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HR Brew

Learning and Development

Mikaela Cohen

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What would the world look like if employees introduced themselves not by job titles but by their skills inventory?

While it isn’t realistic to introduce yourself in everyday conversations with, “Hi, my name is Stacey. I write code in Python. I design products. I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years,” one author suggests HR pros think of their employees as these skills instead of just, “Stacey, the director of product design.”

Craig Friedman, a talent and skills transformation leader for the Illinois-based St. Charles Consulting Group, highlights the importance of companies becoming a skills-based organization in his new book 

Enterprise Skills Unlocked: A Blueprint for Building Skills-based Talent Management

Friedman shared with HR Brew what people leaders will learn from his book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does a skills-based organization look like?

Skills [are] largely about data…and that’s one of the misconceptions around it…If we had skills not just tied to learning courses and on people’s profiles, but they were tied to everyone’s job descriptions, and especially tied to the work tasks, whether that’s in a workflow, or in a staffing assignment, or job posting…we can actually leverage a whole bunch of more adaptable, more efficient, more tailored talent strategies across the whole value chain.

We can create more personalized learning pathways, so we get [a] broader reach of learning, development, of leadership development, more flexible work design, more career mobility options for employees, [a] deeper reach for recruiting, more strategic workforce planning.

What’s an example of how HR can focus on skills for roles and projects?

One way that consulting companies are leveraging these concepts is through talent marketplaces. The core of a consulting business is getting people staffed on projects that are billable, and when people are not on projects, they’re essentially like inventory in a warehouse accumulating, carrying charges…So, anything you can do to get the right people staffed on the right projects more efficiently leads directly to revenue capture.

If they’re using a talent marketplace where they’re posting open staffing assignments, the machine learning in the talent marketplaces can scan across all of the employee profiles, find people who are the best matches. And, even if they’re not a 100% match, say you’ve got someone whose skills profile is a 90% match, the system can automatically tee up the project onboarding for that 10%. No extra effort on anyone’s part. No one has to create a project onboarding plan.

How can HR help their organization adopt a skills-first mindset?

You can make a lot of progress building in the long term a skills-based organization or skills-based enterprise one meaningful project at a time, and one of the best ways that I’ve seen companies do it is by finding a business issue that is tied to skills.

I had a client that worked in the mining industry. The market was changing in such a way that they needed to dramatically expand their copper mining business, and in order to expand their copper mining business, it so turns out that most of the copper that they’re mining today is near the surface of the earth. If they want to dramatically increase it, they need to dig deeper into the earth to get some more copper.

But underground mining is a completely different set of engineering practices than surface mining, so they have to develop a whole lot of new underground mining skills in order to expand their business. With the help of a skills-based organization, they can much more effectively find the talent that they need, define the skills that they need through a variety of different strategies. 

They might do skills-based recruiting to get it from the marketplace…They might move people around internally, the build, buy, repatch, borrow strategy to try to meet that capability need and get to market quickly.

What role does AI play in skills-based organizations?

For most of the last 40 years, our HR systems have been all based at the employee level. We hire employees. We give them a job title. We give them a salary and benefits, and an email address and a phone number. Slot them into a job. Everything that HR does is focused at the headcount level.

Skills-based [strategies] takes that down a level of detail, and in taking it down a level of detail, it’s both more granular, but it’s also more informative. Because skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish. So, it moves the whole exercise of talent management from being a headcount management exercise to being a capability development exercise.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Craig Friedman, author of ‘Enterprise Skills Unlocked’

“Skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish.”

HR should stop thinking of employees in headcount—consider them as a collection of skills

Is getting promoted always the best thing to happen? There’s little doubt that many employees wouldn’t turn down a pay bump, but one author suggests that promotions aren’t always positive.

More companies are reconsidering promotion structures to include both non-management and management role tracks, 

, so employees can advance their careers without necessarily jumping into people management.

But even when employees decide to take on a people management role, some of those “superpower skills” that got them promoted might work against them, according to Sabina Nawaz, executive coach, speaker, and author of 

You’re The Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)

Nawaz shared with HR Brew how people pros can help employees be aware of some adverse effects of stepping into leadership.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

This book, for HR professionals, is a two-fold resource. One is for themselves, and the other is for the clients that they support. There are three key things in the book that reshape our thinking about power, pressure, and leadership, and particularly leading in these times. The first one is that getting promoted is often the riskiest time in your career.

