[Learning Leadership Conference 2025] Skills as a Strategy

Welcome to today's session on skills as a strategy, the art and science of balancing skill supply and demand, and proving its value. Hi. I'm Scott Mahoney. I am the chief strategy officer for Seertech, and I'm very pleased to bring this session to you today. This is really about something I'm quite passionate about, which is about addressing the biggest challenge we have as L&D professionals today, and that is one of trust. And when I mentioned or when I say trust, I'm really talking about trust from our c level executives, trust from our business stakeholders that the work that we are doing as learning and development professionals is actually adding value and it's worth the investment that they're making into learning. It's so important if we want to establish a robust and viable and sustained learning and development practice within organizations. We need to gain that trust, and we need to get that seat at the c level table in order for us to be able to continue to deliver on the true value that we are providing as l and d professionals to the organization. So today's session is really going to be looking at skills as a strategy to help us actually achieve those goals. So let's take a look now. So the first question I have for, organizations, and I presented this at the Learning Leadership Conference in Orlando in October 2025. It's one of the first questions I asked was, everyone says they have a skill strategy. So I asked for a show of hands, how many people said that they had a skill strategy? And almost everyone in the audience put their hands up. And it was, you know, dozens and dozens of people. I'd ask them the next question, which is what is the reality of your skill strategy as it relates to can you prove the business impact on of your skill strategy on your organization? And everyone's hands went down. So this is this represents one of the biggest challenges we face as a as an industry in that we believe that skills have value, which is represented by, you know, some of these statistics, which is really talking about the the value that skills has to an organization, and this is proven value. So over three quarters of leaders and executives actually believe that skills and skills development has true value for their organization. The reality is that skills adoption has been very, very low. Despite the fact that no over ninety percent of executives in organizations believe they don't have the skills that they need to be able to deliver on their business goals in the next three to five years. So this is something I call the skills paradox and that we all believe that it's important, but we have a very low penetration rate of adoption. And so it's not something that is beliefs holding us back. As I said, the three quarters of executives believe that skills are important, but it is one of really execution. You know, less than five percent of organizations say that they have the right sized investment to be able to enable their skill strategy. So that lack of investment really gets down to a lack of trust, a lack of trust that it is worth the priority to invest in skills in order to be able to deliver on business goals. Other priorities take investment, and that's because we've not been, as l and d professionals, very good at either executing or proving the value of the work that we're doing when we're executing our skill strategy. So this really looks at the the challenges to that. And I know a bit like this young lad here, he's struggling to lift up a barbell. He has all the intent in the world, but he doesn't yet have the capability, all the techniques, all the tools to help him lift that bar bill. And I think it's very, very similar to what we face today as learning developer professionals as it relates to executing on a robust skill strategy. And I really think the the challenges to execution fall into two primary swim lanes. The first one is what I call strategy and tactics, and this is really where we start to look at why are we why are we failing to execute, not just from a tools and systems perspective, perspective, but our thinking and our application of thinking. So if we look at the first one, lacking a clear business case. So, you know, almost twenty percent can't, can quantify business benefit, but that means over eighty percent can't. So if you can't align your skill strategy and how you're looking to execute on your skill strategy with business benefit and prioritize business benefit, then you won't get priority of investment. And that's a challenge because without investment, you won't be able to execute. At the same time, that data and measurement gaps is a big gap as well. Less than nineteen percent contract skills in real time, which means that learning leaders or organizational leaders, I should say, are making multimillion dollar bets on their investment in the skill strategy with very little visibility to actual business impact. So that is a that is a concern because one and two, the business case and the measurement of that impact of the business case go hand in hand to gaining trust and to gaining investment. Without that trust, no investment. At the same time, you've got pockets of activity that are taking place within organizations in a very siloed fashion, results in a whole bunch of duplicate spend, whole bunch of activities that are taking place that aren't aligned from an enterprise perspective. And so this is really also partially impacting that trust equation where executives are saying, well, we know skills activities are going on in the organization, but we don't believe that it's effective because it's spread all over the organization, and we're not truly unified in our thinking. So therefore or our execution. So