blueprint for a three
bedroom house versus a shopping center.

Bridging the skills gap 5

 “AI-based skills inference can help organizations to find the
‘hidden gems’ in an organization, the people with skills you didn’t
even know existed. At an aggregate level, it is possible to design a
heatmap of the skills a business has versus skills that are needed,
and intervention plans can be put in place that allows businesses
to quickly close skill gaps.”
– IBM Smarter Workforce Institute8

Your challenge Your transformed approach

How do I define skills for the hundreds of It can be daunting to start from an empty spreadsheet, so use pre-populated competency
different job roles we have? frameworks to give you something to work from. You might also want to consider refining your long
list of job roles—many can be consolidated to help with framework creation.

How do we keep skills frameworks up to AI skills inference technology can help to provide something for employees to react to. It’s much
date without being a drag for employees? easier for your workers to take a quick look and then edit a list of skills for their role and their level of
competence than to have to start from scratch.

How do I find out what skills all our An online solution that not only surfaces skills and attributes that are associated with a job
employees have without hundreds of description and employee data, but also gives employees the flexibility to add skills (that may never
individual conversations? have been used in their current role), can avoid the need for hundreds of manager conversations. It
also enables a consistency of approach that can be a challenge to maintain across different parts of
the organization.

Read the report: Competencies in the AI Era

Read now à

Bridging the skills gap 6

Build a culture of internal
mobility to reduce skills
shortage

Bridging the skills gap 7

Enabling employees
to change jobs within
your organization
can increase their
likelihood to stay by IBM HR Director of Career & Skills Tanya Moore on

up to 33 percent.9
transformation in talent development

Once you know the skills you have and have defined your
framework for the skills you need, it’s time to bridge the
gap. The knee-jerk response might be to start placing job
ads, but let’s pause for a moment. Have you really made the
“HR of tomorrow takes
most of the talent you already have?
advantage of digital and
Ensuring that your existing talent is able to fully utilize all
of their current skills and develop their careers is a huge social technologies, and AI.
driver of employee engagement and business performance.
It also matters for employee retention. In fact, three out of
This is a radical shift. The
four high-potential workers say they would be attracted to a employee was getting lost in
new job in a different organization if it offered better career
development opportunities or enabled them to fully utilize the HR process. They had to
their skills.10
search around for answers to
Even when organizations recognize that clear career their questions. Now, we can
progression paths and successful job transitions are integral
to business success, the reality is that most workers are left make it a great experience
to their own devices to find new opportunities. While high
performing employees may be singled out for development
and personalized and
opportunities, career coaching has historically been an transparent for employees.”
extremely high-touch, human-driven process with a lack of
– Diane Gherson, IBM CHRO and 2018
tangible results. 11
HR Executive of the Year12

Bridging the skills gap 8

According to a recent survey by the IBM Smarter Workforce interface for employees who want to evaluate their options
Institute and UNLEASH one of the common barriers
13
before officially speaking with their manager. The coach can
to greater internal mobility is employees’ lack of career even suggest new opportunities that employees may not
information, either due to low visibility of potential have considered: what if your skills make you a great fit for
opportunities, or no encouragement to pursue them. And a career in sales, but you always thought of yourself as an
while 79 percent of HR professionals believe internal HR person?
mobility is important to their talent management strategy,
only 30 percent are satisfied with their ability to meet goals
in this area.14 This is where technology can help.

One of the oldest and largest financial institutions in the

United States, Citizens Bank, wanted to help its people
understand the skill requirements of their current role
and look at how their aspirations and desires align with
the company’s needs in order to see potential paths they
could pursue. Citizens is implementing an AI-based virtual
career coach to help its 18,000 employees set career goals,
determine what kind of skills training they need, and move
into new roles within the company. Says John Ferguson,
SVP, Head of Talent Management at Citizens Bank, “As
a company, we made a decision that we’d made a lot of
investments to meet client needs, and to equip people to
be able to do that, but we also needed to look internally in
the organization and make investments in our people. As
we looked at what was out there, we started investigating
AI, and that eventually brought us to IBM and the Watson
Career Coach product.” Ferguson continues, “Quite frankly,
what we’re trying to do, taking AI and using it as a career
coach and talk about career development, those are
complicated conversations. There’s not a single answer,
typically, to questions such as, ‘What should I do next in my
career?’ But that’s what we’re trying to tackle.”15

An AI solution can deliver a direct channel to opportunities

for employees who want growth or change. Not only that,
but some workers may be reluctant to start a conversation
about a new role with their current manager for fear of
being seen as disloyal. A virtual coach could be a better

Bridging the skills gap 9

Your challenge Your transformed approach

How do I match open job opportunities to First, great that you’re thinking first about internal mobility to fill your open job reqs. Your managers
the skills of our current workforce? should be encouraged to flag new roles to their teams and publicly acknowledge internal mobility as
great for the organization. If you want to automate the process to enable employees to drive their
own internal mobility, then consider an AI solution that is not only able to “chat” with your people but
also do the matching for them.

