Rethinking talent management: Why skills visibility is the new competitive advantage

Sometimes, an organisation’s talent struggles aren’t due to  missing skills but  a lack of visibility into them. In many companies, skills data lies buried deep within legacy HR systems, out-of-date resumes, half-hearted performance reviews, and disengaged spreadsheets. This has an immediate and direct impact on skills management, talent management, and strategic workforce planning.

To build an agile and future-ready workforce that thrives amid constant disruptions and evolving business needs, organisations must embrace skills visibility. Without a deep understanding of current proficiencies and emerging skills, critical workforce decisions are often made on assumptions and instinct, leading to inefficiencies, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.

Leveraging skills intelligence and technology – including artificial intelligence – promotes transparent, actionable skills data and is the  talent management innovation organisations need today. This enables better talent discovery, data-backed workforce decisions, and equitable opportunities through enhanced learning and mobility.

This article explains how skills visibility drives skills-first talent strategies, and how you can use skills management platform MuchSkills to build transparency, optimise your workforce, and empower every employee to grow and thrive.

Evolution of talent management – From legacy systems to a skills-first approach

Legacy talent strategies can be a major obstacle to workforce agility and growth, taking several forms such as:

• Antiquated job titles that don’t reflect skills, are misaligned with current and future business needs, and ignore skill adjacencies that indicate readiness for new roles.
• Outdated skills databases and spreadsheets that fail to capture how employees’ skills and competencies have evolved over time.
• Top-down hierarchies that discourage employees from making lateral moves to grow within the organisation.
• Static annual performance reviews with a blinkered focus on results rather than growth and development.
• Employee misconceptions about the value of skills based on their observations of who gets promoted and who gets the corner office.

These traditional approaches lead to role mismatches, underutilised talent, ineffective resource allocation, and stalled performance and innovation. They also lead to an over-dependence on external hiring as well as high attrition rates – undesirable outcomes in the context of today’s talent scarcity. Both external recruitment and employee turnover come with significant costs related to hiring and retraining employees who often leave sooner than expected.

Illustrating this divide, a Boston Consulting Group study found that nearly 90% of new hires were external candidates, even as 60% of employees who quit did so after lacking the right career opportunities. These gaps highlight the need for a different approach.

The skills-first approach

To improve talent management, many organisations are now adopting a skills-first approach with skills intelligence and technology driving this workforce transformation. A skills-first approach benefits four priority areas:

1. Skill development

Globally, talent pools grow nearly 10 times using a skills-first approach, says a study by LinkedIn.

2. Employee retention

According to a 2024 report by EY, 83% of employees say they would likely stay if their organisation followed a skills-first approach. Similarly, 63% of HR leaders acknowledge that being skills-first has a positive impact on employee retention.

3. Employee satisfaction

A 2022 LinkedIn report links internal talent mobility opportunities with improved employee satisfaction and, by extension, retention. It says that employees of skills-based organisations with an effective internal mobility strategy stay on for an average of 5.4 years, which is twice as long as for companies without an effective internal mobility strategy.

4. Overall performance

Fifty-eight per cent of HR leaders interviewed by EY credit skills-first transformations for improved employee performance. Deloitte, too, reports that companies that are adopting skills-based practices are 63% more likely to achieve results.

Skills visibility = Smarter workforce planning

Many organisations struggle with skills gaps. But for most, the challenge is more often the lack of visibility rather than lack of capability. This makes skills visibility a business imperative.

Skills visibility means being aware of what each employee knows, how proficient they are, and how their skills are evolving over time. Achieving this requires dynamic skills databases and skills management platforms, which give leaders a real-time view of both core and adjacent skills that static legacy systems often overlook.

With clear skills visibility, leaders can track skill usage across teams and functions, monitor skill supply and demand, and make data-driven workforce decisions. It is safe to say that skills visibility is central to making smart HR decisions and unlocking workforce agility.

Workforce planning without skills visibility is essentially shooting in the dark. Organisations end up mobilising talent based on job titles, outdated resumes, or assumptions instead of ability, leading to poor job fit. This contributes to talent underutilisation, undetected skills gaps, misdirected learning initiatives, high hiring costs, diminished performance and agility, and the lack of internal mobility opportunities.

Why do we need skills transparency?

By promoting transparency and helping build trust, skills visibility has two major benefits for organisations:

1. Democratising talent

In a traditional top-down set-up, employees’ career outcomes often rest with their managers. Promotions and coveted roles tend to go to well-connected individuals, leaving many employees underutilised.

On the other hand, skills-based organisations that prioritise skills visibility give up such bias in exchange for transparency and equal opportunities for all. They provide equal access to resources and opportunities, allowing each employee to pursue career pathways aligned with the skills they already have and those they are developing.

