Beyond the Framework: Skills, Competencies, Ontologies and the Future of Work
A round-up from one of the first sessions of UNLEASH World 2022.
Why You Should Care
Be it through skills, competencies or ontologies, focusing on the business outcome is what's important.
That's the message from our first learning panel on day one of UNLEASH World 2022.
Read on for more.
For the last two years or so, since the emergence and impact of COVID-19, the skills agenda has risen in importance across the world, as businesses wise up to the idea that you don’t always need to look around to find the best talent that gives you that cutting edge; sometimes it’s right under your nose and in your organization already – people just need a spot of reskilling.
And, if you’ve established that’s the direction you want to go in, it’s just the small matter of how to execute on that. Step forward Gemma Paterson, head of people experiences and innovation at Legal and General, Daniela Proust, head of global learning and growth at Siemens, and Kristina Tsiriotakis, senior director of organizational development & learning at DECIEM.
Our panel of experts on this day one, afternoon session in the learning and skills breakout area drew on their experiences working with a post-framework skills agenda, all moderated by one of the most experienced analysts around, David Perring, Fosway Group’s head of research.
Into the skills agenda
‘Skills, competencies, ontologies, and the future of work’ seemed like an verbose yet necessarily exhaustive way of describing the issue of giving your people the tools they need to be more productive at work, and positively affect that all-important bottom line.
And, even though this discussion was taking place at a tech show, Gemma Paterson had some initial words of warning when assuming tech tools will solve all your problems:
“We can sometimes get a bit woo-ed by tech, and we need to keep asking ourselves what are we going to do with the data from AI and automation – and if you don’t know, start small.”
This was echoed by Daniela Proust, who turned a few heads as she drew on her experience with Siemens, a very tech-savvy, tech-focused company, suggesting that, “tech can help but we haven’t found the holy grail yet.” Perhaps she’s talking about businesses more generally (and she’s probably right).
It helps to have buy-in from the top though, right? Kristina Tsiriotakis agrees. You don’t want to waste your time on initiatives that aren’t going to fly, as she says, “understand what your leaders and the C-Suite are going to commit to in learning, otherwise it will flop.”
Interviewed by UNLEASH in the run-up to the show, Gemma Paterson’s big drive at L&G is to make it all about what works best for the team and the individual. She finishes on the theme of tech being no more than an enabler, with the bigger fundamental of ‘purpose’ being the real focus that businesses need:
“It’s about business outcomes, to get in the place where our customers and society need us to do.”
There is now no doubt that skills and competencies are now a business-wide priority, anddespite this session taking place on the learning stage could just as easily be the subject of a future of work keynote as they could a panel centered on frameworks.
We leave it to Tsiriotakis to split the difference: “The truth is somewhere in the middle – it’s about being human with tech, and where the two meet.”
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Editorial content manager
Jon has 20 years' experience in digital journalism and more than a decade in L&D and HR publishing.
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