Nigel Cassidy (NC): What fun, we're out of the office at the CIPD's Festival of Work here at the ExCel Centre in East London. Thousands of HR pilgrims here over the next two days, looking, you might say, for the Holy Grail. No, not the free pens or the tote bags, but ideas to improve performance and productivity.
And we're going to focus on one real topic of the moment that's just been debated on stage here, the need to change from building your organisation around defined job roles to a fluid, skills-based approach. Because with business needs changing so fast and AI making existing jobs obsolete, whether that's planned or not, recruiting and employing people in structures based on traditional fixed jobs is leaving big capability gaps. So what can we do about it?
I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is our CIPD podcast from the 2026 Festival of Work.
Well we've come backstage, we found a quiet corner, and I've got three guests literally plucked from their audience session a few moments ago to walk us through what needs to change to shift from being a jobs to a skills-based organisation.
From Skills Development Scotland, we've got Stephen Findlay. He's a hands-on leader. His long experience honed in part at the financial services and insurance giant Aviva. He's also a qualified pro football coach, so I hope none of us get a yellow card. Hi, Steve.
Stephen Findlay (SF): Hi, lovely to meet you, Nigel.
NC: Alex Boulting has led jobs to skills-based change at GSK, Amnesty International, IBM and others, with a focus, he says, on job redesign, the tech choices, the cultural shift and likely sources of friction. Alex is a transformation leader at the Ebbnflow Consultancy. Hello, Alex.
Alex Boulting (AB): Hi, thanks for having me.
NC: And Simone Carroll has built quite the career as a chief human resources insider at the very moment that her organisations had to change. That's energy businesses coming off fossil fuels, retailers reinventing for digital, and media shifting from print to platform. She's also a former Australian HR Director of the Year. Hi, Simone.
Simone Carroll (SC): Hello, thanks for having me.
NC: Now, for all our working lives, organisations have divided up responsibilities and made people decisions based on the jobs that employees have been given. It's set in stone, isn't it? I mean, on the face of it, having no set employees to carry out defined tasks, I mean, it sounds like a recipe for chaos.
So, Simone Carroll, what does it mean to be a skills-based organisation? I mean, what business value does it bring?
SC: Ultimately, it helps us get the skills into the organisation that we need. And there's a real shortage on skills that's coming our way. So what we'll be doing now is focusing more on the skills themselves, training those skills up, and less on the job. So the container has changed.
NC: And what's happening in the world of work that's forcing this on organisations?
SC: I think, well, my experience is we're finding it difficult to get the skills that we need into a business. The jobs that need to be done are changing. And we're getting more data as well about the jobs that need to be done. So becoming more specific about the work itself.
NC: Okay, well, Simone, you've already made the business case. As Stephen Findlay, I just wonder whether a skills model kind of blows everything up, because inevitably you're going to have a lot of people just doing jobs with the traditional job description.
SF: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's going to blow everything up, but what I do think it's going to present is what we would call positive disruption to the way we work and how we organise work, Nigel, in that sense.
I think it's interesting, back to Simone's point as well. If you look at the CIPD, the recent CIPD People Report 2030, for all the organisations that were part of that, 73% of them said they're going to have skills shortages between now and 2030. So a lot of those organisations, to your point, will have competency frameworks already in place.
So the skills agenda and I think where skills is going to move over the next three to five years is very much about understanding and surfacing where those skills are, in organisations, but matching those skills to the priorities organisations have. So I think if anything, I think it's going to become as detailed and as structured as we would have with competency frameworks. I don't think it's going to be chaotic in the way I think it's described. I think it's going to help organisations to really think about the skills currency that they surface and they have now, understand that data as Simone has suggested, but I think it'll help them to plan better.
NC: I'm trying to square what you've just been saying about skills shortages with the fact that a third of degree level people feel they're overqualified for their current job. So how do you explain the two?
