How SkyHive Uses AI-Driven Skills Intelligence to Help Enterprises Build Workforce Agility (Interview with Strategy Lead Alison Lands)

Introduction: SkyHive and Alison Lands

Alison Lands

00:00My name is Alison Lands. I lead strategy at skyhive technologies. We are a series b skills intelligence platform. We use AI and machine learning to synthesize the world's labor market data and we put it to work on behalf of learners, job seekers, governments, fortune 500 and global 2,000 enterprises, as well as post secondary institutions and educators. So if you work in a startup that employs people, this talk is for you. If you work in an HR

00:27tech or skills tech or end tech startup, this is especially for you and you'll probably be thinking about a lot of this type of functionality and a lot of these macro issues and megatrends in your day to day work. I will echo the previous speaker, Andrew's sort of clearing call for sustainability, not only in the form of sort of finance and finance ops, but actually in the form of workforce and labor and cost of talent, because

Background: Coursera and Startup Experience

Alison Lands

00:51that really becomes a huge issue for companies at all sizes. Before skyhive, I worked for Coursera both pre IPO and then post exit. So I've seen the issues that occur across a variety of startups of different sizes and different stages of growth. I'm assuming that this is my mic or my remote. So in the next twenty minutes, we're gonna talk a little bit about the megatrends, how work is evolving and what that means for startups and

01:14why startups actually have a unique advantage as opposed to like larger legacy companies, particularly larger brands or larger enterprises. We'll then talk a little bit about what is skills agility and how to become skills agile through both your incumbent workforce, through your sourcing of talent, through the different ways that you can sort of strategically position your teams to be successful and what you'll get from that skills agility, which is not only lower operating costs and a

01:43more competitive return on your investments in people, but greater enterprise resilience for the twists and the turns of a startup's journey, as well as better products, I will argue that ultimately investing in skills agility and employing diverse staff and cross training them accordingly is actually going to result in better product design, more thoughtful requirements for your marketplace and also just better alignment across functions. So why do skills matter now? If you work in the HR or

02:15skills or ed tech space, you will already be familiar with a book called Work Without Jobs, which was a bestseller on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller list last year. It was written by a partner, Robin Jesse Thassen and John Boudreaux from University of Southern California, labor economist, and it was about how work is evolving and how enterprises need to think about their talent in light of these larger changes. So they're arguing that

02:42the way that we currently think about work and the way that we thought about work to date was largely cultivated in the early twentieth century and it was aligned to industrial production. So we thought of jobs, we thought of occupational categories. There was a much longer timeframe in terms of how long employees stayed with a company and what their scope of work was was relatively static during the period of time when they held that title or

03:05that role.

03:07With the digital transformation and the advent of increasing automation eroding jobs and tasks and activities at the work level, we're starting to see a disintegration of work. And so as automation takes away tasks from a job, but doesn't necessarily take the job itself away in total, we're seeing a need not only to hybridize work, but to backfill some of those automated responsibilities and to think differently about how digital work is organized. It's no longer really around

03:36the title or the role or the occupational class, it's really more about the skills that that worker brings to the table. There's an increasing need to evolve and transform those skills continuously over time. Historically, employers may not have always seen this as their primary responsibility, but increasingly they're seeing a need, particularly in startups which have to be agile, pivot often and evolve quickly. A need to invest in workers so that they can flex as needed as

04:03the business demands. We're also seeing the emergence of a new way of labor supply or talent as a service. So I'm coming to you from the South by Southwest stage, I'll try to weave in as many nuggets from that convening as possible, but one of the breakouts, one of the last breakouts I attended was really about freelancing and Fiverr was hosting this talk and they were talking about how by the year 2,030, over half of The

Megatrend: Disintegration of Work and Automation

Alison Lands

04:30US workforce will be self employed freelance, will have its own title of CEO because of its side hustle, because of its own work, because it's become self employed, because it's launched its own individualized brand. And when they pulled the audience, probably two thirds of the audience was already working in a freelance capacity, the remainder were there to learn how they could work in a freelance capacity. So we're not only seeing a disintegration or an atomization of

