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This is an era of technology. The equation "future technology = company survival" was first set off by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it has been further accelerated by the shift toward a digital-centered society during the COVID-19 pandemic. And this is not a phenomenon limited to IT — the primary player in future technologies like AI.
Even in traditional manufacturing, securing technologies like the Smart Factory to lift productivity has become a core topic for sustained growth. The totality of technology a company holds is realized as the sum of the skills held by its individual employees.
And at the individual level, the range of skills that need to be newly acquired is expanding rapidly — not just those directly tied to a person's field, but also the ability to use collaboration tools like Zoom and Teams in the hybrid-work era.
According to a recent study, the skills required in IT, Finance, and Sales have been rising by an annual average of roughly 6.3% since 2018 — meaning that someone holding two skills today would need to have added one more skill four years from now.
As the pace of change in required skills and the urgency of demand increase, most companies are experiencing an acute skill gap in the short term.
According to Gartner research based on a survey of more than 500 HR leaders worldwide, 59% of respondents said that building core technologies and capabilities inside the organization is their single highest priority this year.
In the same study, 40% of respondents said that they could not build skill development solutions fast enough to keep up with evolving technology requirements.
This mismatch between supply and demand, colliding with the era of the Great Resignation, makes it even harder to secure and retain the skills an organization needs on a stable footing.
To close the skill gap in the short term and, in the long run, to build organizations that can adapt quickly to a rapidly changing technology environment, a range of HR approaches — including recruiting and development — is being deployed.
The area where the most direct and immediate change is happening is recruiting. According to LinkedIn data, over the past year in the U.S., cases where the recruiting criterion is specific "skills and responsibilities"
rather than simple "job qualifications" rose by 21%,
and cases where a degree is not required rose by close to 40%. In fact, at IBM's Rocket Center, nearly one-third of new hires in cloud computing, cybersecurity, and application development were found not to hold a four-year degree. Companies' needs have shifted from "we need someone with a four-year degree and O years of experience" to "we need someone who can code in Java."
The effort to define these skills more clearly has also led to building individual-level Skill Sets. In a recent project example, Company A rebuilt its existing, somewhat vague and qualitative job capability framework into a more granular Skill and Knowledge system centered on the programming languages individuals actually use.
Company A assesses that through a semi-annual review system, it can proactively identify the core skills needed to achieve the organization's strategic goals, and has built a system that lets it lead the industry through technology. Building a Skill Set to identify the skills an organization and its individuals need to hold — today and in the future — can also be viewed as indispensable infrastructure for Upskilling and Reskilling, the biggest topics in the HRD field right now.
Though still limited, the number of companies introducing skill-based compensation is also growing. In another recent project example, Company P selected a handful of skills that are particularly valuable in the talent market through a "Skill Premium Review Session" and designed a program that pays additional compensation — in the form of a premium — to employees who hold those skills. Company P evaluates this program as having a real effect in preventing the loss of critical skills the organization must retain. If traditional compensation has been primarily rewards for "role or job," this represents a shift in perspective — treating "the skills an individual holds" themselves as the core reward element — and is worth considering as a meaningful starting point for change going forward.
Tech media outlet CIO recently listed the IT skills drawing the highest compensation premiums as: ① risk analysis and assessment, ② DevSecOps, ③ smart contracts, ④ Apache Pig, ⑤ blockchain, ⑥ Oracle Exadata Database Machine, ⑦ deep learning,
⑧ Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), ⑨ big data analysis, ⑩ Cloud Foundry, ⑪ e-discovery, and ⑫ Splunk.
A few Korean companies are now preparing fundamental changes to their job level structures — as organizational and HR infrastructure that goes beyond simply leveraging Skills. These cases are especially noteworthy.
Company N announced the introduction of a new "Level-based" job structure, generating significant ripples in the industry. The heart of the Level-based system is classifying employees by level of expertise rather than by traditional job title and level — a shift from "Role" as the traditional basis for HR operations toward "Skill."
Given that job-based HR operation is still a distant prospect for many Korean companies, the chances of success remain uncertain. But in terms of beginning to think about a workforce operating system that fits a technology-based company, it is a very positive example.
Typically, the skills required of individuals are managed in fragments within each functional organization. But from a strategy-level perspective on reasonable skill use, it is more desirable to establish ownership at the enterprise level.
It is worth remembering that jobs like AI Specialist and Big Data Analyst did not exist just a few years ago. For that reason, discovering newly created jobs that are currently needed — and collecting related skill data — can only deliver half its value unless it is handled by a dynamic system.
Executives should always be able to see the latest skill data through tools like HR Dashboards.
We have seen countless cases where the document called a Job Description quietly sleeps in an HR department's drawer.
A Skill Set cannot be an end in itself either. It has to be substantively linked to HR programs and actually used in decision-making.
Rather than piecemeal development activities aimed at closing a short-term skill gap, what is needed is a major HR transformation — one that runs performance management and development grounded in a strategy-linked database, and in doing so establishes a virtuous cycle in which the organization's expertise is continually reinforced.
It is true that some job families are a better fit for Skill-based HR operations. For IT-related jobs, for example, the programming languages that can be used are clear, and it is also relatively easy to prove a person's current level through recognized certifications. In cases like these, a good change management strategy is to build the program in one job family first and then expand it to other job families.
Skill-based HR also connects in part to the recent trend toward personalization grounded in Employee Experience, since the perspective of operation shifts from the organization to the individual. Rather than worrying about the complexity of individual-level management or saying you are not yet ready, I recommend taking a look at the areas inside your organization that are a natural fit — and trying them.