Democratising talent can take many forms, including:

• Creating an internal talent marketplace that connects people to opportunities
• Investing in continuous learning and development
• Practising pay transparency
• Assessing performance based on growth and potential rather than only results

2. Improving engagement 

In a transparent work environment, employees understand their value in the organisation. This awareness gives them the confidence to pursue career moves they might not have otherwise considered. Equal access to opportunities based on skills encourages employees to take ownership of their careers, boosting performance, innovation, and business growth.

Feeling appreciated at work directly impacts an individual’s engagement. Highly engaged individuals are more productive, collaborate more effectively, produce stronger business results, and tend to stay longer. According to Gallup, highly engaged organisations outperform disengaged ones by 81% in absenteeism, 18% in turnover, and 14% in productivity.

How MuchSkills supports transparent skills ecosystems

Many successful organisations are leveraging skills intelligence to gain visibility into employee skills, using skills management platforms such as MuchSkills. By providing a clear view of workforce capabilities, skills intelligence enhances accuracy in hiring, training, role fit, and career-pathing, which in turn strengthens strategic workforce planning. Here are four ways MuchSkills promotes transparency and insight into workforce skills:

• Helps organisations develop a skills taxonomy: Developing a well-structured skills taxonomy – a  standardised framework for understanding, assessing, tracking, categorising, and developing skills across roles and functions – is the first step to achieving true skills visibility. Skills taxonomies underpin transparent skills data, enabling talent discovery and utilisation, targeted learning, and evidence based workforce decisions. MuchSkills provides an inbuilt skills taxonomy that organisations can adopt as is or customise to fit their unique needs. To know about how to create a skills taxonomy with MuchSkills, click here.
• Live team skills maps: MuchSkills’ skills and competency mapping tool creates visual, detailed team skills maps that capture existing skills, proficiency levels, and certifications – making team capabilities fully visible.  Leaders can immediately see if the team has the skills needed for project delivery and identify gaps. Team members also gain visibility into each other’s skills, enabling collaboration, effective task allocation, knowledge sharing, and leveraging complementary strengths for better performance and innovation.
• Personal fit analysis: Our personal role fit tool allows individuals to gain clear visibility into how their abilities and interests match the requirements of their current role or any other role they are interested in. It highlights skill gaps, helps employees explore roles aligned with their strengths, and identifies growth pathways toward their ideal positions. This ensures alignment between skills and roles while promoting talent democracy by empowering employees to take charge of their own careers.
• Internal talent marketplace: MuchSkills’ internal talent marketplace makes skills and role-fit visible across the organisation, supporting career mobility, internal hiring, and growth opportunities. Beyond uncovering new pathways for promotions and growth, it also unlocks workforce agility. Organisations with a strong internal skills marketplace can respond more quickly to changing business needs, optimise talent deployment, and build stronger succession plans to meet future challenges.

Seeing is believing – Real-life success stories

How these major companies took their business to new heights by unlocking skills visibility and transparency during the worst economic disruption in recent history:

Walmart-Unilever’s talent mobility project 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Unilever and Walmart undertook a skills mapping and talent mobility exercise with the help of global management consultant Accenture and Canadian workforce agility platform SkyHive. Their objective was to improve and increase opportunities for their employees. 

The pilot project tested three hypotheses: identifying hidden skills, designing upskilling pathways to enable movement into emerging roles, and achieving talent mobility across functions and organisations based purely on skills. The exercise proved that by enhancing skills visibility and leveraging AI, the companies managed to unearth more hidden skills and create more talent mobility opportunities both within and across organisations.

Seagate’s internal talent marketplace 

Also at the height of the Covid-19 disruption, data storage giant Seagate decided to invest in internal development to prepare for future business needs and reduce dependence on external hiring. It launched Career Discovery, an internal talent marketplace, with the objective of building critical skills, discovering hidden talent, and democratising talent. The programme used AI algorithms to recommend projects, mentorships, and opportunities for its employees. The enhanced skills visibility empowered Seagate staff to snap up those opportunities and take charge of their careers. As for the company, it gained a flexible, agile workforce that allowed it to easily deploy talent to areas needing attention. Seagate’s internal mobility strategy was a success: over 90% of its 40,000-strong workforce registered with the talent marketplace within four months, and the company achieved a USD 104-million return on investment in that period, according to Divkiran Kathuria, global director of talent mobility and talent acquisition programmes.

Conclusion

The more granular and visible the skills data, the more opportunities present themselves. MuchSkills helps organisations see their skills data in a new light by increasing accuracy, visibility, and transparency. It improves the quality of decision-making through relevant, timely, and evidence-based insights. Unlocking true skills visibility is integral to talent discovery, talent democracy, and career mobility. It is the talent management innovation all organisations need today.