For the past several years, organizations have invested heavily in skills.
They have built taxonomies and frameworks, collected employee skills data, launched talent marketplaces, implemented skills technology, piloted new approaches to learning and mobility, and experimented with AI-powered skills inference.
Yet a more fundamental question is emerging:
What workforce decisions are all of these investments supposed to improve?
The next phase of skills strategy may be less about building the skills layer itself—and more about turning skills data into better decisions about talent, work, capability, and investment.
That shift is becoming more urgent as AI changes the nature of work.
Jobs are being decomposed into tasks. Some work is being automated, some augmented, and some redesigned. Organizations are reconsidering which capabilities should be built internally, where external talent is needed, which roles are becoming more critical, and where workforce risk is emerging.
Skills data has the potential to inform those decisions.
But only if organizations can answer a new set of questions.
What we’ll explore
During this Skills Roundtable, we’ll discuss questions such as:
The shift from skills infrastructure to workforce decision-making
Many organizations have focused first on the infrastructure required to support skills-based talent practices:
Those capabilities remain important.
But increasingly, their value depends on whether they help leaders answer practical workforce questions:
Where do we have critical capability today?
Where are we exposed?
Who could move into emerging roles?
What capability should we develop rather than hire?
Which skills are becoming more or less important as AI changes work?
Where should we invest our limited development resources?
What workforce decisions can we make confidently with the data we already have?
This roundtable will focus on the emerging workforce decision layer of skills strategy: the point where skills data, workforce planning, business priorities, technology, and human judgment come together.
Who should attend
This discussion is designed for leaders responsible for or actively influencing:
As always, the Skills Roundtable is designed as a peer discussion rather than a webinar.
We’ll provide a strategic frame for the conversation, surface emerging practices and tensions, and then spend most of the session learning from the experience of practitioners working through these decisions inside their organizations.
If your organization has moved beyond asking “Should we become more skills-based?” and is now asking “How should skills actually improve the decisions we make about our workforce?”, this conversation is for you.
Hosted by Richardson Consulting Group as part of the Skills Roundtable series—convening leaders who are shaping the future of enterprise skills strategy and practice.