therefore, our investment is sort of being wasted. And that again is fragmenting trust within the organization that skills is even though we know it's valuable, that the practical application of skills is valuable. And then the other impacts variable here is is legacy systems and processes. So, you know, almost, eighty percent of leaders don't believe they have the right tools, Don't believe that their tools can scale a skills platform or a skills framework. They also don't believe that their processes will be able to support that either. So all of these combined are barriers to entry as it relates to executing on a skill strategy. But that's not all. There's another swim lane, which I like to call culture and market dynamics, which is really talking about beyond just the organization, what other things are occurring that are impacting skills adoption. So, you know, cultural resistance and change fatigue, you know, almost almost, you know, three quarters of, skills, enterprises or sorry, skills activities, skills projects failed due to just resistance. And that's employees, managers, they're pushing back on adopting a skills based strategy because they're concerned about how skills and measuring skills are going to, expose gaps that ultimately may put their jobs in jeopardy. That leads to a lot of pushback and a lack of adoption and certainly a lot of resistance. Now that could be counted through effective change management, explaining and showing the reason why a skills based approach is important for employees and managers and how it's going to benefit them rather than be at risk. But that not being addressed, well, results in a lot of resistance. At the same time, the market is changing dramatically. Almost half the jobs that exist today will change fundamentally or cease to exist in the next three to five years. What does that mean? Well, it means that the skills that you're developing for the jobs of today, half of those may no longer be relevant or they may change fundamentally in the next three to five years. And what does that mean for a skill strategy? Well, if it's gonna take you three to five years to roll out your skill strategy, then you may actually be outdated by the time you launch it, which means that your investment was wasted. So trying to take a boil the ocean approach to a skill strategy across the organization puts your organization at risk because half of those roles, etcetera, may change. There are ways around it to address it. And part of that is actually looking at jobs that are important but are unlikely to change in the next three to five years. Focus on those. Your investment is is more protected. But I'm not covering I'm not going into detail on that today. Short term and long term priorities. Now that's a real challenge because skills investment is an investment over time, and it does take time to truly, leverage that investment and see returns on the on a skills based investment. And I've got examples of that I'll talk to later on in today's presentation. However, that focus on the long term oh, sorry. The the focus on concerns over the long term really lead to a, double down of investment in short term tactical staffing, put people in jobs, move them around, etcetera, without really a fundamental sort of skills based approach to to, job alignment. Now that results in a lot of tactical efforts which have short term benefit but are robbing from your future. That is a concern, again, because of trust. And then finally, there's lots of people like me and others that are talking about this from many different perspectives. Some of us agree. Some of us disagree. But, ultimately, all of that becomes noise if it doesn't make sense to you, and that leads to inactivity. What do people just choose to do? Nothing because there's just too much noise. And these strategy and tactical challenges and culture and market dynamic challenges become overwhelming and result in doing nothing. So if you want to address organizational change through the lens of skills, you have to overcome these challenges in order to do so. And today I'm going to look at two of these because I think they're really important. The first first one is directly related to the second one, and this is around the business case because everything stems from that. As I mentioned before, if you don't have a clear business case in terms of skills impacting business KPIs or OKRs, which then has a financial return, if you're not able to prove that or not able to establish that then prove that, then you really are going to be struggling to go any further with your skills journey. So being able to translate skills into business KPIs, builder skills, return on your investment dashboard or reporting, which shows that the efforts and the investment in the skills efforts are having a financial impact, which is positive. Being able to link those learning impacts or learning outcomes to measurable results is really critical. And doing this across high value use cases, so not trying to boil the ocean, but proving it through high value use cases, absolutely critical to getting initial adoption and then being able to measure this behind the scenes. So everything from using the right validation tools with alignment to, taxonomies that address those sort of business critical roles and functions, and then being able to report on that on a regular basis. Absolutely critical to gaining that trust. And I start any skills project or, skills intervention in an organization through asking these four questions which relate back to these two points. And that is, what are your business priorities? So, actually, when you're talking to your business stakeholder, understanding their priorities and understanding how they think about those priorities and