The Great Skills Reshuffling

Nolan Hout is senior vice president of growth at Infopro Learning.

Let’s be honest—job titles are starting to feel a bit like those “one size fits all” T-shirts that never really fit anyone. Smart companies are waking up to a simple truth: It’s not about what someone’s business card says anymore; it’s about the collection of skills they bring to the table.

Think of it like this: Instead of hiring for rigid job roles (looking at you, “Digital Marketing Ninja”), organizations are building talent networks based on skill clusters. That marketing specialist? They might have a knack for data analytics that could revolutionize your product development team. Your customer support person, who is having 100 conversations with customers daily, could be your next all-star salesperson.

This shift isn’t just making HR folks’ lives easier—it’s transforming how we think about learning impact. When you map learning directly to skills, suddenly you can draw a straight line between that Python course and increased productivity or that leadership workshop and improved team performance. Major organizations are transforming their approach to talent development. Take IBM, which has pioneered its internal Open Badge program to track and validate employee skills, or Unilever’s digital-first learning platform that maps specific skills to business outcomes. These companies are showing that when you focus on skills rather than roles, you can better measure the impact of your learning investments.

Major players aren’t just investing billions in AI; they’re creating dynamic skill marketplaces where employees can showcase their capabilities and get matched to projects based on their actual skills, not just their job titles.

For example, IBM developed its SkillsBuild platform that helps certify and badge employees for skills they want to develop. Unlike traditional job-based training, these skills have broad appeal and can be applied to any number of jobs.

AT&T’s Future Ready Initiative offers another compelling example in this space. As documented in Harvard Business Review and CNBC, they faced a stark reality: Only about 50% of their workforce had the necessary skills for their digital transformation. Rather than massive layoffs, they invested $1 billion to create detailed skills maps showing the gap between current capabilities and future needs. But here’s the clever bit—they created specific learning paths and partnerships with universities like Georgia Tech to develop custom “nanodegrees.” According to AT&T’s own reporting, by 2020, employees had completed over 4 million courses, with thousands redeployed to new roles based on newly acquired skills rather than previous job titles. This approach dramatically reduced external hiring costs while improving employee retention.

While these are just two examples, the results are widespread. LinkedIn reports that companies with strong internal mobility retain employees nearly twice as long as those that don’t, while a Gartner study found that organizations using skills-based planning are better able to fill critical roles quickly.

How Can You Shift To A Skills-Based Workforce?

Adopting a skills-based workforce is not something that can be done overnight, but nothing is more important than getting everyone bought into the idea that skills are the fundamental building blocks of how people bring value to your organization.

Once you have won over the hearts and minds of people in your organization, you can start shifting to a skills-based organization by:

• Start tracking what people can do, not just their titles.

• Ask “What skills does this work require?” before assigning projects, rather than “Who has the right job title?”

• Give opportunities based on skill potential, not just proven experience.

• Budget for skill development rather than role-specific training.

• Evaluate performance based on skill growth and application, not just role-based KPIs.

• Look for skill adjacencies. If someone’s good at project coordination, they might excel at stakeholder management with some development.

• Build teams around complementary skills rather than job descriptions. Mix technical, creative and operational skills for better project outcomes.

Leveraging Technology

Since it feels illegal to write an article without mentioning technology and artificial intelligence, it’s now time for me to officially “check the box.” As much as it pains me to say it, there is an abundance of technology out there that makes the work outlined above 100 times faster, better and less expensive. Such tools can almost automatically catalog all of the skills in your organization, create common skills taxonomies that map to industry standards and even rewrite your job descriptions to be more skills-focused.

However, just about every tool in this space misses one critical component: closing the inevitable skills gap in organizations. Don’t get me wrong, all the tools claim to help close the skills gap, but merely linking these tools to your online learning subscription (OpenSesame, LinkedIn Learning, etc.) is not enough to develop the skills of your employees. To close your skills gaps, you need to engage deeply with your HR and L&D teams to map out what development programs are the best fit for the skills you need to develop today. More than likely, they have programs in place already to support you, and if they don’t, you can work with them to secure the budget you need.

The workplace is undergoing a fundamental shift from job-based to skills-based talent management. This transformation enables organizations to better identify, develop and deploy talent while improving employee retention and reducing hiring costs. Success requires moving beyond traditional job descriptions to track actual capabilities, match skills to work requirements and create meaningful development opportunities. While technology can help catalog and map skills, true skill development demands thoughtful partnership between managers and L&D teams to create effective learning programs that close critical skill gaps.

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