Insights and benchmarks to accelerate a skills-based transformation in your company.
The latest Pay for Skills survey results are in. They offer insights that will help accelerate the skills conversation in your company and allow you to benchmark your progress against your peers.
More than 650 organizations from around the world contributed to the survey. They shared their experiences attracting, retaining and rewarding people with the skills they require to advance their business strategies.
With more companies than ever before prioritizing skills over education, all organizations need to think about developing their skills-based talent management capabilities.
Competition for top talent is fierce. About 45% of companies report a pressing need for skills that are generally in high demand, which makes the search for talent (and talent retention) especially challenging.
Overall, the need for certain skills has moved to the forefront of the hiring process — in some cases ahead of education and experience. As a result, skills-based pay practices are often deployed to attract new talent. However, even though organizations are assessing skills when hiring (with a view to achieving their strategic goals), many companies still have no formal skills-based rewards in place to recognize and drive in-house skills development.
This poses the question: are companies over-focusing on skills during the hiring process, while under-focusing on building and retaining the skills they need to advance their business priorities?
Access insights and benchmarks to accelerate your skills-based talent strategy. Learn why pay for skills is important strategically but difficult to operationalize across an organization.
Five key questions being addressed by organizations leading the transformation towards the use of skills-focused talent strategies.
What skills do we need and how will we incorporate a skills taxonomy into our job architecture?
What skill proficiency level do we expect for each role?
How do we assess the skills that will drive our business forward?
How will we reward those with top skills?
How will we operationalize our skills-based strategy?
Mercer’s latest Pay for Skills survey report offers insight into how your peers are progressing on the journey to develop skills-based talent practices. It highlights the most common approaches to building skills taxonomies, tracking skills (both within an organization and in the market), developing proficiency scales, and operationalizing pay-for-skills strategies.
Mercer Skills-Edge Suite is an integrated service offering comprising consulting, technology, and data. The Suite gives you the information and insight you need to advance skills-based talent and pay practices across your company.
How to start your journey?
Transformation demands deconstructing jobs into units of skill and updating talent models so skills become the basis for defining work, deploying talent, managing careers and valuing employees. Without accelerating progress on their skills agenda, organizations won’t have the talent to take advantage of emerging new jobs. Leading companies are re-inventing their talent and reward programs around skills.
Making the move from jobs to skills affects how you approach workforce planning, reskilling/upskilling, performance management, your internal talent marketplace, succession planning, pay and talent acquisition. Partner with Mercer to help you transform your workforce.
Apply internal and external supply and demand skills research data for enhanced insights and redefined talent/skills pools
Conduct rapid reskilling, targeted by robust assessment capability, without laborious current state analysis
Measure skills and capabilities objectively for talent acquisition, development, succession or a broader people strategy, based on your skill framework
Invest in future skills and reinvent pay programs with AI-driven pay decisions based on skill demand, supply and criticality
Know that agile environments require rapid, multi-sourced performance feedback and assessment, so skill proficiency and development activities are even more critical
Enable employees’ ownership of their careers through skill mapping and adjacencies, which shine a light on actionable career paths
Ensure succession pools are informed by individual skills to expand potential talent pipelines and avoid job structures that may limit diversity
Deploy talent to gigs, projects, experiences based on skills supply and demand, promoting internal mobility and diversity of thinking and experiences across the organization
Select candidates based on skills, using AI-driven skill inferences and simple digital assessment tools to improve the quality of the process and the candidate experience
Pay-for-skills practices can lead to increased attraction and retention of critical skills. In addition, they can strengthen and reinforce other people initiatives, such as workforce planning, performance management and career development.
Mercer products that can support pay-for-skills initiatives include:
Lay the groundwork for skills-based decision-making.
Skills Library offers a rapid short-cut to deploying a skills taxonomy that is based on market data — the first step in adding skills to your organization’s pay strategy.
Determine which skills are most valuable to your organization.
Skills Pricer is a self-service web application that reports which skills influence the pay of a selected job, as well as assigning a value to those skills. Additionally Skills Pricer allows you to customise a benchmark job to reflect your own unique skills mix, and see how that impacts on pay for the new role.
Reinvent your rewards with pay for skills.
This AI-driven tool is designed to equip organizations with intelligent pay at the employee level – based on business strategy – combining skill scarcity and business criticality, along with other business-related employee performance data.
Access insights and benchmarks to accelerate your skills-based talent strategy. Learn why pay for skills is important strategically but difficult to operationalize across an organization.
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