Skills-Based Talent Models Require The Right Organizational Structure
Saurabh Jain is founder and CEO of Spire.AI, which empowers people and businesses with adaptability and future-readiness.
In boardrooms across the globe, the concept of a skills-based organization (SBO) has increasingly found its way into conversations. The premise is straightforward: It's an organization that matches its talent to opportunities based on capabilities, not just title. But while the model is conceptually sound and widely endorsed, operationalization remains elusive for many. The issue isn't resistance or a lack of ambition; most enterprise leaders are already invested in creating more agile, opportunity-rich systems of work. Instead, the constraint often lies in the tools and frameworks available to execute that ambition.
For decades, organizations have structured their workforces and talent systems around well-defined, hierarchical roles. This strategy is excellent for tracking positions, managing payrolls and organizing reporting lines. But it isn't engineered to dynamically interpret workforce capability, identify skill adjacencies or surface timely career transitions. So, when leaders set goals around internal mobility, workforce adaptability or precision reskilling, a traditional talent system will often fall short.
The workforce today is multidimensional. A single role may encompass five, 10 or more evolving skill competencies. Employees are increasingly developing capabilities beyond their formal job descriptions through projects, stretch assignments and adjacent responsibilities. Without a talent system that captures and contextualizes this growth, that capability remains invisible and unaccounted for.
In 2022, Deloitte found that organizations with skills-based practices are more likely to deploy talent effectively and significantly more likely to retain high performers. The distinction lies in operational systems that can break down roles into their underlying competencies, then link those competencies to specific, evolving skills. With this level of support, leaders are better equipped to see who can do what, where capability exists across the organization and how talent can be aligned to work with greater accuracy.
The most common friction point in SBO execution is internal mobility. Even when organizations invest in it and there's employee interest, the volume of lateral or upward movement doesn't always reflect that. The root issue is rarely intent. It's visibility.
Employees often cannot see where they can go, what skills they need to get there or how their existing capabilities translate across business functions. So career mobility becomes reactive, disconnected from current momentum and misaligned with aspiration.
Consider a scenario where a business analyst has spent several years supporting cross-functional initiatives by working closely with product teams, managing internal reporting tools and even leading client workshops. However, their employee profile remains tied to their original role description, highlighting only static skills like 'requirements gathering' or 'data documentation.' When new roles open in areas like product operations or client success, the system overlooks this individual because their broadened skill set hasn't been captured or contextualized.
There's a vital connection between current capability and future opportunity. According to a 2023 LinkedIn report, employees who make internal moves are 63% more likely to stay with a company. This clearly indicates that visibility, when supported with structure, drives retention. So, organizations must evolve internal mobility from a static application-based process to a dynamic, system-guided experience.
As organizations face accelerating shifts in business models and technology, skilling has become nonnegotiable. But traditional, broad approaches to upskilling initiatives often fail to meet the moment. What's needed is sharper context in the flow of work.
Skilling must begin with a clear view of workforce capability: where strengths lie, where critical gaps are forming and what future scenarios may require. Developing employees must be connected to clear, role-aligned career pathways that give purpose and direction to learning. It's also key that skilling efforts are embedded within day-to-day execution, not treated as a parallel initiative. This isn't about rethinking learning, it's about embedding workforce development within daily responsibilities and empowering individuals to upskill or reskill whenever a skill gap emerges.
The organizations making progress with skills-based models aren't abandoning job architectures. They're modernizing and infusing them with the ability to evolve, respond and guide talent intelligently. It requires investing in systems that can continuously update skill profiles based on actual work, surface opportunity at the point of readiness, align skilling to specific transition paths and enable talent decisions that are timely, contextual and measurable
As skills-based models mature, their true impact will extend far beyond talent operations. What begins as a shift in how workforces are structured quickly evolves into a new enterprise capability: the ability to adapt with greater speed, accuracy and internal coherence.
In this light, becoming an SBO isn't a workforce strategy; it's an adaptability strategy that empowers leaders to reconfigure teams faster, pursue new revenue lines with existing talent and build resilience into every layer of execution. To succeed, organizations will need to embed skills into their enterprise architecture so they can respond to change effectively and keep talent aligned to business strategy.
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