How do I find people for the most hard-to- Consider identifying people already in your business with the potential to fill those roles. The right
fill roles without paying over the odds? assessments can be used to identify potential and then you can put in place training and development
to get people up to speed. When Goodwill of North Georgia found that it could take three to six
months to train a new case manager, but they were rapidly expanding their services into new
industries, it made better financial sense to recruit and train internally to keep operational costs low
and productivity high. Goodwill was then able to help its employees cultivate new skills and reach
new paths of success.16

Learn how Citizens Bank improved internal mobility with AI.

Watch the webinar à

Bridging the skills gap 10

Motivate employees to
continuously learn new
skills through personalized,
consumer-grade experiences

Bridging the skills gap 11

Eighty percent of Now that our experiences as consumers are so easy and
personalized—a few clicks to buy, a chat window that

employees say they

pops up just when you were wondering whether your
potential purchase would do the job you needed—our
expectations in the workplace are heightened. Where

lack the skills they employee work experiences used to rely almost entirely on
managers, today, new approaches can create a much more

need both for their personalized experience without the need for hours and
hours of manager time.

current role and their

future career.17
Think of the different approaches to organizational learning
you’ve encountered throughout your career. Historically,
learning has been deployed in a one-size-fits-all approach.
You’ve probably also witnessed scenarios where learning
opportunities are left up to individual managers to fund
from a discretionary budget (which is often one of the first
things to go in a budget cut). Even when employees want to
learn, they often struggle to make time to do so.

Global Industry Analyst Josh Bersin discusses the

importance of organizational learning

Bridging the skills gap 12

 “The rate and pace of skill demand is accelerated to the point
where the external market simply can’t provide everything we
need. As a result, it’s really important for us as an organization, as
a function, as a capability to think differently about the availability
of our internal talent and how we can take advantage of that… In
our engagement survey at IBM, we have found that the strongest
correlation—higher than any other feature of our environment—to
engagement is learning opportunity. Those who take advantage of
learning opportunities are by far the most engaged.”
– Deb Bubb, VP, Chief Leadership and Learning Officer, IBM18

While learning management systems have allowed Using AI technology to deliver consumer-grade experiences
more effective delivery of corporate-wide training, new to employees is a way to drive better learning results
technology like AI brings personalization to the forefront. AI because it will understand and develop each person based
solutions can match learning content to specific employee on the skills and abilities unique to them. We just cannot do
skills gaps at the optimal point in time and tailor content this without the help of technology.
delivery to individual learning preferences (i.e. self-paced
video versus classroom settings). This can accelerate skills IBM’s HR team wanted to provide high quality career

growth because it’s delivered when and where employees guidance to all employees, regardless of level. So, the

need the information and guidance. team developed a personal advisor that interacts with
workers who are thinking about future opportunities.
The ability of an organization to learn is more important It gets to know the employee by asking and answering
than ever, because the half-life of skills is shorter than ever. questions with natural language and integrating with
Living in a world where we have our TV shows curated for historical information. It allows employees to upload
us in a personalized app, and items we order online arrive their resumes or answer questions about skills, and then
within 24 hours, employees expect a similar experience suggests roles that are suitable for the employee. It also
at work. Career coaching technology can provide this type offers personalized learning recommendations, which
of consumer-grade experience by personalizing learning help employees continually develop their skills. AI is
recommendations and instantly pointing to relevant job personalizing learning and development for each job role
opportunities inside the company. Engage workers by and leading the way in making learning a central aspect of
giving them the ability to track the progress of their skills the company’s culture.19 The results? More than 45,000
development against their career goals. learners are visiting IBM’s learning platform every day

Bridging the skills gap 13

and 98 percent of employees access it each quarter.20 AI has the potential to help workers continuously grow and
Says Richard McColl, Vice President and Partner, Talent enhance their performance… Individuals who are most
Technology Practice Leader, IBM Global Business Services, successful competing for work opportunities will be those
“We have taken but the first steps in a new frontier where who embrace performance enhancing AI.”21

Your challenge Your transformed approach

How do I help employees access the This all comes down to intelligent tagging of your content to ensure that it can be found easily
learning they need, when they need it? by employees looking for support. We’re talking about much more than keywords—using AI that
understands natural language is able to match what your employee types into a search function with
the video, articles, webinars, and other training materials that you have on hand.

How do I give all employees access to Historically, organizations had to focus tight learning budgets on mandatory courses and high-
learning, not just high-potentials? potential employees. AI solutions are now opening up learning to all. An AI solution to learning is
personalized so that new learning suggestions are made to employees based on what others in their
role or with their learning history have benefitted from before. It’s like having a career coach for every
single employee, not just your high potentials.

See how AI can be used to deliver a differentiated candidate experience.

Explore the interactive demo à

Bridging the skills gap 14

Take the next steps

Bridging the skills gap 15

Your new mantra: 2. Prime your culture. When you bring in a new
technology, it’s important to make sure you’re aligning

think big, start small,

your culture to what you’re trying to achieve with the
technology. At the end of the day, it’s still going to be
about your people—technology like AI is just one of

move fast. the tools to help your people reach their potential.