why they are priorities, which is question number two, are really important because that gives you the framework from which you can start to build out your skills based strategy. Because the next question is, well, if I understand that there's these business priorities and those priorities as they relate to others in your business, I can then look at, well, how does skills impact those? And this is where you can collaborate with your business stakeholder to look at some of the challenges in terms of achieving those business priorities and then how the people component relates to that. And then for the people component, it's really looking at the skills, approach or the skills component of those people and how does that relate to achieving those business outcomes. And then finally, measuring the impact worth. So if we move the needle on the skills based approach, what is that gonna cost us versus what is the impact in terms of the business priority impacts? What is that worth? Is it is the juice worth the squeeze? So if it's gonna cost me more money to implement my skills journey than the benefit I'm going to get, then you need to either look at reducing the scope of your skills journey, or you need to look at your business priorities and choose others where there's greater benefit. And through addressing those four questions, you're on it. You're on the start of the journey to getting a, the the business case, a measurable business case together. But that's not enough. You need the right tools to be able to join the dots and help you with the evaluation piece. And that's where the next part comes into play, which is the learning effectiveness index. So this is how we, and when I say we, Seertech, measures the impact of learning across five pillars of measurement. And it really these five pillars of measurement are measuring learning across all dimensions of impact within the organization. There's two separate learning effectiveness indexes. The one I'm talking about today is focused on corporate organizations where your learners are your employees and you're developing those employees so that you can achieve your corporate business objectives. There's another one which is the, learning effectiveness index for commercial learning businesses, and that's focused on, when you're selling learning as a product. And there's there's five pillars for that one as well. It's looking at these, measures slightly differently because of the different focus. But just briefly, these five pillars of measurement looks at everything from learning access and engagement, which is pillar one. And are we getting the right learning to the right people, and are they engaging with it? Pillar number two is looking at learning performance and outcomes, and I sort of see that as the engine room of learning success. So how are people performing in learning and are they achieving the outcomes that are expected or they expected and the organization expected from those learning interventions. Pillar number three is where, we're really starting to look at, skills as it relates to building workforce capability and readiness for the jobs that they have as well as for the future roles that are emerging within the organization. And that's really important for a whole bunch of different reasons, including, obviously, organizational effectiveness, but also, retention, motivation of talent, etcetera. Pillar number four looks at, are you running an effective learning business? In other words, are you providing content, platform, support, resource utilization, etcetera, effectively in order to justify the cost? And that is really important because that's really, again, a juice. Is the juice worth the squeeze discussion? Because if pillars one, two, and three are performing really, really well, but it's costing you more than the benefit you get in pillar four, then you may need to rethink your strategy. And then pillar number five is really looking at the holy grail, which is business impact and value realization. So this looks at how are pillars one through to three, supported by pillar number four, which is operationally effective learning business, How is that impacting your business overall? And those percentage measures are weights of each of those pillars, and the numbers down the bottom are grouped measures for each of those pillars. There's twenty seven measures for the corporate learning effectiveness index, which represent about ninety four, individual metrics, which are grouped up under those twenty seven. And this learning effectiveness index has come from twenty five years of research and experience and three years of intensive modeling to prove the value and prove how these values are derived, measured, and then validated through this entire metrics process. And these five pillars of measurement really important because what it does, it gives you not only the tools to determine how you're performing as a business in terms of your learning impacts, But it also gives you the numbers that you can drill down through to determine if I'm not achieving the impact that I expected, where did I go wrong? And it helps she helps you very surgically identify the areas for underperformance so that you can actually invest intentionally into those areas to get the performance you're looking for. Alright. We're gonna look at numbers two and three or pillars two and three because this is really the two pillars that have the biggest impact on, skills. And we're going to look at that from the perspective of how learning effectiveness impacts KPIs and impacts return on investment. So as we mentioned before, learning effectiveness index is really a measure, a number measure between zero being really, really poor and a hundred being really, really good of how