04:55work and an evolution of how work presents itself, we're also seeing evolutions in the labor supply about how people will supply their labor and how many different types of employers or experiences they'll have over the course of a working lifetime. So what this means for us is that a skills first labor market, whether you're ready for it or not, whether you think about work this way or not, is evolving around us and it's happening with or

05:19without us. And first mover firms will ultimately have a strategic advantage. This is why I think startups in particular have a unique advantage because they are not beholden to a lot of the traditional work architecture that larger and more established companies currently subscribe to. They don't have big enterprise HCM systems in place that are aligned in a certain way that they have to sort of operate to. And they're quite accustomed to needing to slot in talent

Rise of the Freelance Economy and Skills-First Labor Market

Alison Lands

05:44and work with freelance talent to do that sort of contingent build, borrow, buy decision making on a regular basis as the company grows, as quarter by quarter their needs change and evolve. Recent LinkedIn report said that of folks who are using LinkedIn as a hiring channel, this year over 40% of employer were looking at skills first more than imperfect proxies for experience, background, degree, major as a hiring criterion. That's a 20% increase year over year. And

06:16of those 40% who are using skills based evaluations in their hiring and talent decisions, they are 60% more likely to find a fit faster than those who are subscribing to a traditional kind of more of a post and pray type of approach or who are holding out for that idealized candidate. What this means I think is that skills agility will end up becoming a competitive differentiator in the sauce landscape. Those who take this agile approach to

06:43their talent and how to skill their people and how to source those skills into their organization will end up being able to operate leaner, to avoid paying a premium on skilled talent when they need it, and will be able to source that talent faster and more efficiently, close their vacancies faster and result in less churn as well. So what is skills agility? I'll define the term, it's probably not one that if you Googled it you would

Defining Skills Agility

Alison Lands

07:09find this term, but I'm defining it. An enterprises of any size, capacity to anticipate and contextualize operational and larger market shifts in the context of workforce readiness, and then to leverage the transferable skills that are within their organization, one to know what those are, and then to leverage them strategically and tap hidden sources of talent in order to adapt to those shifts, those operational and market shifts. This means really understanding the skills that you currently have,

07:37the skills that you will need both now immediately and in the near term future, probably not more than three years out because it's hard to evaluate things more than three years out. But if you're able to then optimize how you source talent from a build, borrow or buy perspective, and then you're also able to understand where to source that talent from. Know both of the traditional labor pools that are available to you, but you're also able

How SaaS Companies Can Become Skills Agile

Alison Lands

08:01to start to tap into non intuitive or unorthodox labor pools and pull in those skills and upscale and onboard them accordingly. This is lending skills agility to the organization. And just for purposes of illustrative, skyhive is full disclosure, a skills intelligence company. And so we help companies do this quite frequently. We're aware that most people can upskill or reskill for a new role in less than six months, often four to six months with training. There's a

08:28large amount of transferable skills within sauce that play across functions and we're able to at the individual level, not only see what those pathways look like for a particular person in the role that they possess, we're also able to specify personalized training pathways to close those skill gaps efficiently and quickly. So how does a company, a SaaS company become skills agile? It's really about three sort of three capabilities, being able to understand the future of soft

08:56skills for your organization and that is both within the functions of the business as well as within the market that you play. So if you're vertical sauce like HR tech or skills tech, you'll have to have a certain set of capabilities and understanding of how skills in that marketplace are moving. How HR leaders, CHROs, human capital oriented decision makers think and how they're behaving, as well as how a soft startup needs to operate for your particular

09:22stage of growth. You'll also need to think about how to strategically source talent. And by that I mean, examining skills adjacent pools. We know from just the general tightness of the labor market, I don't know how many of you read the jobs report every month, but I do and I report on it on LinkedIn. So what we're seeing is that despite interest rate increases, despite attempts to adjust through fiscal and monetary policy, labor supply and to