3. Find the right partner. IBM Watson Talent is a

go-to-partner for reimagining your internal talent
As artificial intelligence and other new technologies
development process. Our expert team of industrial-
help to automate tasks, support decision making and
organizational (I/O) psychologists informs the creation
personalization, and drive new ways of working, incredible
of all our products by guiding the collection and use
opportunities emerge for the workforce at large. This is the
of skills data, informing how to effectively use AI
moment to rethink the way your talent development team
to augment human intelligence, and addressing HR
operates, where and how your employees spend their time,
challenges like unconscious bias, internal mobility,
the type of new skills and learning your team focuses on,
and skill development. Watson is not only the leading
and HR’s potential for impact on the business. Don’t wait to
AI for business, but Watson Talent is custom-built for
get started. Here are three steps you can take immediately
HR. It uses AI to illuminate internal career options,
to get moving:
reduce regrettable attrition, increase employee
1. Pilot, pilot, pilot. Don’t spend years and years trying engagement, and much more.
to create the perfect talent development program to
scale to the entire organization. Get things moving.
Try, sometimes fail, but always learn. Bring your good
ideas to life quickly so they can build momentum and
be adjusted as they grow organically.

Bridging the skills gap 16

Reimagine talent development with the
power of AI

Watch the webinar Get HR insights in your inbox See Watson Talent in action
Learn how Citizens Bank is applying AI Stay current on talent development See how you can leverage data,
to develop talent, drive internal mobility, trends with the Smarter Workforce expertise, and technology to create
and standardize skills and competencies. newsletter. better business outcomes.

Watch now à Sign up today à Explore now à

References
1 2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is
Accelerating. Innosight, November 2017 11 Dr. Nigel Guenole. “Three Immediate Steps to Prepare for AI in
HR,” 2018. http://www.ibm.com/smarter-workforce/three-
2 Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, immediate-steps-to-prepare-for-ai-in-hr
skills, and wages. McKinsey Global Institute, November 2017
12 The HR Agenda for the Digital Era, 2019. https://mediacenter.ibm.
3 The Talent Challenge: Rebalancing skills for the digital age. PwC com/media/1_afgnt8aj
21st Annual Global CEO Survey, 2018
13 Making Moves: Internal Career Mobility and the Role of AI. IBM
4 Unplug from the past: The Chief Human Resources Officer Smarter Workforce Institute, May 2018
perspective. IBM Institute for Business Value, June 2018
14 Making Moves: Internal Career Mobility and the Role of AI. IBM
5 Making Moves: Internal Career Mobility and the Role of AI. IBM Smarter Workforce Institute, May 2018
Smarter Workforce Institute, May 20
15 John Ferguson, SVP, Head of Talent Management at Citizens Bank
6 Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 2015
16 Goodwill of North Georgia: Equips employees with the skills they
7 ArcBest: Empowering the next generation of leaders to develop the need to help fulfill its mission of putting people to work, 2018.
skills for success, 2018. https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/ https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/goodwill-of-north-georgia
arcbest-watson-talent-frameworks-leadership
17 Gartner 2018 Shifting Skills Survey
8 “How AI can be used across the employee experience,” The
Business Case for AI in HR. IBM Smarter Workforce Institute, 18 How to Create A Learning Enterprise, 2019. https://mediacenter.
December 2018 ibm.com/media/t/1_atoqmawz

9 Enabling Employees to Change Jobs Within Their Organization Can 19 The Business Case for AI in HR. IBM Smarter Workforce Institute,
Increase Their Likelihood to Stay By 33 Percent, According to December 2018
Gartner, 2018. http://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press- 20 Riia O’Donnell, “From buzzkill to benefit: How IBM rebranded its
releases/2018-10-30-enabling-employees-to-change-jobs-within- HR department.” HR Dive, April 1, 2019
their-organization-can-increase-their-likelihood-to-stay-by-33- 21 The Business Case for AI in HR. IBM Smarter Workforce Institute,
percent-according-to-gartner December 2018
10 Should I stay or should I go? IBM Smarter Workforce Institute, July
2017

Bridging the skills gap 17

@IBMWatsonTalent
#TalentTransformed

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2019 This document is current as of the initial

date of publication and may be changed by
IBM Corporation
IBM at any time. Not all offerings are
New Orchard Road
available in every country in which IBM
Armonk, NY 10504
operates.
Produced in the United States of America
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
April 2019
PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and Kenexa WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
are trademarks of International Business INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES
Machines Corp., registered in many OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
jurisdictions worldwide. Other product PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY
and service names might be trademarks WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-
of IBM or other companies. A current list INFRINGEMENT.
of IBM trademarks is available on the
IBM products are warranted according to
Web at “Copyright and trademark
the terms and conditions of the agreements
information” at www.ibm.com/legal/
under which they are provided.
copytrade.shtml.

48024748USEN-00

Bridging the skills gap 18