The second is that it is not power, but pressure that corrupts us. Under pressure, we act out, we get shorter, we get snippier, and then power comes in, and isolates us from the impact of those actions under pressure. So, we are often the last ones to find out that we’re actually doing damage and becoming innocent saboteurs for our teams, as well as our business results, because nobody wants to tell someone in a position of power what they don’t want to hear.

To the first point, what do you mean by promotions are risky?

When we get promoted, of course, it’s obviously an occasion for great celebration. At the same time, we haven’t changed, but our position has changed. We’re in a new level, and we have new rules. If people are not aware of that, it comes [back] to bite them.

Let’s say somebody is really attentive to details. It’s a superpower of theirs. That is what got them noticed and promoted up the ranks. Now, suddenly, as a manager, they’re going to be viewed as a micromanager because while we haven’t changed, the necks that are craning up to look at us, their view of us becomes less charitable, and also, sometimes people feel a sense of threat when somebody is in a position of power because they have so much control over our lives.

What does a good or effective manager look like from your perspective?

I don’t know that there is such a thing as a purely good manager or bad manager. They both reside under us, and it goes back to one of the earlier points I mentioned around pressure, that pressure actually changes how we act. 

There were times in my career where people told me I was the best boss they’d ever had, and there were times in my career where people told me I was the worst boss they ever had. Actually, they didn’t tell me that, they told other people.

Did I have a personality transplant? No. Did I act differently? Yes. Did those actions change because of the amount of pressure I was under? Absolutely. 

I’m not saying we should use that as an excuse, but to recognize that we’re capable of both types of behaviors we just have to be mindful of how we manage pressure. Because, if you think about it, pressure is also great. Diamonds are forged under pressure. It’s like an invitation to grow. We don’t realize the brilliance, the resilience, the creativity that we have unless we’re under pressure. So it doesn’t have to define you, it can refine you.

An interview with Sabina Nawaz, author of ‘You’re The Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)’

“When we get promoted, of course, it’s obviously an occasion for great celebration. At the same time, we haven’t changed, but our position has changed. We’re in a new level, and we have new rules. If people are not aware of that, it comes [back] to bite them.”

How having promotable skills can have adverse effects on employees

Adam DeRose

In order to know where you’re going, you need to know where you are.

Before Workday designed any AI learning or adoption strategy for its workforce, execs first needed to understand where employees were at both as it related to their skills and sentiments and to identify their needs amid this workplace upheaval.

“It’s not just a technological transformation, it’s very much a human one,” said Chris Ernst, chief learning officer at Workday. “Even though we’re a technology company in Silicon Valley, when we began our upskilling journey on AI, we started with research, and we’ve learned a lot.”

The firm surveyed employees to better understand the barriers to AI adoption. What Workday discovered ended up informing the cornerstones of its AI adoption initiative: Everyday AI.

According to the company, the global focus groups revealed three key data points to build its strategy around:

43% of Workday employees lacked time to explore AI tools

37% said they weren’t sure how to use them effectively

37% revealed concerns about reliability and accuracy

“Once we deeply understood our Workmates,” Ernst said, referring to Workday employees, “their needs, their concerns, their use cases, we went really big on this, and we’ve launched an enterprise upskilling initiative…The goal of this program is for all of our nearly 20,000 Workmates to build the mindsets, the skills, and the habits to use AI effectively every day.”

Changing mindsets at Workday involves giving employees more exposure to AI tools and their capabilities to really address baseline fears around how AI will impact their work.

“The mindset piece really is about that fear and that concern,” Ernst told HR Brew. “The way we’ve really been working on that..is through a lot of events around the company.”

The company launched its first ever “prompt-athon,” inspired by the popular Big Tech practice of hosting hackathons, events for developers and teams to work together or in competition to address problems or challenges with a technology or tool.

To address upskilling at Workday, the learning team created one digital academy for all things AI available to all employees. The content is organized by different personas of users, so employees can learn about AI strategies or use cases based on their specific role or project they’re assigned.

The academy serves more as a choose-your-own-adventure: Employees can identify exactly what they’d like to do with AI, and the platform surfaces relevant training based on different personas, such as “innovator,” “communicator,” and “analyst,” according to Ernst.

To foster good AI habits, Ernst asked all employees to set a personal AI goal, share that objective with their managers, and check-in quarterly on the progress.

Additionally, instead of communicating from the top down about the AI plans from senior execs, Workday opened up a company-wide town hall to spotlight the work of employees leveraging the tech in important or interesting ways that are really meaningful to Workday’s business.