SF: I think you can explain the two. I think with the skills-based organisation, I think you're really truly focused on the skills that people have, how you're utilising those skills and where you're deploying those skills to. I think if you've certainly got the data that you've provided there where people feel that their skills aren't being used. I would suggest that skills focus in those organisations isn't necessarily where it needs to be. So I do think skills-based organisation and being able to kind of look at that and map that in a way that ensures that skills are being tapped into.
NC: Now, this is really all about sort of deconstructing the work in a company, isn't it? Formally, always done by people with a particular job description, probably working for one line manager in a particular department. What's the process involved in breaking that down in establishing the jobs that need to be done and the skills of your existing people and those you're going to need to look for outside?
AB: Yeah, so I think that relationship between the manager and their team is absolutely critical. So we're talking about the underlying conditions that allow a skills-based organisation to realise the benefits. So that's about having open, honest conversations about what skills you have, calibrating those skills. So how do you judge whether somebody has the skills that you need or not? And all of that is sort of underpinned by that psychological safety, that trust, being very open and honest about where your strengths and weaknesses are.
And I think those kind of underlying mechanisms have always been there. We've always wanted to try and improve the quality of those conversations. And if they're not there, it doesn't matter whether you have job descriptions, competency frameworks, skill-based, whatever you want to call it, if you can't get those mechanics right, the underlying culture and behaviours right, then the skills-based organisation doesn't work. Because ultimately, a manager's going to have to talk to another manager about how good they think the person is when that manager says, right, I want that skill in my area now. And the manager's got to be willing to give up that skill. So there's a whole behavioural change piece that underpins what we're trying to aspire to, yeah.
NC: And Simone, that's a lot, but assuming that you've done that, what is the nature of the process where you divvy up the work in this new way to the people with skills, whereas before you knew who was going to do that job?
SC: Yes, well, we're redesigning the way that work gets done. And we want to do that in a sustainable way where employees are highly engaged and the work's done well. Which means it's got to be done in consultation with the professions themselves. So there's a great opportunity here for companies who wish to be market leaders to engage with professional organisations and develop expertise that's going to suit their organisation.
So what this looks like is, say you have an engineer and we want to change the way that an engineer executes their role, delivers the strategy. Then rather than just change the job description around and do a skills taxonomy on that, we want to sit down with that engineer and even an engineering group and redefine what a successful process would look like and what the skills are. So co-creation is going to be key.
NC: I'm wondering who's running this process though.
SF: So for me, I think, you know, Simone’s ended on the kind of co-creation and I would absolutely agree that it's got to be engineered and designed by people in the organisation, from that perspective, Nigel. I think, it's often seen as an HR project or an HR strategy, but it's a people strategy. And I think it's got to be co-designed in a way that people feel part of that change, designing that change, understanding that change, and really fundamentally being part of the change-making that's going on in an organisation for the longer-term benefit of the organisation.
I think the other thing I think that's really important to recognise here is that we talk about skills, the life of a skill is around five years at the moment. In some sectors and some industries it's two, two and a half years. And in some others it's even less than that. So we talk about the kind of debate around skills and competencies. The life of a skill is changing and the pace of that is moving really swiftly. So organisations if they want to stay ahead of it, they want to get ahead of that curve, they have to get in front of it and I think you do that with clarity and I think that you do that with a really clear plan with your people.
AB: I think just picking up on Stephen's point there, HR's always struggled with being at the top table and being seen as strategic and this is a great opportunity because HR are going to the business now saying, right, where are your skills gaps? What is it? How does that relate to the overall sort of business strategy? What do we want to achieve? So it can actually, it equips the HR people to challenge the business to say, what exactly is it that you want to do through isolating where these skills opportunities are?
And I think a very practical level, having, we experimented in GSK with having like a marketplace. So you're encouraging people to post opportunities that exist. We need a skill here now, whatever that might be, and how you apply for that, how you would advertise that, how you get managers to give up their resources to go and help that. So you're talking about an organisation that becomes a lot more collaborative, a lot more transparent in terms of what its needs are, and a lot more open and honest about what people are good at and what they're not.
