This is Part 1 of 3 where I look at skills-based learning in organizations: what it means, what it can look like in practice, and how you could actually build the practice into your organization. (Part 2 · Part 3)
If you’ve been anywhere near LinkedIn, an HR conference, or a learning and development publication or event in the last year, you’ve heard the phrase: skills-based organization. It’s in the keynotes. It’s in the trend reports. It’s in the job postings. And it’s quickly becoming one of those terms that everyone uses but very few people can define in a way of why it’s practical and matters for our organizations.
The difficulty in describing this is not because it isn’t important, it is. I believe it’s one of the more significant shifts in how organizations think about talent since the rise of eLearning itself. But there is a massive gap between talking about skills-based and actually building skills-based. And after years in Learning and Development and leadership, I believe this gap is where most organizations are sitting right now. We need employees who are flexible, who can wear multiple hats, and who are ready to adapt quickly to the changing needs of our organizations. The skills-based model, I believe, is one of the ways we can get there.
As I’ve been going through my own experiences recently, looking at some things that I can continue to grow and expand my own knowledge in the field, I came across this. This is the information I have been putting together around it. It’s taking me some time to build these posts out with everything I’ve been doing.
So let’s talk about what this can actually mean, starting with where this idea came from, why the data behind it is so compelling, and why most organizations still aren’t doing it.
First, What Does “Skills-Based” Actually Mean?
Before we go any further, it’s worth defining what I’m actually talking about when I talk about skills-based training. Because “skills-based organization” gets used to mean a lot of different things, and that ambiguity is part of the problem.
At its core, a skills-based organization is one that puts skills, not job titles, degrees, or tenure, at the center of how it makes decisions about people. That means hiring based on what someone can do rather than where they went to school. It means designing development around the specific capabilities employees need to grow, not just assigning courses from a catalog. It means building career pathways based on skill progression, not just seniority. And it means making workforce planning decisions based on what skills the organization has, what it needs, where the gaps are, and where it will need to move going into the future.
Think about how most organizations still operate today. You have a job description with a title, a set of responsibilities, and a list of requirements, usually a degree and a number of years of experience. The skills-based model challenges that entire framework. When using a skills-based framework, you break roles down into the underlying tasks and skills required to do them and ask: do we have people who can do this work, regardless of their title? That shift changes everything from how you recruit to how you train to how you think about who’s ready for the next opportunity.
Let’s build on this a bit. Think about two roles that most people would never put side by side: a call center agent and a clinical provider working in the same healthcare organization. On paper, these jobs couldn’t look more different. One answers phones. The other treats patients. Different titles, different departments, different career paths. But when you start looking at the underlying skills, you start to see something interesting.
Both roles require active listening, the ability to hear what someone is really saying, not just the words coming out of their mouth. Both require empathy and patient interaction, working with people who are often frustrated, scared, or confused, and meeting them where they are. Both require de-escalation, knowing how to bring the temperature down when emotions are running high. Both require clear, accurate documentation. Both require the ability to navigate complex systems under pressure while maintaining compliance. And both require a deep knowledge and understanding of organizational policies and procedures to guide someone.
In a traditional model, those two employees would never cross paths in a development conversation. In a skills-based model, you start asking: what shared competencies do these roles have, and how can we develop them together? Maybe your call center training on de-escalation is better than what your clinical team is getting. Maybe your clinical team’s patient interaction framework could elevate how your call center handles sensitive conversations. Maybe there’s a career pathway from one to the other that nobody has ever mapped.
Now let’s consider another unexpected pair: an employee who drives a company delivery truck and an employee working the cash register. Two very different roles. But both require time management and the ability to prioritize tasks under pressure. Both require attention to detail, whether that’s counting inventory and handling cash accurately or completing pre-trip inspections and maintaining delivery logs. Both require customer interaction skills. Both require the ability to follow standard operating procedures consistently. And both require problem-solving when something doesn’t go as planned.
So here’s a question a skills-based organization can ask: could an employee at the register grow into a role driving one of your delivery trucks? Why not? If they already have the foundational skills, reliability, attention to detail, procedural compliance, customer service, and they’re someone who is passionate about the company, who carries out the mission, who shows up every day with a positive attitude and a willingness to grow, then the gap isn’t as wide as the job titles make it seem. They’re not starting from scratch. They’re building on a foundation that already exists. You identify the delta, things like CDL training, route management, and vehicle operation, and you build a targeted development plan around closing that specific gap. That’s skills-based mobility. And it’s one way organizations fill critical roles faster, retain institutional knowledge, and give employees career paths they may never have thought possible.