“All of this is creating the conditions to want to learn,” Ernst told HR Brew. “Our highest performers are twice as engaged with these technologies. We also found that those who are most engaged with these technologies…feel that they have a 13% increase in their sense of having a career path.”

Workday employees are reporting that since the launch:

73% found that AI tools make them more productive;

50% said it provides them new insights; and

“This is the biggest enterprise learning and development initiative we’ve taken on in 20 years as a company,” Ernst said.

An AI robot robot sitting side by side with a businessman at an office desk working

How Workday narrowed its talent strategy for AI enablement and skill building to focus on three things

“The goal of this program is for all of our nearly 20,000 workmates to build the mindsets, the skills, and the habits to use AI effectively every day.”

Growing up the sandbox was full of treasure: weird shaped rocks, pillbugs, coins, tiny plastic toys left and forgotten by a previous visitor. It’s a place of wonder for children, provided the neighborhood alley cat doesn’t also bury treasure there.

Sandboxes are small plots dedicated to play, creation, and sometimes destruction, especially in service of building something greater. It’s an apt analogy for a space created for employees to play with AI at work.

Rather than rely solely on IT departments or outside consultants to implement AI tools across the organization, some companies are creating internal ‘sandboxes’ of sorts that provide employees with the space to experiment, tinker, and even build their own applications, and are finding it’s a great way to center an AI strategy.

Thinking about AI from the ground up rather than top down helps with adoption inside the organization. It can ease anxieties about AI’s place at work and how humans fit into the new paradigm. It also can further innovation from inside the company, with the aid of the people who actually do the work: your employees.

“Organizations, if they want their company to survive through this transformation and thrive…they need to be providing employees the opportunity to use these tools and understand how they can evolve, how it will evolve business models,” said Mary Alice Vuicic, CPO at Thomson Reuters.

 Vuicic and her colleague from the technology team recognized the transformation potential early after the launch of ChatGPT, and set out to articulate a strategy focusing not only on the global news and professional services firm’s approach to adopting the technology but also its talent strategy amid this AI transformation.

At Thomson Reuters, the people strategy centered around “Four Ts” to prepare its workforce for AI: tone from the top, training, tools, and time.

“You have to get hands-on experience to understand,” she said of “tools” and “time.” “We’ve seen a huge shift when that happens.”

. The secure internal “sandbox” offers the entire Thomson Reuters workforce, all 27,000 employees, access to leading large language models to explore AI in the workplace and gain hands-on experience interacting with the tech to foster a culture of experimentation, as well as trial and error.

“Everybody can use it, and it is secure,” Vuicic said. “We encourage people to go in [and] start their work in that sandbox.”

More than half of Thomson Reuters employees are now using Open Arena regularly, and the company is starting to track usage and report its findings back to employees and their managers to foster transparency about AI use at the company.

Open Arena also helped facilitate the company’s AI champions program. Some 400 Thomson Reuters employees are AI super-users and are helping to coach peers and design use cases on how to better use it at work, she said.

“Innovation and problem solving can come from anywhere in the organization,” Vuicic said. “That’s very different from how a traditional organization structure works.”

 Other global companies are also seeing that employee involvement is critical to scaling AI. At collaboration and team-based project management software company Atlassian, non-technical employees aren’t just end-users, they’re also AI builders.

Atlassian uses its customer-facing generative AI tool, Rovo, internally. Atlassian’s strategy includes engaging teams across the company to build tools tailored specifically to their workflows.

CPO Avani Prabhakar told HR Brew that this results in both faster adoption and deeper ownership over how AI shapes work for Atlassian employees, pointing to widely used agents built out by her HR team.

“We have Rovo agent, that’s the tool that you get,” Prabhakar said. “Our team has been able to build an onboarding agent on top of it. That agent is called Nora…It is built by [the] HR team, so I don’t have to worry about adoption.”

Because HR leaders involved in onboarding at Atlassian helped ideate how AI could improve or impact the experience for new hires, Nora acts more like an “onboarding buddy” for new hires, answering “dumb” questions like those a new hire may be too embarrassed to ask a supervisor or colleague and to walk employees through their early days. This tool, built by actual HR professionals, is used by 70% of new hires, according to Prabhakar.

“The good thing with non-tech users like HR is like, ‘Oh, I can create my own agent, it’s not being done by the IT team and then given to me to work with,’” she said. “ It’s just a very different notion.”

Atlassian’s most popular AI agent lives inside its performance management system, APEX, Prabhakar adds. It can assist in drafting talking points, and also help employees create written content or feedback. The tool also helps managers consolidate information from 360-degree feedback, peer feedback, and other places into a coherent assessment.