effective your learning is. And that's for learners. That's for business impact. And that is, measured across those five pillars. And from the perspective of today's session, we'd be looking at as part of the skills development impact. And the next part we look at is KPI impact. So every single learning effectiveness measure has one or more business KPI impacts, and we can measure the weight of those impacts as part of the whole learning effectiveness index framework. And that skills business impact is really important because that's part of establishing that trust with your business stakeholder that you're impacting the right things with the right movement in those business KPIs that matter to the business stakeholder. And then finally, we can actually measure a combination of what did it cost us from a learning side to deliver on that business KPI impact, what's the worth of that business KPI impact, and then what's the net return on investment. And this is really measuring the financial return of your learning spend. And that skill's financial impact is very important for both your skill your business stakeholder, but also your financial stakeholders or investors because they wanna know that the juice was worth the squeeze. So let's look at this in practice just to illustrate how these relate to each other, and then we'll go through some real world examples. So if we look at the five pillars of measurement, this is a bit of an eye chart. Unfortunately, it has to be because there are a lot of relationships between the learning effectiveness index measures represented by the pillars and those numbers on the left hand side. Each of those pillars then has, one or more, at least five, if not six in some cases, measures that are contained within each pillar. And these are all represented by mathematical equations, which I'm not gonna bore you with today. But, ultimately, each of those measures has an impact to more than one business KPI, and the color represents the pillar and the metric. The size or the the thickness of the line represents the weight of impact. And we're able to now measure the learning effectiveness on the left hand side and its business KPI impact on the right hand side. And, again, this is through that, you know, three years of intensive modeling and twenty five years of research. Today, we're gonna look at two, performance and outcomes and capability and readiness, those two pillars, and we're gonna look at the business KPI impact across these seven KPIs. Alright. So if we look at the, learning effectiveness measure impact on KPIs, we can see that for pillar two, performance and outcomes, each one of those measures has a corresponding impact to and we just picked one here, which is productivity per FTE as a KPI. You can also see that not only is there a relationship, but you can see the weighting of that relationship or its impact on the business KPI. So these five measures on the left have corresponding weighted impact on the KPI movement on the right hand side. And this has been empirically modeled, and we are now able to get this down to an accuracy of within two decimal places in practice. So these numbers aren't made up. These numbers are proven. We can also see for pillar three, very similar. Right? Different metrics, different weights, but, ultimately, they all combine under pillar two and pillar three to have a impact on productivity per FTE. And now if we if we've looked at the learning effectiveness index measure and its impact on KPIs, we can also do the same thing from a KPI impact to a return on investment impact. So this chart, again, a little bit of an eye chart, but what it does is it looks at that KPI measure that was impacted by learning effectiveness measures, how that's impacting, from a financial perspective. So it's either improving revenue or it's reducing cost or operational expenditure. And the combination of those two things less the the learning cost, the program, the platform, the support cost, etcetera, all of that gives us a net ROI impact. So that net ROI impact is measured in dollars, or it can be measured in times investment, or it can be measured as a percentage of uplift. But, ultimately, those lines joining KPI to financial impact, you can see the colors that are used there, and you can see which KPIs are having those impacts on the financial side from which, learning effectiveness index measure. Alright. So now let's look at this in practice, combining everything together. So we can see from a learning effectiveness index measure the skills assessment pre and post, which is looking at a skills assessment that was performed before the learning and then the same skills assessment performed after the learning, looking at the delta between the two as a measure of did the learning actually take place and has that being retained by the learner post learning. So So in this case, we can see that the skills assessment pre and post actually has a KPI influence represented by the percentages on more than one business KPI. So in this case, it's productivity per FTE, quality, safety, etcetera. We can also see then the corresponding return on investment impact across revenue cost, risk reduction, which reduces cost, as well as talent reduction talent retention, which does reduce cost. And all of those ROI influences are represented across one or more business KPIs to show a relative impact on return on investment, giving us the ability to measure impact from a learning perspective on a KPI and then from a KPI to the return on investment, satisfying your learning stakeholders, your business stakeholders, and your financial investors, their concerns and needs. So let's look at this in a in a real world example. So in this case, there's an organization that, wanted to model