Strategic Talent Sourcing and Non-Traditional Labor Pools

Alison Lands

09:50build some slack into our labor market, we're seeing a continued and persistent tightness. And there's a reason for this, it's actually structural, it's demographic in nature. Even with recent increases to the interest rate, we're still seeing several 100,000 jobs added to the economy each month. We're also seeing a really outsized number of new business starts in the form of solopreneur and small person businesses. So you can start to see what I had just mentioned about the

10:13freelance economy rising up. You can see it in our labor data today, but it's part of a much much larger shift. So being able to strategically source talent from pools that you may not have previously considered or channels that you may not have previously considered, as well as to look at internal mobility and ways to cultivate the talent that's already under your roof to do the work that you're going to need in the next three years

STARs: Skilled Through Alternative Routes

Alison Lands

10:36will become a superpower that high performing sauce companies have, which will allow them to operate very leanly and also allow them to be super agile in the need, if they need to pivot, they lose a key hire, if there are certain disruptions to the business. I would also advocate if you're not familiar with the term stars, skilled through alternative routes, there are 70,000,000 of them, they are half of The US workforce. They often gain their skills

11:00through boot camps, certificates, military service, community college, and by and large have been overlooked and ignored by the labor market. Skyhive works with an organization called Opportunity at Work, which specifically focuses on this population of stars and ways that we can get them meaningfully employed and make the most of their skills so we can combat underemployment. Lastly, I'd say really upskilling and cross skilling is a key way to develop skills agility within your organization. As I

11:27said, I don't come from background, I don't come from tech originally, I come from workforce and economic development as my background, as well as a background in management consulting. But from this I know that you can reskill into a new role pretty quickly with the right training and that skills that you're gaining in the flow of work and on the job are often the stickiest. We also know that especially in sauce, human and durable skills and

11:49AI conversancy are becoming table stakes for all functions, not just the engineering teams, not just the ones who are focused on product. And so that's a key investment that you can make in all workers to sort of level up the game of the entire organization in parallel to really trying to cross train folks to fill open vacancies. I'd also argue we should exploit cross functional synergies in order to deepen your bench as much as possible between

12:12product, revenue, marketing and other functions.

Internal Mobility and Cross-Functional Synergies

Alison Lands

12:17If we are thinking about where might those untapped sources of talent be, there's a whole bunch of different examples here that you'll be able to see to reference the slides. In some cases we see folks who are embracing hybrid work and they're embracing secondary labor markets internationally as well as looking at rural America or other outside of the major tech capitals where you're able to source skilled talent. Coursera became

12:42a remote first company, my previous employer, primarily for this reason. It made it easier to tap talent outside of Mountain View and New York and London where the offices were and we were able to be able to opt out of some of the bidding wars for talent as a result because there are good content marketers, great account executives, good CSMs and data scientists spread all over the country. And so if you have a CEO who feels

13:06really adamantly that everybody needs to be in the office all the time, you may want to help challenge some of those orthodoxies as a leader in your organization or if you have board members who feel strongly about it to challenge some of their orthodoxies as well. I mentioned STARS, we also have the frontline workforce if you're in a larger sauce organization that happens to have a customer service arm or a technical support arm, we found in

13:27working with our clients that these are some really good hotbeds of unrealized customer success talent as well as sales talent that can be tapped into. Not only do they seek it out, it will retain them in your organization longer, it'll do so in a way that's really cost competitive and preserves a lot of intellectual capital for your organization. And you can refer to some of these examples for additional sort of hidden sources of talent. I'd also

13:53say internal mobility, increasingly over 50% of hires are now internal hires, they're being sourced from other parts of the business. But oftentimes within SAAS because there's a thin bench or a need to sort of keep a key person on a team, folks may feel like workers, employees may feel like they don't have as much mobility as they'd like either because their manager does not want them to leave their team and go to another or because they

14:18are just unaware of what other possibilities might look like within the organization. If they sit on the revenue team, they might not know enough about what product management or project management looks like to be able to transition into that kind of a role. But the graph that you see on the slide there is an example just for CSMs of the different pathways that they can travel. Oftentimes that can be into management, but it could also be