So I think that for me is one of the biggest challenges is creating that larger conversation that translate the strategy. Where do we want to go into what are the day-to-day skills that we need to deliver right now?
NC: Okay, and Simone, when you've worked with companies that have been doing this, one could imagine, I mean, lots of issues are going to arise. One immediate one that springs to mind from what we just heard from Alex's work assignments and how you do that. But also, people's performance and progression because they're no longer working for one person.
SC: Yeah, it's an identity shift that happens. And it's interesting seeing the four generations in the workplace today, the response you get, a new graduate doesn't know any different and actually loves the focus on skills. An experienced executive who's been in the workplace for 34, you know, 30 plus years has agency and owns their job and everything about it. And we're asking them to break it down and potentially sort of dumb it down.
NC: Well, this is a challenge to hierarchies.
SC: It's a massive challenge to hierarchies. And of course, our instinct is to protect those roles and the people who are making decisions about the allocation of funding skills development are usually the ones whose roles are being threatened. So this will change. We know this will change as the generations come through the workplace. What we want to do is get today's leader designing that change so we don't lose their expertise in the process and shifting their understanding of agency from owning their job description to owning the process that will skill the next generation.
NC: Yeah, I can see that makes a lot of sense. But Stephen, sometimes you're just not going to find what you need within the organisation. It takes time to train people. So you're going to need to recruit. But I mean, we've already said if traditional job roles, job descriptions are out, what do you actually advertise? I mean, what replaces them?
SF: Yeah, and I think that's where the kind of job architecture piece becomes really important, Nigel, to the conversation. I mean, I wouldn't say that job descriptions, for example, will disappear. I think they'll metamorphose into something else. I think they'll still be really, really important because I don't think that the conversation as much is about skills-based organisation skills. I don't think we can discount that knowledge and experience is still equally really important to that. So it's, yes, about skills, but it's equally important to recognise the knowledge and experience that people bring.
But I do think to your question, we’re going to have to think about, to the employee life cycle, how do we address recruitment, for example? So will we have to think about kind of redesigning recruitment practices around skills first? I know other organisations, certainly when I was at Aviva, we used to have a competency-based interviewing and we changed our strategy around strengths-based a number of years ago, for example. So it can be done to determine kind of how you want to bring the right people with the right skill set, the right knowledge and experience in to do the job that you're looking for people to do.
AB: Also understanding if this is the business case, then what are the skills, what are the behaviours, sorry, that we need to adopt in order to realise, so if it is about moving people around rapidly and managers having conversations between each other about who's the best person from their team to go and help another team, how do you get those behaviours installed? What kind of attitudes do we need to change on the floor about how people see their jobs and not being in this sort of job box, as it were?
So I think all of those challenges are ongoing conversations once you decide this is the way you want to move. And even before you decide, is this the way we want to move? I think if you're already a competency-based organisation and you've moved into that, what is the marginal value of moving to a skills-based organisation? What is it that's going to push you to really justify this move? And I think some businesses are naturally orientated, like consultancies for instance, are naturally orientated to skills-based because you've got people sitting on the bench and you're trying to mix skills to deliver certain things for organisations. I think potentially others aren't. So there's that whole conversation around value. What is it actually going to deliver rather than being sucked into the complications of the taxonomy and the technology.
NC: Simone mentioned earlier the sort of way the different generations of people in the workplace might respond to this. Have you any thoughts, Stephen, on how you engage people? Because people don't normally come into work necessarily and think, oh, I want to be skills-based. I don't care about my job description anymore.
SF: Listen, Nigel, people wake up in the morning and they think about going to work and they want to be fulfilled. People want to come to work. and do something that has a purpose about it and something that I think they truly enjoy. I think you're right. I don't think people go, I'm going to work today because I'm going to use these skills. But I think it's interesting. I think people still want that fulfilment. People want to be motivated by what they do. People want development. The one thing people do want to work because they want to be stretched and developed.
