The business landscape is rapidly evolving. Skills intelligence — understanding your workforce so you can close skills gaps and mobilize talent — is vital for a company to anticipate and adapt to change. But how does a company actually achieve that comprehensive view, and where should learning and development leaders invest now to build a workforce fit for the future?

To answer these questions and others around L&D, AI, and skills verification, Workera hosted a webinar that brought together a leading researcher and an industry expert with a track record of harnessing skills intelligence. Dani Johnson, co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread Research, interviewed Jim Hemgen, Director of Talent Development at Booz Allen Hamilton.

The webinar explored topics ranging from the crucial role of culture in a talent marketplace to the specific skills assessments that ensure a workforce is AI-ready. 

Here are the five biggest takeaways from their discussion:

1. Talent marketplaces are key to retention


According to Hemgen, skills are front and center in every discussion as L&D leaders prepare employees for GenAI. The data backs him up. RedThread Research revealed that 94% of companies are thinking about skills to some extent. However, 43% of companies lack any kind of skills strategy, and only 18% of organizations have a skills strategy for the entire company. “Lots of talk right now, but not a lot of action,” observed Johnson.

For Booz Allen Hamilton, one key statistic revealed the need for a dedicated skills strategy. The company wanted to do a better job of connecting people to internal jobs and projects, so they studied their applicant tracking system to see how many people were applying for jobs. They found that 60% of applicants left the company if they didn’t get a new opportunity within a new year.

Booz Allen quickly did the math on the significant cost of replacing that talent. The company launched a pilot talent marketplace with five important job roles and asked leaders to populate it with projects and roles that employees could apply for to ensure supply and demand. 

2. Skills verification acts as a flywheel for internal mobility


Skills quickly enter the equation in a talent marketplace. If you don’t personally know an individual, how do you know which skills and expertise they’re bringing to the table? Booz Allen needed to create trust in the system so people had faith that a person really knew and could do what they claimed. That led the firm to launch an internal badging program, where employees could self-report skills and industry certifications. 

The initial system was limited, but Booz Allen soon created skills assessments that helped determine whether a person was at the foundational, practitioner, or expert level for several key technical skills, such as Python. Employees who asked “What’s in it for me to pursue these credentials?” found that the badges made them much more visible, more marketable, and more likely to get accepted onto exciting projects. 

Skills verification “acts like a flywheel,” Johnson noted, where employees put data in, employers make the system work better for their career, and the employee puts more data in. Hemgen expects Booz Allen to eventually advance to real-time skills verification, where a manager could watch a junior colleague give a masterful presentation and immediately log in the colleague’s profile that they demonstrated leadership voice. “That is super powerful,” Hemgen said. 

3. Organizations with a dedicated skills strategy outperform others


Building a skills intelligence program can require significant investments of time and budget from L&D leaders and employees. The data shows that it’s worth it. According to RedThread Research, when organizations have a clear skills strategy, employees are:

    • 3.4x more likely to give a positive NPS score
    • 2x more likely to report their company as innovative
    • 1.7x more likely to report their company met its 2023 business goals

At Booz Allen, skills verification became an essential tool for their technical risk review board. The review board is charged with assessing the potential risk associated with the complex solutions they deliver to clients — with huge financial implications. Hemgen established role-based badges for the review board — demonstrating the proven skills or stackable skills that an employee must possess to perform this crucial function. That credential became the price of entry for an individual to be in a job and gain access to any systems required by the job.

The business needed a way to mitigate risk by identifying talent, certifying that talent, and making those people discoverable within Booz Allen’s systems. Skills verification made the talent planning and pulling possible, while also granting secure access to systems. 

4. AI literacy is now a power skill


L&D leaders right now are laser-focused on getting their workforces AI-ready. As Hemgen noted, AI literacy is the new power skill that every employee needs to have, because they will all be exposed to AI in some capacity. Booz Allen is focused on building AI competence across its team, which is why they began to collaborate with Workera in 2023. 

Workera “had the platform at the ready to really help us assess skills in a way that we couldn't do before,” Hemgen said. Booz Allen was able to identify assessments that build to specific skills and then roll those up to specific roles. Employees go to the Workera platform, where they can assess and validate their skills. The adaptive platform serves up the most meaningful and relevant content to close skills gaps, then reassess the skills to track improvement over time.

“We've reported to Wall Street some of the gains that we've received in terms of building these AI capabilities, and how it has really improved our book of business related to AI solutions,” Hemgen said. 

5. Automation is the future of skills intelligence


Technology is evolving from self-directed learning journeys to targeted upskilling. Instead of companies providing content programs that employees can opt into as they progress in their career, companies are looking for specific profiles and baseline skills. Technology is now adaptive enough to identify the target audience and serve up not only courses but specific topics within a course to reduce the time demands on each employee. 

Hemgen pointed to tech that serves as a coach or teaching assistant — like Sage, Workera’s AI mentor for the enterprise — offering a personalized and ever-evolving learning journey. The technology removes the need for human intervention and frees L&D leaders to be more strategic about the targets they need to pursue and the interventions they should deploy. 

Hemgen sees his role at Booz Allen as demand sensing the needs of the business. He must understand the most critical roles at the company and the skills necessary to do the work. As he plans for the next fiscal year, he’s investing L&D resources in targeted upskilling.

To hear more from Dani Johnson and Jim Hemgen, check out the full recording of the webinar. And for a deeper look at some of the topics discussed, visit Workera’s recently published eBook The Leader's Guide to an AI-Ready Workforce.