How to keep skills and ways of working relevant: A sustainable talent path

We hosted a roundtable for a small group of our clients to discuss the topic: “How successful organisations have kept their skills and ways of working relevant”. The discussion quickly went into thinking about career growth, internal promotion vs external hiring, employee upskilling and performance management as well as company culture.

Career growth

In smaller companies where processes are still being built and the employees are doing tasks beyond their titles, it’s usually easier to promote someone internally to improve certain areas. Without any career progression models in place, the internal hire usually showcases high company knowledge or skills in the area and is trusted by both their peers and supervisors.

In a fast-growing company that scales rapidly from a few ten people into more than a thousand, career baths can quickly break. What once worked by choosing the “right guy” internally or the “best new hire” into a position, turns into a hidden cost for the company: perceived unfairness and loss of motivation, with the end result of losing good talent and deteriorating company culture.

Clear career framework

We could all agree in the room that this is one of the biggest questions for leaders when talking about “keeping skills and ways of working relevant”: Internal promotion vs external hiring? While the employee of five years already knows the company well, they don’t necessarily have enough experience whether to understand things on a bigger scale or to lead other people, and at the same time an external hire might bring in a fresh perspective.

To mitigate the problems raised due to feelings of unfairness, building career progression models with clear expectations/role descriptions, potential levels and measurable criteria is extremely important. An interesting side of this is also the fact that different people can see career progression differently. For some it means more interesting projects and challenges, for some it is the title or opportunity to lead people. This is why models can be mentioned in plural: one for expert track, one for manager, one for advisors etc. depending on what your company needs.

Upskilling with purpose

After a framework for career growth has been built, the next step that usually gives a better eNPS score is training and development opportunities. Or better yet, a full employee development strategy with learning programs. Why? Because attending courses or conferences doesn’t necessarily turn into action, meaning they are not easy to apply into real work. With pilot projects, it’s the same, they stay isolated or they take so much of the employees’ time that they become stressed or even burnt out.

Take aways: Learning must be embedded into delivery, whether it happens inside usual work projects, by mentoring colleagues for more resources or doing peer learning. Same as with a career model, learning needs to be structured!

Performance management

Learning + structure = performance management. Upskilling doesn’t usually happen just because of motivation. It needs to have concrete implications.

1. Structure - Can be created by regular (yearly/ quarterly) check-ins, by putting metrics in place or even upskilling OKRs. With OKRs, it’s important to link learning into company strategy, so that developing employee skills drives business impact.
2. Result - Learning is connected to the career framework. By improving certain skills, it’s possible to rise in the model.

Inevitably, AI was mentioned here. As a tool to learn as well as a potential skill to master. While AI is quite often used rather on an individual sparring method than automating a full company process, it is already affecting team structures. Since some fundamental coding can already be handled with AI, the need for more project managers and product owners grows. A shift away from engineering-led teams can be seen.

It’s worth having a structure for AI in place as well: who can use it, when, how, where, what is allowed etc. In some places AI adoption might be still in its initial levels, in others, it might already be embedded into a whole team’s regular work. An interesting hypothetical was said out loud here: What happens to the developers who are part of this team or a big AI project? Since their skills quickly become very valuable, what happens to employee retention?

Company culture is key

To have a career framework and performance management in place, a certain kind of company culture has to exist! For employees to feel safe admitting to skill gaps, a culture of psychological safety top-down makes the idea of learning initially possible. Having the motivation to learn new things comes from empowerment, not from a permission culture where everything needs separate approval.

Common goals

Further thinking from individual safety went to teams and company scaling. Scaling can create internal competition, silos, cliques and in the worst case scenario some groups only work to make their own numbers look good.

To keep employee wellbeing and motivation: clear company, team and individual level goals as well as cross-functional collaboration are the antidotes. Or, to quote one of the participants, “yhteinen tekemisen meininki” (in English “a shared sense of doing things”).

A sustainable talent path formula

To summarise, these three make the successful ingredients in keeping a company's skills and ways of working relevant: Career path clarity + work-related upskilling + safety in admitting skill gaps!

Noticed your company has a skill gap? Call us.