And I think it goes back to that question about not everybody has an ambition to be promoted or to go to that next level or the drive to do that. Some people want to do a really good job, continue to stretch themselves where they are. And I think that's where the kind of skills-based approach, I think, is a good fit for all. So I think it gives people a proper career pathway and career trajectory for those that have the ambitions around that career pathway.
And for people who just want to do a really good job, but learn something new or spend some time doing something different, but building new skills, I think skills-based organisations will in the future help people to do that.
NC: Which brings us neatly, Simone, to how we know if this is starting to work. Obviously, we've talked here a little bit about personal fulfilment, but of course, a lot of people leave organisations because they feel they're underused and appreciated.
SC: I think you're definitely going to see it in engagement score results as well as the retention. I know that we've got high retention around the world at the moment because there's uncertainty in the world, but pretty low engagement.
NC: Pretty negative reason for that.
SC: Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. So you want to see both. You want to, we'll see that retention, we'll see engagement, but most importantly, we're going to see loyal customers committed to the type of organisation that we are, because part of the learning loop that out these skills-based organisations is, is connected to the customer or consumer themselves.
The consumer and the market's changing all the time. So it's really, successful organisations are going to have that much closer proximity to their market and therefore be able to anticipate their market and stay in a market leadership position.
AB: An example where it's, for me, where it's really brought to life is we were scanning people's CVs to understand what their skills were and then having that conversation with their managers and trying to sort of rate their skills and bringing evidence into the room. And one wonderful story for me, which was the real value of doing this, was someone putting their CV through this and saying, well, hang on, it's not giving me a very high score on critical thinking. And I did this project and by the way, that project wasn't on my CV. So they went through a process of rethinking where their skills were and how it matched what the organisation needed. And then they had the aha moment say, well, hang on, I can actually help the organisation. So that whole sort of engagement piece and knowing your value and sense of purpose, I think the more you can have conversations around that and the more you can make people appreciate that they can add something to the organisation, at that sort of granular level, I think is really important.
SC: I just want to completely agree with you. I imagine a world where we were fulfilled by our achievement and our delivery as opposed to our job title.
NC: Ha, yes, I know.
Stephen, one of the questions that actually came up in the session was whether you need a kind of custom-built, implied expensive skills assessment system to actually ensure you're not missing what you've got.
SF: It's a great question.
NC: Or what you need?
SF: You’ve been looking at our business case for year two, Nigel.
Yeah, look, there are many pieces of technology and software out there that match what organisations are looking to do, but for where we're at, Skills Development Scotland. So everything we've done in year one, it's been very much manual around the kind of building blocks in the evidence.
NC: Was that an active choice or simply because your organisation can't afford to go out and buy all these?
SF: No, it's an active choice. I think before you go back to Alex’s point, earlier, about the new shiny tools. I think you want to be able to prove the substance of what you're trying to do in your organisation. And yeah, that's very much to your exec team, but it's also to people on the ground as well. So colleagues that you're, you know, the kind of this will have the impact on. So for us, it's very much working through the substance of it in the first instance.
We're looking at a number of things when it comes to technology. So we have started to look at the external marketplace and your expense budget. It's really important to organisations. We're also looking at how AI and the acceleration of AI can help. And we don't understand enough about that right now. And that's why I wanted to try and take our time to make sure that we have the right options and the right kind of solutions around that.
But can I just go back as well, Nigel, to a point that Simone was talking about in terms of customer? Some great case studies during COVID. So we're talking about being a skills-based organisation, how you have to wrap all of this governance and structure around it. And yet we had so many organisations during COVID that just did it.
So a really huge supermarket in the UK during COVID took 2,000 staff from supermarket shop floors because you weren't able to go into a supermarket. And they reskilled and upskilled 2,000 staff to the distribution centres because the customer demand had moved to getting deliveries to home. COVID’s a great example of if we just do these things, you know, we talk about risking being risk averse. And I know lots of people who have changed careers out the back of COVID because they've gone and learnt some new skills or they've been given opportunity to do something different. And I think sometimes we constrain ourselves by thinking these things can't work or won't work. And I think what COVID has shown us is that actually, if you sometimes do these things, there are really great benefits out the back of them.
