A new era of competency

Job titles, professional certifications, and university degrees have been the currency of professional competency for as long as we’ve been performing knowledge work. No longer.

We’re entering an era where talent readiness is the ultimate competitive advantage. Loïc Michel, the CEO of 365Talents, and Docebo’s Harald Overaa connected on Harald’s podcast for a talk about this transformation. By combining the diagnostic power of skills intelligence with the content curation and delivery strength of learning platforms, organizations are finally finding the remedy for their most persistent business pains.

What do those pains invariably have in common? They’re driven by skill gaps. In fact, skill gaps now rank as the most common barrier to business transformation. Let’s dive into the details.

AI is not a job replacer

One of the most common anxieties in the modern workforce is that AI is ‘coming for our jobs.’ However, the reality is more nuanced. Loïc points out that contemporary AI doesn’t actually solve for the demands of entire jobs; it performs a task. 

Think of a job as a collection of responsibilities. AI chips away at specific tasks within that collection, which means the job itself evolves, rather than disappears. This ‘chipping away’ is happening so quickly, it’s estimated that the half life of an important tech skill can now be as low as just 2.5 years. 

If you don’t have visibility into these granular shifts, you can’t prepare your workforce for the transition. This is why skills have become the new currency for talent. While degrees represent what you knew years ago, a dynamic skills portfolio represents what you can do today.

A hero in search of fire

Before an organization rushes to buy the latest skills-based technology, they need to answer a fundamental question: What fire are we trying to put out? 

Most organizations have no shortage of fires, but a skills program needs to address at least one of them head-on. If no one’s saying “I can’t staff my projects,” or “I can’t find the right skills,” then the implementation will fail. 

Don’t try to be a firefighter where there isn’t a fire. And if you suspect there are fires but don’t know where, look at complex functions or projects in your organization:

  • In Sales: If conversion or retention is down, what skills are missing from the team to close those gaps?
  • In Consulting: Are you relying on external hires because you can’t properly use the talent you already have?
  • In M&A: Mergers and acquisitions are a critical time to understand the capabilities of the new organization and identify where new skills are required to make the merger successful.

Start with the problem, get broad buy-in, and only then start looking at solutions, frameworks, and technology.

The myth of corporate uniqueness

“We’re not like our competitors, we have a really unique structure and culture.”
– Every company on earth

Cultural and industry differences are real—measuring skills in Japan is different than in Germany—but in Loïc’s experience they are vastly overstated. Once the idiosyncrasies are ironed out, the underlying business logic of skills ecosystems is remarkably consistent across companies.

The secret is adaptive technology. And luckily, modern AI-first platforms can adapt automatically to any context, whether cultural, geographical, or industry-based .

Loïc shares an example of a 365Talents customer that saves €100 million each year in third-party consultant costs because skills intelligence lets them staff projects internally. Their unique culture hasn’t changed. In fact, it’s amplified because now more of the work is controlled by the people who are part of that culture.

Closing the loop: The Doctor and the Pharmacist

Once leadership is bought in and the business problems (fires) are identified, you need a system that both identifies the problem and delivers the cure. This is where the integration of skills intelligence and learning platforms changes everything.

Loïc uses the analogy of a Doctor and a Pharmacist to explain how 365Talents and Docebo work together:

  1. The Doctor (Skills Intelligence): This is the diagnostic layer. It looks at the workforce, identifies where the “illness” or skill gaps reside, and prescribes the specific growth path needed to fix it.
  2. The Pharmacist (Learning Platform): This is the delivery layer. Once the gap is diagnosed, the learning platform provides the curated content and training needed to build the needed skills and resolve the issue.

Without the doctor, the pharmacist is just handing out generic supplements that may not help and that certainly aren’t personalized. Without the pharmacist, the doctor can tell you you’re sick but can’t help you get better. You need both to achieve talent readiness (and to beat that winter flu bug).

The future is skill-based

The message for leaders is clear: Stop looking at the degree on the wall and start looking at the tasks your people are actually performing today . The currency of work has changed and organizations that can adopt this new model will remain agile enough to survive the next wave of technological disruption. 

For more, listen to the full episode here.