When you stop looking at job titles and start looking at skills, you will see connections across your workforce that were always there. You just weren’t looking for them.
Why I Started Looking Into This
I’ll be honest about what led me here. I didn’t start researching skills-based organizations because it was trendy. I started because I needed to, for two reasons.
First, as someone who has spent years building learning programs, onboarding systems, and development frameworks, I needed to understand this shift so I could prepare the workforce in my organization. If the way we think about jobs and skills is fundamentally changing, then the way we design learning has to change with it. I needed to know what was coming so I could build for it. And with many of the challenges we face in different areas finding reliable employees who are passionate about the organization, it became clear that sometimes the employees we have are the best aligned for our open roles.
Second, I needed to be able to talk about it. Not in a surface-level, “here’s what the trend report says” kind of way, but with real depth. As a learning professional, the people I work with, leaders, HR partners, frontline managers, look to me to help them understand how shifts like this affect their teams. I can’t do that if I’m only repeating headlines. I had to do the reading.
And here’s what I learned.
Where Did This Come From?
From what I’ve found, the idea of organizing work around skills instead of job titles didn’t appear out of nowhere. Its roots go back further than most people realize.
In the early 1970s, Harvard psychologist Dr. David McClelland developed what’s considered the first formal competency model.1 His research challenged the idea that intelligence tests and academic credentials were the best predictors of job performance. Instead, he argued that specific competencies, observable skills and behaviors, were far more reliable indicators of who would actually succeed in a role. That work, done in partnership with consultants at McBer and Company, laid the foundation for competency-based frameworks that would spread through human resources over the following decades.2
By the 1980s, businesses were increasingly adopting competency frameworks for recruitment, training, and performance appraisals. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the focus on competencies continued to grow alongside the rise of HR technology and talent management platforms. Lominger, founded in 1991 and later acquired by Korn Ferry in 2006, built an entire business around competency-based leadership development, identifying 67 individual competencies critical to success and creating tools for job profiling, selection, performance management, and succession planning. By 2014, Korn Ferry had consolidated that work into their Leadership Architect framework of 38 competencies, and organizations were already using it to drive skills-based talent development in practice.3 I worked for a company that used Korn Ferry’s framework to do exactly this, building development plans around demonstrated competencies rather than just job titles and tenure. But even then, it was still largely an HR and L&D exercise, something that lived in performance review forms and development plans, not something that shaped how entire organizations thought about work and how it could actually work in developing employees in the organization, offering them opportunities outside of their current roles.
The modern concept of the skills-based organization, the version we’re all hearing about now, really took shape around 2020–2022. Deloitte is widely credited with formalizing it through their research and their “hub and spokes” framework, which argued that skills should be the connective tissue across all talent practices: hiring, development, mobility, performance, and workforce planning.4 The post-pandemic talent war, the Great Resignation, and the rapid acceleration of AI all created the conditions for this idea to move from academic concept to boardroom priority.
I think about it the same way I think about eLearning. When organizations first started moving training online in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it wasn’t just a new delivery method, it fundamentally changed how L&D teams thought about scale, access, and what a learning experience could look like. It changed the role of the instructional designer. It changed the tools we used. It changed the conversations we had with leadership. The shift to skills-based feels that big to me. It’s not a new feature. It’s a new operating model.
The shift from “what job do you hold?” to “what can you do?” has been building for over fifty years. What’s different now is that the business world doesn’t just have the option to act on it, it has to. In my opinion, the organizations that embrace this shift will lead their industries. The ones that don’t will lose ground to the ones that do.