So I think there's just some great examples from during COVID times where skills-based kind of principles actually worked and worked really, really well.
NC: Is this something strategic for senior managers or could HR get a bit more of this done?
AB: I think HR has to be the role model. And when I was at GSK, our CPO decided that HR would be the sort of the pilot, the test case. And if HR couldn't do it, then kind of who could do it? I think HR needs to lead and prove the value of it. And ultimately, I think HR are the people that are owning that connection between people and organisational productivity, they're the ones who are responsible for proving that sort of causal chain. And I think being skills-based helps you do that because you're saying, well, this skill is needed in this area and delivers this business impact. And that's what creates purpose for individuals, right? Is where I see myself connecting to something outside the organisation, as Stephen's example, of redeploying people to an area that the business needs that's going to add customer value. And I think that's when you start to break down these barriers of, oh, I'm not, moving jobs or, this is not in my job description.
NC: And of course, it's a lot more convenient for HR to manage people when they have just a neat role.
AB: Yeah, maybe it is, but I think it's easier to manage people when they transcend their job roles and they say, I spoke to Stephen in the corridor yesterday and he said he's really, he really needs some people to help out down in the warehouse of filling orders over Christmas, whatever. And so we all go in and start to do that. at a fundamental level is what a skills-based organisation is about.
NC: AI, of course, the elephant in the room. It's the one thing that's driving a lot of this change. So a quick thought from each of you on the relationship between AI and skills.
SF: It's a really interesting question for me. I think it's really about, I think, automation and where work can be automated, I think will be really important to that. But I think when it comes to AI, it's not about machine learning, taking your job away. I think humans are still going to have to be an important element of AI. I think we're going to have to reskill and upskill on AI and the benefits of AI and how it presents itself in providing value and impact in our organisation. So I do think there is a combination of a relationship there.
AB: Yeah, and I think there are lots of wonderful things that you can do with AI around being skills-based. So one of the things that we were doing was skills inference. So you know what the job is that someone should be doing and there's a similar job somewhere else in the organisation or in another organisation. So you can infer what type of skills that person will need now and in the future. And clearly that's very helpful with strategic workforce planning.
I think it can automate descriptions of work that you want when you're looking for skills. You can say, right, we've got this opportunity and you can use AI to kind of audit that and see if that makes sense. But I think from a skills perspective, so there's lots of fancy things you can do with the technology, but from a skills perspective and the one skill that stays constant, has stayed constant in the World Economic Forum sort of assessment of skills, is critical thinking. And that's the skill whenever you go into organisations or particularly for us as well, that is always the skill that people talk about training. And the reason that that's important is because we have to have a critical mindset when we're using AI and constantly question what the output is and what it's saying to us. So I think we become more like verifiers of what AI is doing.
NC: Well, I love that. I love the idea of the machines pointing us back to the human skills and capability.
SC: Yes, human in the loop there for sure. We have an opportunity now at a task level to think about what tasks and skills within those tasks we can give to AI versus what we want to retain as humans and develop mastery in as humans. And I believe that's where our competitive advantage is.
NC: Before we finish, I just want to get a bit more of a sense, Simone, of the kind of nuts and bolts of how a skills-based organisation every day inside the organisation is different from a more traditional one.
SC: What you're going to see in a skills-based organisation is going to feel a lot more like a university and a lot less like a Dilbert-style office block. You're going to see open spaces where people can mix and mingle and collaborate. You're going to see areas where humans can come together and plan for delivery. So they start to get to a task level. These companies used to use ‘Agile’ with a capital A or ‘Lean’, it's Toyota, and they'd have tasks on the walls moving from left to right. And now we use software to do a similar thing.
You're going to see design-based thinking come into it. You're going to see work happening in sprints and you're going to see small agile teams executing that work and being rewarded more frequently for different stages of delivery. So fulfilment goes up in that way.