out improving their business KPI, which is productivity per FTE, by a certain percentage. And looking at them, the the various different metrics that could be, impacted, looking at, skills assessment performance. So that was that pillar two metric, which is skills assessment pre and post performance. They wanted to improve that performance by one point five percent, which meant that they've if their, skills assessment performance had a had a delta between pre and post test of, say, five percent, they wanted to make it, a delta of six and a half percent. That impact could be modeled through learning effectiveness by showing a business outcome for productivity per f t. And just looking at this one KPI alone of plus point three five percent. So that would improve productivity per f t by point three five percent. Now that doesn't seem like a lot, but because of the volume of work that would've been, undertaken by the, FTE and the, the value of that work, that could actually be modeled out to a financial result. So that increased net benefit was from an investment of seventy eight thousand dollars on the left hand side to deliver on that learning impact or in this case, skill impact goal. We see a a corresponding return on investment of sixteen times that investment or one point two five million's net benefit over twelve months. So the ability to model it out is really important because that gains trust with your business stakeholders, with your financial stakeholders. It also proves your own thoughts. If I move this learning lever, is this the best way to achieve these goals? But not only does it give you the ability to model that, it also gives you the ability to prove it out after the fact. So when this was modeled out, these were the numbers that were achieved or were were, identified as part of that modeling, what was achieved was within two decimal places of these numbers. So not only does it give trust in terms of you've thought this through and you've modeled out an outcome that makes sense, but you've also gained further trust by proving that the model works through practice. And that's really important. Now this data doesn't just come magically from from the air. You need systems to be able to capture that information as well as to be able to report out on it. And this is where we look at how do you get this data. Now from a Seertech perspective and from our customers, and that's what I'm using as as a benchmark here, We have a a skills hub that allows us to ingest skills taxonomies, normalize those across multiple taxonomies regardless if it's something from an external provider like Workday, SAP, Korn Ferry, Tech Wolf, like a whole bunch of different providers, or you're building and managing your taxonomy in our system. Ultimately, though, that skills hub then gives us the baseline to be able to provide a a skills portfolio that makes sense for the individual's job roles, job and role based skills, which provides context to those skills as it relates to performance in your job or roles, and then skills analytics, which is represented by the learning effectiveness index and the data that we're managing as part of that modeling as well as proof, framework, which we just discussed earlier. And then on the top end, we've got the skills, the skills development processes, which is really through three different frameworks. One is around skills endorsement, and the bullet points underneath that or the pills underneath that are representing the tools that we use within our application framework. To support that, we see AI next to it. This is where we're using AI to be able to support, everything from skills ingestion and normalization through personal development plan, personalization and targeting. But endorsed skills are really the traditional model of endorsement that you will find in a lot of, systems today where I'm endorsing myself or somebody also will endorse me that I have that skill, but there's no real proof around that. Validated skills is where we start to look at the proof, and this is highly used in areas of technical skill, validation, but also in durable skill validation as well. And there's multiple different tools that we use, but ultimately, out of it becomes a validated skill that holds up to audit and scrutiny. And that's really important when you're looking at long lasting, skills performance and particularly when you're looking at moving, certain business KPI needles. And then from a performance skills perspective, that's where we are really inferring skills based on operational performance data that you that we automatically aggregate as part of you just doing your job. Good example of that is I'm a tax professional. I'm preparing tax returns. So in order for me to say that I'm meeting my, skill requirements for that tax professional role, I need to, prepare a certain volume of tax returns in a given period of time, but they also need to meet a certain quality metric in order for me to gain a certain skill at a certain level. And quality metric can be made up of everything from rejects from the IRS based on, you know, tax returns not being prepared correctly or customer satisfaction feedback or a combination of that, which ultimately is matrixed to provide a level of skills inference based on your performance. That's quite dynamic, and it's really exciting because that's something that we're using extensively now with organizations. And it really does help provide better data for learning effectiveness index and and business KPI, impacts as well as impact modeling. But having the right tools, it does address challenge number four. So challenge number four, if we remember back to our key challenges for skills adoption, is around legacy systems and process. So being able to have a tool set