The Hype Is Real, and So Is the Problem
The numbers behind the skills-based movement are hard to ignore. According to the TalentLMS 2026 L&D Report, 79% of HR managers say their company is adopting a skills-based approach to hiring, training, and career development.5 The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030, and that nearly 60% of the global workforce will need reskilling or upskilling in that same timeframe.6 Deloitte found that 77% of business and HR executives say flexibly moving skills to work is critical to navigating future disruptions.4
And the business case goes beyond just keeping up with change. Organizations with strong internal mobility programs fill roles 20–30% faster than those relying primarily on external hiring, and internal promotions tend to produce better long-term performance and retention than outside hires.7 When you develop and promote from within, you’re investing in people who already understand your culture, your systems, and your customers. That’s not just a talent strategy, it’s a profit strategy. LinkedIn’s own data suggests that skills-based hiring can multiply applications by a factor of ten.8 McKinsey research shows that companies applying people and learning analytics effectively can see productivity gains of up to 25%.7
These aren’t fringe ideas. This is the mainstream. So if the data is this compelling and the adoption is this widespread, why does it still feel like most organizations are just… talking about it?
The Gap Between Saying It and Doing It
There’s a difference between adopting a skills-based mindset and building a skills-based infrastructure. And right now I believe most organizations are stuck somewhere in between (if building a skills-based practice is even on their mind).
Deloitte’s own research found that fewer than one in five organizations have actually adopted skills-based approaches to a significant extent.9 The Mercer 2025/2026 Skills Snapshot Survey shows that only 38% of organizations maintain a single, enterprise-wide skills library. Just 55% map skills directly to jobs. The mean percentage of jobs with skills actually mapped sits at 72%, which sounds decent until you realize that means nearly a third of roles in the average organization still have no formal skills mapping.10
And here’s the stat that should keep every L&D leader up at night: only 8% of L&D professionals report being highly confident in their ability to measure the business impact of learning.11 Eight percent. We’re building skills-based organizations and we can barely prove that our learning programs are working.
The industry has fallen in love with the idea of skills-based. But the execution? That’s where it falls apart, and that’s where L&D leaders need to step up.
What Comes Next
Understanding what skills-based means and where it came from is the first step. But knowing the history and the data only gets you so far. The real question is: what does it actually look like when an organization gets this right, and how do you build it?
That’s what the rest of this series is about. In Part 2, I break down what a skills-based approach can look like in an organization, from skills taxonomies and competency mapping to assessment design, career mobility, and where AI might be able to help. I share what I’ve seen work in practice, what I believe is holding most organizations back, and what I have found in reading about this.
In Part 3, I get into the how, a practical playbook I hope you can use in building a skills-based approach in your own organization. Where you might be able to start, how you might be able to get buy-in, what you might want to look at measuring, and how to avoid the most common mistakes I’ve read others have taken.
Because the shift to skills-based isn’t really a technology problem. So much of it comes down to people, leadership, and how willing we are to rethink the way we’ve always done things. And I believe L&D is in a great position to help lead that conversation.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear where you are on this journey. Is your organization actually doing skills-based, do you believe in it, or is it just a fad? Join the conversation on LinkedIn, let’s talk about what’s real and what’s not.
References
- McClelland, D. C. (1973). Testing for competence rather than for “intelligence.” American Psychologist, 28(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034092
- Workitect. (n.d.). Unveiling the first competency model: Foundation of skills management. https://workitect.com/the-first-competency-model/
- Korn Ferry. (2014). Korn Ferry Leadership Architect™ global competency framework. https://www.kornferry.com/capabilities/talent-suite/korn-ferry-assess/leadership-architect
- Deloitte. (2024). The skills-based organization: A new operating model for work and the workforce. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/work/skills-based-organizations.html
- TalentLMS. (2026). The 2026 L&D report: The state of workplace learning. https://www.talentlms.com/research/learning-development-report-2026
- World Economic Forum. (2025). The future of jobs report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
- McKinsey Global Institute. (2024). Performance through people: Transforming human capital into competitive advantage. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/performance-through-people
- LinkedIn Economic Graph. (2026). Skills on the rise: The fastest-growing skills in 2026. LinkedIn. https://news.linkedin.com/2026/Skills-on-the-rise-2026
- Deloitte. (2025). Skills-based organisations: Looking back to move ahead. Deloitte Netherlands Consulting. https://www.deloitte.com/nl/en/services/consulting/perspectives/skillsbased-organisations.html
- Mercer. (2025). The 2025/2026 Skills Snapshot Survey report. https://www.mercer.com/en-us/insights/talent-and-transformation/skill-based-talent-management/
- AIHR. (2026). 30+ L&D statistics you need to know in 2026. Academy to Innovate HR. https://www.aihr.com/blog/learning-and-development-statistics/