“Because you are letting employees tinker with the technology, then there is more buy-in, but also it eradicates all the fear that sits around it,” Prabhakar said.

Vuicic and Prabhakar agree that letting workers explore the tools for themselves—and not simply participate in training—creates a shift in mindset and eases adoption and fear. Adopting the new technology becomes less about enforcement and box checking and more about learning, engagement, and career transformation.

“They get past anxiety or fear about, ‘What is this technology’ and, ‘What’s it going to do to my job,’” Vuicic said. “But then it becomes a delight, because it’s so accessible,” adding that she imagines a future wherein the remaining work—what’s not modified or impacted by AI—actually becomes more human.

And that unexpected employee delight is a business advantage too, Vuicic said, adding that top talent expects access to AI now.

“They want to be future-proofed, and so they will leave and go to companies, or they won’t join companies that don’t give them that access,” she said.

two suit and tie types on their laptops in the sand

AI strategy can be built on sand, and in this case, it’s a good thing

Some companies are letting their employees play in the AI sandbox and it’s helping generate use-cases and alleviate AI anxiety.

You probably have a boss, who has a boss, who has a bigger boss, who has a boss in the C-suite. And, the thought of actually managing all or even one of those bosses, as an individual employee, might feel rather daunting.

But every employee can “manage up” to their boss and leadership teams in order to take the reins of their career and gain influence within the company, says Melody Wilding, author of 

Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge

Wilding shared more with HR Brew from her book.

I very simply define managing up as how do you navigate your relationship with the people that have more positional power or positional authority than you. Primarily, that’s going to be your boss, but not always…and I think the mistake people make is that they think managing up is just something they do for their manager’s benefit, to get on their good side, to make them happy, to make them look good. It tends to be very much about the other person.

When, in actuality, managing up…is really about creating the conditions you need to be successful, whether that’s negotiating your workload, giving feedback and actually having it be heard, advocating for the resources you need or the advancement you want. It’s actually something you should do for your own benefit.

How can employees manage up when they may have conflicting interests or goals from their managers?

It’s ironic that mostly managing up starts with yourself. Managing yourself, your own psychology, understanding your own frame of reference, because, yes, you may value flexibility and making sure you have enough energy for your work and you’re engaged, and you or your team have high morale, and that’s why work-life balance is important to you. 

But, you may be dealing with a manager who is much more efficient [and] results-oriented. The people side of it is not as top of mind or convincing for them, and that’s really crucial to know because that influences how you frame your message, so that it actually gets through to them.

And, if you can say something along the lines of, “After 6pm, I do log off to spend time with my family, because I want to make sure that when I show up here, I can deliver the best results. I don’t make mistakes, which means that we can get deliverables to our clients faster,” you’re contextualizing it in a way that your manager is actually going to hear, care more about, and that will convince them to take action or say yes. You’re not fundamentally changing the content of your message. You’re just tweaking it, so that ultimately it’s more effective for you.

What role does HR play in helping employees manage up?

Everything from communicating and helping facilitate some of these conversations around alignment…It’s something that we all kind of overlook, because we’re just busy getting the work done. We very rarely zoom out or up to think about, 

Why are we doing this, and are we actually on the same page?

Especially now, as things are changing so quickly. Every day, every hour, it sounds like priorities are changing. You need to make sure your manager and the people who are reporting to them are aligned and understand, “What does success look like?” And, I think HR plays an important role in normalizing that those conversations should even be happening and helping people understand what’s the utility of them to you, as the manager.

This should be something that’s coming up in your one-on-ones, where managers, you are giving your employees line of sight into things you’re thinking about, or what’s happening at the leadership level. So, they can anticipate, they can ask questions. They have an opportunity to step up and say, “Actually, I would love to be part of that meeting. That’s something I could handle on your behalf.” So, they have development opportunities.

An interview with Melody Wilding, author of ‘Managing Up: How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge’

“Managing up…is really about creating the conditions you need to be successful, whether that’s negotiating your workload, giving feedback and actually having it be heard.”

Employees who manage up to bosses help the entire organization and their careers

For decades, learning and development (L&D) operated within an outdated framework: linear e-learning courses, in-person training sessions, and pricey LMS systems. Most organizations continue to rely on costly, oft-clunky, tools that don’t meet business or workforce needs, and their use has never impressed those with the purse strings.

