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The Skills-Based Organization

A New Operating Model for Work and the Workforce

The most fundamental building block of work—the job—could be hampering many organizations. Instead, many are now applying skills-based models to meet the demand for evolving business priorities.

Organizations are moving toward a new approach

According to a global Deloitte survey of more than 1,200 professionals, organizations are increasingly placing skills, rather than jobs, at the center of the way work gets done.

By decoupling some work from the job – either by atomizing it into projects or tasks or broadening it so it is focused on problems to be solved, outcomes to be achieved, or value to created – people can be freed from being defined by their jobs to being seen as whole individuals with skills and capabilities that can be fluidly deployed to work matching their interests and evolving business priorities. And by basing people decisions on skills more than jobs, organizations can still have a scalable, manageable, more equitable way of operating. We call this new operating model for work and the workforce “the skills-based organization.”

Download our research findings

To explore how organizations are thinking about the move to skills-based organizations and how they are operationalizing it, we conducted both quantitative and qualitative research – surveying 1,021 workers and 225 business and HR executives around the world.

Download the report

Do ‘jobs’ really define what we do?

The short answer is no. Jobs are quickly giving way to more fluid ways of working. We found that 63% of current work being performed, falls outside of people’s core job descriptions. 81% say work is increasingly performed across functional boundaries, and 36% say work is increasingly being performed by workers outside of the organization, who don’t have defined jobs, at all. We believe the answer is the Skills-Based Organization, a new operating model for work.

Webinar: Dbriefs: The skills-based organization: A new model for the future of work

Participants will explore how SBOs can support a wide range of talent strategies and business decisions and discover how SBOs can fuel innovation and agility that unlocks workforce potential.

Podcast: The Skills-Based Organization: Capital H Podcast

Participants will explore how SBOs can support a wide range of talent strategies and business decisions and discover how SBOs can fuel innovation and agility that unlocks workforce potential.

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