In today’s fast-moving world, enterprise agility depends on empowering the workforce with the right skills and capabilities. 

Skills taxonomies are organising frameworks that provide structure and help organisations prioritise and identify the skills they currently have and those they need. 

This provides a common framework to describe the talent characteristics of the broader workforce, which promotes career mobility by enabling these skill profiles to be consumed by adjacent HR functions.

It’s an effective vehicle for fast-tracking skills progression, talent mobility and driving a competitive edge.

Skills taxonomies are organising frameworks that provide structure and help organisations prioritise and identify the skills they currently have and those they need

How should an organisation approach developing a skills taxonomy?

With the recent convergence of AI technologies and the increasing availability of robust skilling frameworks, it can be daunting for today’s learning leaders to know where to start addressing the skills needed for the future. 

Some fundamental considerations for L&D and talent teams looking to set up skills taxonomy include:

1. Get executive buy-in

C-Suite buy-in is critical to embed skill taxonomies in the business and enlist support. 

L&D leaders must secure involvement from senior leadership to invest appropriately in talent development and appreciate what skills and knowledge are required to realise the business’ strategic objectives. 

Once leaders appreciate the correlation between skills transformation and business impact, they will likely sponsor learning and skill development. 

It’s also sensible to establish a steering committee to help govern the larger set of talent priorities and the systems that will enable them. 

This L&D ecosystem might comprise hiring managers, HR, and technology and learning providers. 

Once leaders appreciate the correlation between skills transformation and business impact, they will likely sponsor learning and skill development

2. Align on the organisation’s priorities

As an outcome of the executive support, there should be some discussion and alignment on the talent and skill priorities critical for the business to achieve its OKRs. 

Given the comprehensive nature of establishing a common taxonomy, and the myriad of stakeholders engaged, it can be tempting to deep dive into defining legacy skillsets that may be relevant from a historical perspective but bear little relevance to the future success of the business. 

It’s essential to have a top 10 list when discussing skills alignment so that you focus the organisation on the skills that are the most critical for growth vs those that might be important to legacy divisions, operating units or management.

A skill taxonomy needs to be forward-looking, indexed with the market, and able to evolve and change in real-time with the business.

It’s essential to have a top 10 list when discussing skills alignment so that you focus the organisation on the skills that are the most critical for growth

3. Analyse, rationalise and align skill profiles

When organisations start down the path of aligning their skills architecture into a common taxonomy, they are confronted with the inconvenient reality that they may have thousands of job descriptions or skills profiles from heritage divisions, acquisitions, the parent company, subsidiaries, or other organisational artefacts that are no longer relevant. 

Additionally, these skill profiles may be stored in legacy HRIS systems, databases, spreadsheets, documents and other assets. 

The first order of business is to reconcile and align these artefacts into a standard set of skill profiles that reflect the current organisation's actual talent composition and priorities. 

It is not uncommon for organisations to reduce the number of skills profiles by a factor of 10 or more. This is part of the process. 

Fortunately, the recent advances in LLM and Generative AI have radically simplified this task. 

However, it still requires human intervention and oversight to align the profiles that genuinely matter and a governance model for managing these on a go-forward basis.

4. Establish a governance model

As the organisation aligns its skill profiles, it must establish a go-forward framework for governing the underlying taxonomy. 

How will changes be made to the profiles and the taxonomy? Who will approve the changes? How will you ensure that you have real-time inputs to the market so that your skill definitions stay current? 

These are important questions to answer as you define the skill's architecture. 

As organisations ebb and flow with the demands of the business, they can quickly find themselves back in a place with redundant skill definitions and frameworks, which offer little benefit to the business.

As the organisation aligns its skill profiles, it must establish a go-forward framework for governing the underlying taxonomy

5. Identify where skills capabilities and gaps lie

One of the primary advantages of a common skills taxonomy is the organisation's ability to understand the workforce's overall capability better. 

Once a common architecture has been established and aligned with the workforce, proper diagnostics and analytics can be conducted to assess the strengths and gaps in the current talent pool. 

This can be done with various skill benchmarks or other micro-assessments to gauge the organisation’s talent profile.  

This must be positioned as an enabler of career growth and mobility for the workforce vs an inventor, audit or ‘stack rank’, which generally have negative connotations. 

One way to do this is to offer formative, on-demand, self-service learning recommendations for employees with marketable badges and credentials. 

Using this approach, the workforce will be inherently motivated to improve their skillset, and the organisation will create generative capability at scale.     

Skills should be threaded through job descriptions, workforce plans, hiring decisions, ongoing job and career development, and talent mobility decisions

6. Take a personalised approach to align skills development to needs

Once skills needs and proficiencies have been identified, it's essential to anchor skills development efforts to employee and business needs by matching a person to specialisations. 

This enables personalisation at scale, improves time to proficiency, and breaks down inclusion barriers. 

Skills should be threaded through job descriptions, workforce plans, hiring decisions, ongoing job and career development, and talent mobility decisions.

It is essential to deliver relevant learning opportunities to employees in how they prefer to learn

7. Ensure flexible learning approaches

It is essential to deliver relevant learning opportunities to employees in how they prefer to learn. 

With hybrid work becoming the norm, learning programmes must remain highly adaptable, accessible, and available on any device, wherever and whenever. 

A blended approach to learning is proven to deliver continual learning opportunities that work for time-challenged employees. 

For instance, on-demand access to videos, podcasts, e-books, and assignments offer more manageable bite-sized learning that embeds a culture of continuous learning throughout the organisation.

If you enjoyed this, read: How to pick the right skills assessment method for your learners