SiriusXM’s chief people and administrative officer shares 4 key lessons from her company’s skills transformation

Restructuring jobs and career development through the lens of skills can be difficult, to say the least. That’s especially true for large companies that have to analyze and reshape thousands of roles with skills and L&D programs in mind.

It’s a process that the satellite radio giant SiriusXM has become well acquainted with in recent years. In September 2024, SiriusXM completed a spin-off and merger, establishing it as a standalone, publicly traded company. Through this restructuring, the company set its sights on becoming a skills-based organization, Faye Tylee, SiriusXM’s chief people and administrative officer, told HR Brew at its Talent Summit in NYC in April.

“We’ve been talking about skills-based now for probably the last two plus years, and it was really, as a result of a change in our business strategy at SiriusXM,” Tylee said.

While SiriusXM’s skills transformation is far from complete—and may never be (more on that later)—Tylee shared some key lessons her team has learned over the past two years.

Get leadership buy-in. One immediate piece of advice Tylee shared with the audience is to tie skills transformation to business goals, and get key leaders on board.

“Understanding your business and what resonates with your respective leaders, in terms of, as you’re trying to affect change and transformation in your organization, that’s critically important,” Tylee said. “That really allowed us to start figuring out a roadmap to moving from a roles-based to skills-based organization.”

Tylee said her team educated key leaders on the importance of company culture to achieving transformation objectives. Conversations with leaders included discussions about the capabilities the company had and needed to help the business strategy succeed. Her team also established a coalition with SiriusXM’s CEO, CFO, and CTO to discuss how talent should be factored into the transformation. She said that made the process feel less prescriptive and more collaborative.

“So as we start to work through, it doesn’t feel like it’s the people and culture team dictating to the business. It’s actually the business working together,” she said.

Having a strong relationship with the CEO is also critical, Tylee added.

“Building that relationship and trust in my judgment and the judgment of the people and culture team is just as important as then being able to articulate the business case around why we’re doing what we’re doing,” she said, adding that SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz is the first to talk about how important skills and culture are “to drive the effectiveness of the organization.”

One way she’s helped build and maintain that trust is by following through on commitments, and underpromising while overdelivering. “It’s a cliché, but I think that that’s super important. How you manage expectations is a way to drive that sense of trust in the relationship,” she said.

Get employee buy-in, too. Tylee’s team spent time analyzing people data to understand how employees moved throughout the company. They identified linear and non-linear career paths, and for the latter identified the skills employees had, and those they developed, before moving to another part of the business. She said she used those examples of employee transformation, and feedback from conversations with the company’s ERGs, various leaders, and remote workers to show employees how various skills could be leveraged for other career opportunities within the company.

“We use them to help tell those stories, to bring it to life so people could actually understand the art of what’s possible,” Tylee said. “As you start to think about how skills can actually give you much more of a platform to consider other opportunities for career development.”

Start small. SiriusXM started its skills-based transformation with a pilot in its product and technology organization. This function was ripe for such a program, because AI was already changing the nature of employees’ work, Tylee said.

The process included encouraging hiring managers to think about skills when crafting job postings.

“We did it in real time so that it didn’t feel like we were coming out with a new program,” Tylee said, adding that her team did this to avoid coming off as being prescriptive.

Other companies have started their skills transformations with pilots, including Workday, which experimented with skills-based hiring in its sales organization, and Skillsoft, which tested its skills strategy in its leadership ranks.

As for where to strike next, Tylee said her team is considering where there’s an appetite for implementing a skills strategy.

“Leveraging FOMO does help, because there is natural competition within an organization,” she said.

Don’t expect an endpoint. One mistake (non-HR) leaders may make is assuming a skills-based transformation is an initiative with an end. The reality is the opposite, Tylee said, especially as AI and other forces evolve and disrupt businesses. Companies will have to respond by identifying the skills required to address them.

“It’s not a static thing,” she said. “You have to have that governance in place to keep sort of coming back around to make sure that you have the flexibility in the system to be able to support that.”