That model, and all the challenges that came along with it, is primed to change, and change dramatically, according to global HR industry analyst Josh Bersin in 

“The infrastructure that was created was the learning experience is a course and the platform is an LMS, and the platform doesn’t know what the course is doing, and the course doesn’t know what the platform is doing. So the platform gives you very little personalization in your learning experience because of the architecture,” Bersin told HR Brew at the Cultivate Talent Summit in Southern California.

Instead of slide decks, expensive video content or scheduled training sessions, employees increasingly desire learning experiences that mirror how they consume content online in their everyday life.

“I think young people have been conditioned to learn through TikTok videos and small snippets and not sitting down for eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, to go through a linear course,” Bersin said.

AI is allowing learning platforms to shift into responsive assistants that are capable of creating custom learning content, answering real-time questions, and adapting to each employee’s pace and needs.

“In the new paradigm, the content and the platform are the same thing,” Bersin said. “The platform is dynamically creating the content for you based on your needs…it can give you an AI tutor; it can give you an AI assistant; you can ask it questions; it will ask you questions.”

AI-powered learning platforms can meet employees where they’re at. He means that literally too: whether it’s transforming learning content to a podcast to listen to along a morning commute or right inside the flow of work allowing the learner to ask questions on a topic as they’re performing their tasks.

“There’s still a need for what you might call long-form content, but I think the long-form content gets consumed as you need it. We don’t force people to spend three hours clicking through stuff. I don’t think that’s gonna happen very much,” he said.

L&D is no longer just about skill-building, according to Bersin. It’s about equipping workers to respond quickly to change, accessing support in the flow of work, and taking control of their development.

“How do you measure the ROI of AI-based learning? You’re never going to be asked for that anymore, because [learners are] going to get the answers to their questions,” he said. “The reason you’re measuring ROI is because you spent $500,000 on a bunch of courses, and you don't know if anybody’s using them, and you’re a little worried that somebody’s going to take your budget away.”

the Josh Bersin Company’s new learning solution and first offering for entire businesses, rather than just the HR org.

“We’re wired as learning creatures,” he said. “If we can stimulate that natural thing, [learners are] going to be happier, they’re going to be more productive, they’re going to be more successful.”

image of a hand pushing a learning button with a stylist pen in a digital space

AI is poised to upend the world of learning and development

HR analyst Josh Bersin predicts the way employees learn and grow is about to dramatically change, and for the better.

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

Generative AI has opened workers’ eyes to how much they can learn using the tool—and how quickly.

Most workers (86%) are motivated to use AI to learn new skills at work, according to a survey of more than 500 adults commissioned by Bright Horizons-owned EdAssist and shared exclusively with HR Brew.

When asked their motivations for upskilling with AI, 45% (the highest share) said they’re using it to help them be more efficient with new learning opportunities and picking up new skills.

“There may be components of a new skill or a new task that you’re being charged with that is made up of variable components. Can you use AI to say: How can I make this more digestible?” said Diane Bartoli, senior vice president at EdAssist by Bright Horizons.

But the challenge that employers face is addressing that many workers still 

 to understand if they’re prompting AI correctly, and evaluating the quality of what the technology gives back to them.

“This is where we see organizations really kind of wrestling with: How do we put together programming and support for employees that helps them harness the power of AI effectively?” she said.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for creating this programming. The specific approaches employers take to helping workers harness these skills will vary based on industry and even specific functions within the company, Bartoli said. However, pushing for 

 such as leadership capabilities, communication, critical thinking and reading between the lines, have been a focus for many corporate leaders.

“These are things that historically don’t have courses attached to them. We’ve sort of treated them as you either are a people person, or you aren’t,” Bartoli said. “I think that there’s increasingly increasing recognition [that] we can actually train for these things…In fact, we’re going to need to.”

This is particularly pertinent to Gen Z workers. They’re 

 AI tools—according to the survey, 43% of Gen Zers want to pursue AI upskilling to achieve better work-life balance, compared to 35% of all respondents, and 42% want to pursue AI upskilling to allow them to focus on more meaningful work, compared to 31% of overall respondents.

 about how AI could affect their jobs. For example, if young bankers aren’t spending as much time in Excel spreadsheets because AI is taking over many of those tasks, they won’t have that learned experience to vet the quality of its output without additional training.

“We need to ensure that younger generations, who don’t necessarily have that wealth of experience to be able to know when something is not correct, are armed with the proper analytic skills, and skills to say: Is that actually right?” Bartoli said.

employee sitting in front of a monitor with AI elements