You will see people, organisations working remotely on work that might need deep thinking, but you will also see some of the more advanced companies and you're seeing this certainly in the digital space because they've learnt this, coming into the office again to mix and mingle, sharing those skills and building that camaraderie between teams that may not spend a lot of time with each other, may not have known each other for a long time. Cross-functional teams that come from different professions.
NC: And Stephen, how does that differ from the competency model people are more familiar with?
SF: I think from what I envisage, I think you'll see organisations using skills data much more naturally in their organisation to make decisions around work, where resources and capacity goes to those priorities and organisations. And I think you touched on this earlier as well, Nigel, around kind of, I think you'll see matrix management coming back to the fore.
So you get the question earlier around how do you manage performance where people are, they have a line manager, but they work for different managers. And I think there's lots of organisations who already operate kind of in that way and I think that will come much more to the kind of the frontline and how managers and leaders operate in that way. But I do think using skills data to make decisions for priorities inside the organisation that make sure we deliver the best customer services we can.
NC: Okay, so just pulling all this together now, Alex, if I can start with you. Can you just sort of sum up in a sentence or two for us? why you should refocus on skills now, if you haven't already thought about it. And we indeed saw that many organisations at the session were already thinking about it. What's the first thing you should start with?
AB: Definitely the business case and why you're doing it, but also thinking about the narrative for the individuals as well who are going to be affected by it. And I always use the example of becoming a skills-based organisation, like baking a cake.
So you have your recipe, which is your knowledge, and people have knowledge and they can read a recipe. That's great, but it doesn't have much business impact. You have people who can operate an oven or a stove and get the food cooking at the right temperature. But again, that's an ability. That doesn't deliver anything. So the skill is in the tasting, as it were, of the food. Are you creating skills that meet a business demand, i.e. people like the cake that you've cooked and it makes them feel good or whatever, gives them good nutritional value. So it's all about impact. That's all it is. And if you've got your business case straight and you've got the value chain all the way through, what skills do we need, how is that going to have business impact, then I think you're on the right track.
SC: I think we're also needing to set our operating model up and our operating rhythm up to be a skills-based organisation.
NC: So is this a new operating model? Would you go as far as that?
SC: To some extent, yes. It's going to be different for different businesses, but think of this as because it's alive, it's organic. The skills required is going to evolve because the technology and the customer demands it so. Therefore, the organisation is organic in the way that it functions. And to keep the organisation on the right track, you're going to need data. We're going to need information all of the time to receive it. Is the thing that we're doing aligned with the customer? Is it happening at the right cost? Is it driving growth and performance? So the operating model will be receiving data from all sorts of different directions, translated into tasks that need to be done, and in a continuous improvement loop going through the operating system.
NC: Okay, follow that, Steve.
SF: I'll try. I think for me, fundamentally, I think for most organisations, the world of work isn't going to stand still, Nigel. So the skills you need today won't necessarily be the skills that you'll need tomorrow. So get in front of that to understand that, I think, for organisations is really, really important.
I think we've talked a bit about technology. Technology is going to shift and change the way we do work and how we do work. What that's going to have an impact on, we don't quite understand the impact of it yet. We're starting to see some of it coming through slowly, particularly entry level activity in organisations. But we have to think how that changes the dynamic of work and how that shifts the dynamic of working skills as well. I don't think any organisation is going to kind of miss that. And I think that will in itself bring opportunities for organisations. So the skills and the currency you have and skills in your organisation, I think being really clear in what that is and what you need, I think it's going to be important to all organisations going forward.
NC: It certainly gives a new meaning to the... the concept of a world without jobs, but hopefully a world with more stimulating work. Our thanks to our fine trio, Stephen Findlay, Alex Boulting and Simone Carroll. You can find out more about them and watch their session if you've got access to the 2026 Festival of Work resources online. But until next month from me, Nigel Cassidy and all the CIPD at this Festival of Work.
Goodbye till next month.
