Talent Mobility

A case story detailing how skill development and talent mobility can bridge the gap between learning development and performance management, while helping employees plan and manage their career.

Image of a woman looking at the many different paths she can traverse for her career

Background

People that make up an organization have plenty of career-related plans and goals. I led a team as the design lead to build a talent mobility solution that could be used to support those aspirations resulting in a highly prepared workforce filled with eager and competent candidates ready to step into vacancies as they open. My goal for talent mobility was to foster internal growth, cultivate skills, and fortify long-term talent retention, central to organizational success.

Project goals

Help employees with the up-skilling, re-skilling, and identify career development opportunities. An internal mobility strategy will help find mentors offering developmental encouragement to learning recommendations that provide a means to grow.
Reduce turnover costs. When an experienced employee leaves, organizations are faced with a loss of productivity, institutional knowledge, and client relationships—not to mention the costs incurred by recruiting and training a replacement.
Increase employee engagement. According to Gallup, only 32% of employees were engaged with their work in 2022. Among the various engagement elements Gallup measures, declines were found in: Feeling cared about at work, opportunities to learn and grow, and opportunities to do what employees do best
Help organizations identify skill gaps. Skills are becoming more important for the way organizations define work, deploy talent, manage careers, and value employees.

The Team

A tiger team consisting of myself, a product owner, and 2 engineers were tasked with developing a strategy for a new product offering that would connect our Learning Development Platform and our Performance Management modules.

The Discovery Process

The product owner and I started the discovery process using techniques from Nate Walkingshaw's directed discovery methodology and elements from Shape Up by Basecamp. We wanted to put the administrators and end users of Bridge at the forefront our of decision making process while at the same time recognizing that Bridge was making a huge bet on this feature and wanted to see results. With well establish project goals we began this effort by conducting internal workshops. I began the process of interviewing existing Bridge customers and prospective customers on their current talent mobility initiatives.

Initial Findings

As I conducted interviews and facilitated workshops, it became evident that Talent Mobility could be broken down into 6 distinct domains:

Career Pathing
Mentoring
Project or Gig Work
Job Boards
Recruiting
Learning and Development

Each of these areas were massive in size and scope and beyond the capacity of our small team to address quickly. We also realized we had a problem in that foundational elements such as skill taxonomy and industry standard job titles were not available in Bridge.

“We want to look at talent pathways within Bridge, looking at how we can bring someone into the business and identify what opportunities they’ve got for progression that aligns with their skillset and what their interests lie in. You could start as an apprentice and you have a vision that you might want to become a CEO, so what does that look like for you?We want to offer clarity around what you need to do If someone wants to become a chief exec, but also at the same time we want to offer opportunities for everyone so they can continue to progress in what they are currently doing if they want to remain there.” -Current Bridge Customer

After conducting an initial round of 14 interviews, I took the data and information and with the help of the team, conducted an affinity mapping exercise to help visualize what area would have the biggest impact and should be the focus of our efforts.

As it turned out, in order to build any of the 6 major talent mobility domains, we would need a strong skill and role mapping solution.

Building out skills taxonomy and job roles

Phase 1 was to introduce skill communities, employee profiles and organization charts to the Bridge LMS. Research showed us that connection and collaboration were key to learning and skill development. We were excited to introduce new skills and community features within Bridge. We also partnered with Lightcast to provide an industry standard taxonomy for skill names and job titles. This allowed us to build our foundation.

Phase 2 was to make Bridge smarter by leveraging AI to help employees determine which skills will drive career growth, and recommend content that helps them reach their goals. We also implemented a feature to allow L&D teams to increase productivity by auto-tagging skills to job titles and courses.The hypothesis was, it would save time and increase productivity for L&D Teams.

Phase 3 starts to build on the skills taxonomy foundation and auto tagging of courses to appropriate skills. We are currently working some ideas around career pathing and mentoring that will form the basis for the big picture vision. Figma prototypes of this work have been shown to customers thought this process and at industry conferences and events to validate our hypotheses and ideas.

Conclusion and Learnings

This is still a work in progress. I'm assembling metrics, customer quotes and benchmark scores Here's what I know so far:

11% increase in profile creation and usage within Bridge.
82% increase in tagged content due to our AI initiatives to tie skills to learnables (couses, programs, checkpoints, and journeys).
On track to achieve $2M in ARR from upselling and new business.

Unfortunately, I was laid off from Bridge prior to seeing this project through to completion. There is a significant product roadmap ahead and I'm excited to see where they take mentoring, career pathing, and the usage of large language models. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss this project.