14:40into sales, it can be into engineering, it can be into product, and it can be into marketing. And it's actually really effective to do some of this cross training and perhaps even not just encourage it, but to require it in some cases because especially for revenue teams, revenue and marketing and product teams, there are some symbiotic relationships there that when people have played on more than one side of the transom, they're able to better sell into

15:05markets, to penetrate new markets, to develop more compelling marketing positioning and to also work with product to establish better product market fit. If you do all of this, what you will gain from skills agility and the TLDR because there's lot of text on this slide is that it is all upside. So you will not only lower your labor costs, the cheapest hire is an internal hire, but it's also very cost effective to retain talent. And with

15:32the lifespan of a typical sauce employee being somewhere in the one to two year time frame, it certainly was in management consulting where I came from. Increasing your upskilling in incumbent workers actually leads to according to McKinsey, a 34% increase in retention. So the ability to keep people in house longer, it's not only better for their careers because it's rather traumatic for employees to change jobs, most people do not want to. They do it either because

Retention, Cost Savings, and Enterprise Resilience

Alison Lands

16:01they have a terrible manager or because they want to change something about the way they work and they just don't see a path forward under your roof, under within the walls of your organization. That's often a misconception. We find in data, in our skyhive data that there are often multiple pathways within an organization, but they're either not visible or they're not well understood by either the employee, the manager or both. So making these types of investments

16:24will increase retention, it can also help you avoid having to get into some of the bidding wars for external talent. We know that there are sort of four key skill sets that just about every region of the world and every industry are competing for in the form of software engineering, data and analytics, AI machine learning, cybersecurity and cloud. If we're all competing for the same scarce talent and it's currently undersupplied in our labor market, you will

16:49pay a premium for that talent. Better to invest in your incumbent workforce and to take some of those technical skill sets and layer them onto functional and domain skill sets. Better yet, hire from industry. I can tell you business analysts, consultants and senior consultants at the big four consulting firms can do these jobs really well. And they will not only see the workload of a sauce as a refreshing break from what they've been doing in management

17:12consulting. They'll also see the wages that are paid and the stock options as a premium that others who have come from that background might not. Let's see, I'm gonna breathe for a second. You can also create enterprise resilience and I say this from one of two perspectives. One, the past six to twelve months where we've all been sort of rocked, the ecosystem's rather volatile. Companies are being very hesitant about bringing on FTEs, there needs to be

17:42a strong value case for that. And workers in turn are starting to see a little bit of the golden halo of technology and working in startups sort of start to wear off. So this is one way to address some of those concerns while also providing flex if employees are leaving, it often leaves especially in earlier stage companies a big hole. This is a way to prevent some of that pain when a key hire leaves is to

18:05have cross trained employees who can sort of flex in and ideally you're retaining them to begin with. And then lastly, think I will argue that I think that cross training in this way and bringing in diverse sources of talent, particularly if you work in EdTech, HRTech or SkillsTech, we are building technology for the future of work and the future of work is everybody's business. So having just tech people or just folks who've worked in startups informing

Better Products Through Diverse Teams

Alison Lands

18:30product design and developing the marketing and messaging often falls quite flat when you go out into the verticals and into industries. So I would argue that bringing in a lot of those diverse perspectives and also translating across business and technical teams will result in better requirements, better messaging, better product, and product that's built for the eightytwenty of use cases that you're gonna get when you actually take it out into the marketplace and into the world of

Closing: The Case for Skills Agility

Alison Lands

18:53work, particularly if you have a consumer business. So companies that lean into a skills based approach, it's not only cost effective, it's not only efficient, it will actually help better prepare the workforce and I believe that employers are the long pole in the tent of workforce development and it's going to help us address some of those talent and skills pain points. So over the last twenty minutes, I've given you your what, your how, and your why

Nathan Latka

19:14of skills agility. I hope you will adopt it and please come find me if you wanna talk a little bit more later in the conference. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Alison. Appreciate that. That was great.