and application set that can support your skills adoption framework by providing these capabilities, as well as the reporting framework that underpins it is absolutely critical for you to get a truly meaningful outcome from your skills investment. Alright. So now we get to the final part of the presentation, which is really about showing the proof. And today, I'm gonna talk about this from the perspective of, real world example. So in this case, using, learning effectiveness index and using our toolset, we were able to initially establish a framework for measuring skills impact as well as a framework for, modeling skills impact. So as part of the modeling, skills impact, we were looking at a three or in this case, five year return, that we're gonna measure over and looking at how long would it take us to build out the skills framework that was required, what would be the break even point, and then what is the return on investment over that sort of three to five year period. So as part of this, we, adopted a skills approach or skills development approach, across several cohorts within an organization. And as part of that, there was platform cost, change cost, program cost, communications costs, etcetera, all up was around about six hundred and seventy thousand that was invested over a twelve month period to get this skills framework up and running for that cohort. There's an ongoing sustainment cost as well, which is only around about three grand a month, which is again is around maintenance as well as, some change and enablement as well. And you can see that's represented by the blue line down the bottom. You can see that in this case, there was six hundred and seventy k invested over that twelve month period. And then between twelve month and month twenty eight, so a bit over a year, there was, activity and adoption of the skills platform, which was now returning and returning on that investment. And that ROI, you can see from the red line. And notice that the intersection of the red line and the blue line, which is where we're tracking cost, shows us our breakeven point, which is roughly around about that twenty eight month mark. Now at that point, the investment was around about eight hundred thousand. But then after that, you can see that the red line continues to grow, and the return on investment is significant over time. And so after sixty months from day zero when we first started the project, there's been a return on investment of seven point three times the level of investment. Now when you look at that, that would be a tough sell if you weren't modeling the project and the impact of that project in this fashion. And if you didn't have the tools, I. E. Learning effectiveness index, to be able to truly measure ROI from business KPI movement based on your learning effectiveness impact measures, then you would never be able to get to this point. So being able to prove this out gives you, like, unqualified trust from your business and from your financial stakeholders. Model it out, but then once you can prove it out and show that your actual execution of the skill strategy was in alignment with your modeling and was very, very close to the original, model's, expectation, I mean, that is that's you you gain unqualified trust moving forward. And that gets you that level that seat at the c level table. Being able to break down cost and break down benefit as well is really important because, again, it's showing that you understand the business and you understand its impact. And as part of that, you also understand how you're managing your business, which is the learning and the learning enablement part of that skill strategy. So looking at everything from, you know, change management, training enablement, consulting design, platform and tools, measuring that out as well as not just for the build phase, but ongoing investment, and then overlaying that against the benefits across everything from, you know, cost benefits as well as revenue generation, so productivity gains representing that, Retention savings, internal mobility savings, hiring cost savings, all of these things ultimately have a direct, measurable benefit. Proving that out, modeling it out in this way, again, is about sense checking your ideas and sense checking your thoughts, but also showing your business stakeholders you've thought about this in a very, very meaningful and robust way. So with LEI, you're really now changing what can be an abstract concept, which is sort of skills, and you're turning it into a strategy that is impactful for the business, provable, and is a mechanism through which you can gain a seat at the seat level table. And that's because the value you're representing, the value you're able to model in is becomes undisputed. And through that mechanism of value and that mechanism of showing value gains you trust, that combination of value and trust is what puts you at that seat at the c level table. And that and by addressing this, that's what gets you ongoing, investment and helps to reinforce that whole value trust proposition. So I'm hoping this has been useful. I hope this is something that you have found, enlightening. If you want more information on learning effectiveness index or on Seertech, our skills, our tools, please reach out to me directly or scan the QR code and find out a little bit more. More than happy to discuss this with you in more detail. I'm very passionate about it, as you can probably guess. So more than happy to, share my knowledge and experience. Alright. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time and energy. If you're still with us right now, thank you again. It's been a long session, and look forward to bringing our next session to you shortly. Thank you very much, and bye for now.