Transform your workforce through skills-based talent practices

Transform your workforce with skills-based talent management. Reinvent your talent and reward programs with a focus on skills.

In an uncertain economy with forecasted long-term labor shortages, maximizing the value of your workforce and attracting new talent to your organization is critical. As the world of work continues to change rapidly, more than ever, the ability to transform with it is crucial to success.  That’s why embracing skills-based practices has become a top priority for companies — because reskilling is essential to transforming organizations for the future of work. Measuring skills and capabilities objectively bolsters talent acquisition, development, succession and your broader talent strategy. Unlock exponential results today through a focus on skills. 

Whether you’re looking to build a strong skills foundation, redesign the way you work or rethink how you attract, retain and develop talent, we can help. Implementing skills-based practices at scale requires collaboration across teams — you’ll need expertise that spans workforce transformation, data and tech products, and digital enablement. That’s where Mercer comes in. 

  • Workforce and transformation advisory 
    Strategic visioning, program design, change activation 
  • Data and tech products 
    Skills data, market values and trends, enabling functionality 
  • Digital enablement 
    HR tech stack planning, deployment and optimization services 

Challenges

  • We struggle to identify current bench strength and skills gaps to inform skills-based hiring.
  • We’re working to restructure jobs around automation.
  • Learning and development investments aligned with skills-based talent management are difficult for us to prioritize.
  • We want to offer flexible careers across the organization.
Talent & transformation

The 2023/2024 Skills Snapshot Survey report

The report outlines the benefits of a skills-based approach, including improved employee retention, enhanced workforce agility, and greater flexibility for evolving market demands. It provides recommendations for implementing a skills-based talent strategy, such as building a skills foundation, aligning key performance indicators, and defining success metrics.
Download the report

How do leading companies reinvent for skills-based talent management?

  • Strategic workforce planning

    Apply internal and external supply-and-demand skills research data for enhanced insights and redefined talent/skills pools.

  • Reskilling

    Accelerate reskilling with targeted and personalized skills-based learning pathways and enhanced assessment capability, eliminating laborious current-state analysis.

  • Skills assessment

    Measure skills and capabilities objectively for talent acquisitions, development, succession or a broader people strategy based on your skills framework.

  • Pay for skills

    Invest in future skills, and reinvent pay programs with AI-enabled pay decisions based on skill demand, supply and criticality.

  • Job and career architecture

    To achieve optimal internal equity and external competitiveness, it’s essential to establish a robust career architecture framework with consistent job analysis and job evaluation methodology.

  • Performance management

    Agile environments require rapid, multisourced performance feedback and assessment to enable targeting of skill proficiency and development activities.

  • Career development/ pathing

    Enable employee ownership of careers through skill mapping and adjacencies, which shine a light on actionable career paths.

  • Succession planning

    Ensure succession pools are informed by individual skills to expand potential talent pipelines, and avoid job structures that may limit diversity.

  • Internal talent marketplace

    Deploy talent to gigs, projects and experiences based on skills supply and demand, promoting internal talent mobility and diversity of thinking and experiences across the organization.

  • Talent acquisition

    Select candidates based on skills-based hiring, using AI-driven skill inferences and simple digital assessment tools to improve the quality of both the process and the candidate experience.

  • Reinventing jobs for the future of work

    Mercer’s work design solutions help to transform and reinvent work by deconstructing jobs into tasks and preparing organizations for the future of work. 
A data-driven approach to pay-for-skills is crucial to your organization’s ability to attract and retain critical talent.

Is your organization ready for skills-based talent management?

Take this diagnostic to assess the maturity of skills structures and reskilling processes in your organization Identify areas for opportunities, and get instant advice on next steps.

Skills-based talent practices continuum

Looking at the workforce through a skills lens leads to increased flexibility

When we compare companies further forward on the journey we do see some differences in mindset and culture

  • there is more fluidity in the organisations
  • there are examples of moving mid-career and not stepping back
  • there is an urgency to bring diverse skills together to solve a problem

However, most organizations are not in a position to fully embrace such a model or to enable it across the full employee population.
The reason being is that many employers’ structures and processes fall on the left side of the screen.

  • The traditional employer typically has narrow job definitions, and the work one is asked to perform is not likely to go beyond the duties and responsibilities outlined in the JD. The employee in this environment view their career as a ladder, anticipating moving up in the same team.
  • Evolving and leading companies have fostered a more flexible environment where skills are a consideration in work assignments, and when employees think about their career, they understand that both vertical and horizontal movement is valuable – and they are empowered to take the wheel on their own career journey.
  • Future focused environments have adopted agile principles in how they organize teams and flow to the work based on their specific skills. 
    The above is often facilitated by a Talent Marketplace platform

A transformation from jobs to skills though needs an understanding of skills.

And for some of the most sophisticated a way to value skills based on market availability, strategic relevance and price. But attaining this change is hard because we live in a world defined by jobs and experience. Unpicking this in a mature organization can be tough – but the rewards are significant.

Incorporate skills into your talent strategy quickly and easily with Mercer Skills Library

Young african woman skipping rope while exercising    
Skills Library offers a rapid short-cut to deploying a skills taxonomy that is based on market data — the first step in adding skills to your organization’s pay strategy. 

Map skills directly to your jobs leveraging Mercer Skills Library curated content

  
Man skiing downhill   
Skills Map is a workflow solution, underpinned by the Mercer Skills Library, that empowers you to quickly map skills and related proficiency levels to your jobs. 

Reward the critical skills that are driving impact in your organization

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Skills Pricer is a self-service web application that reports which skills influence the pay of a selected job, as well as assigning a value to those skills. Additionally Skills Pricer allows you to customize a benchmark job to reflect your own unique skills mix, and see how that impacts on pay for the new role. 

Reinventing jobs for the future of work

   
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Work design helps to transform and reinvent work by deconstructing jobs into tasks and preparing organizations for the future of work.

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    Our partners along the Skills journey

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