Skills Blueprint: How a Global Tech Leader Future-proofed Their Workforce In An Age Of Automation
Faced with imminent changes brought about by automation, this organization put skills data at the center of their talent mobility & reskilling strategy, using AI-powered insights.
Faced with imminent changes brought about by automation, this organization put skills data at the center of their talent mobility strategy for their customer service department, using AI-powered insights to efficiently reskill and redeploy talent for the future.
Challenge
This global business builds online marketplaces enabled by tech, powered by trust, and loved by customers. In recent years, generative AI and automation have become integral to company strategy, helping to improve the customer experience and optimize ways of working.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, embracing change and fostering continuous learning is essential. As this global tech leader streamlines teams and functions, the need for specialized skills and capabilities has never been more critical to adapt to technological advancements, meet industry demands, and provide world-class services and products.
Adopting a skills-based career mobility strategy allows the organization not just to keep up with changes but to lead and innovate through them.
The company needed a way to carve out paths to redeploy or reskill the talent with the challenge of having distributed systems and at the same time addressing a need at scale.
To optimize workforce transformation efforts and remain competitive, they needed to:
- Visualize how technological advancements such as Generative AI and automation would impact roles, the responsibilities, and skills requirements
- Help employees explore new career paths and accelerate internal talent mobility
- Optimize talent data management and skills knowledge across teams.
As part of their Skills strategy, the Talent Success team worked in lockstep with the business to develop a solution for Skills-Based Career Mobility and Career Pathing for customer service teams by introducing cutting-edge technology to meet these goals.
“This year, we’ve prioritized skills and creating sustainable solutions around this transforming our Talent strategy. As we are evolving as a business, we need real-time visibility into our skills landscape, not just a static snapshot. This included understanding the skills we had, identifying gaps, and tracking how we benchmarked those capabilities against the market.”
– Senior Lead of Talent Management, Global Tech Company
Approach
The company needed a partner who could pinpoint their current, and future, skills gaps with greater precision – and help to close them. They chose to roll out a new skills-based approach to career mobility, upskilling and reskilling, at scale – focusing first on the roles and functions that were operationally evolving.
They chose Beamery to build the foundational skills insights and data layer, and provide a new blueprint for workforce decision making, underpinned by transparent and explainable AI.
The two-step approach involved developing a dynamic job architecture, and creating an intelligent system to assess employee skills against open roles in the organization, to build out skills-based career paths.
1. Develop a dynamic, future-proofed Job Architecture
Using Beamery’s AI and proven machine learning models, they were able to infer the skills and responsibilities for each job, generating a skills-based job architecture aligned to the unique requirements of the organization, today and in the future.
The global tech leader began this effort with Customer Service, and used Beamery to:
- Examine the latest job descriptions and roles in relation to each other, to spot shared skills and tasks, and create a cohesive understanding of the job family.
- Identify “core capabilities” and relationships between skills, and create deeper, context-aware definitions quickly.
- Structure, synthesize and standardize job descriptions from a range of formats, and in different languages, and enrich them with skills inferred by Beamery’s AI.
Sample output of structured skills data aligned to their unique dynamic job architecture
Beamery’s AI combines efficiency and human-in-the-loop oversight for more relevant, reliable, and actionable skills data – delivering immediate value. This approach delivered, on average:
- 90% skills relevance
- 86% skills priority relevance
- 73% skills proficiency relevance
“An exercise that might have taken months to a year took us a matter of weeks – we could see all the roles in our Customer Service function, what skills were required to perform those roles, and the relative importance of skills. And it was totally custom to how we do business.” – Senior Lead of Talent Management, Global Tech Company
2. Build skills-based profiles for powerful talent matching
Next, the organization leveraged Beamery AI to analyze the profiles of employees, to understand their skills, aspirations and potential, and match them intelligently to suggested roles or upskilling opportunities across commercial and Product, Data and Tech teams.
The process worked as follows:
- A voluntary pilot group of employees uploaded their resumes to the organization’s career network, where they could easily select which types of job they were most interested in. Beamery’s automated workflows helped to streamline and personalize this experience, while ensuring secure and compliant data capture.
- With powerful resume parsing capabilities and AI, Beamery extracted the relevant skills that were declared in employee profiles, and inferred additional skills that had not been explicitly listed.
- Each employee was matched with potential job families based on their transferable skills. An “AI Talent Match Score”, generated for each role, provided a holistic view of their suitability (skills match, as well as seniority, location, experience, etc.).
- For each role, employees could see the skills extracted from their profile, the skills inferred by Beamery AI, and the core skills required – to help them spot gaps and upskilling opportunities.
“It was eye-opening to see the differences and discrepancies between employee skills and our role data. Thanks to Beamery, we were able to better assess fit areas of opportunity for upskilling, reskilling, and mobility. It also helped our community to really think about skills first and guide individuals discover new car paths through skills-based mapping.” – Senior Lead of Talent Management, Global Tech Company
Thanks to Beamery skills data, the leaders at this global tech company will be able to easily assess aggregated employee skills proficiency, across geographic region or line of business – so they can make better informed workforce plans for the future.
Results
Through this pilot, focused on critical roles, this global tech leader has been able to make quick wins and gain momentum for their skills-based mobility initiatives. Thanks to clearer visibility into workforce skills gaps, and the ability to intelligently match employees with skills-based career paths, they have uncovered a more agile and efficient approach to human resource allocation.
With Beamery, the organization has also undertaken a comprehensive data centralization effort, merging information from various teams and systems incredibly quickly, and developing meaningful, standardized outputs (90% skill relevance on first review).
This enhanced skills data layer has provided a valuable blueprint to both the Talent Success team and employees, helping them understand how skills align with new opportunities, identify gaps, and develop strategies to bridge them.
Furthermore, Beamery’s capabilities have enabled the company’s talent success team to analyze current skill demands and project future requirements, setting them up for future success.
This bold step towards skills-based talent management and workforce allocation have positioned the global tech leader to confidently address their evolving consumer and developer community needs. Even as automation continues to transform job roles, the new approach ensures employees have opportunities for learning, growth, and career progression within the organization. This forward-thinking strategy allows the company to maintain operational excellence while fostering employee development.
“By focusing on skills-based mobility, we prepare our teams to move from routine tasks to more strategic roles, ensuring they remain invaluable assets to our organization.
This represents a win-win scenario for the organization:
Our employees are empowered to find potential roles and upskilling opportunities, powered by data and Generative AI while we continue to improve the service and experience we provide to our customers, as we invest in our people and grow our business.”
- Senior Lead of Talent Management, Global Tech Company
Impact
- 1 day to get up and running with a usable skills framework from Beamery
- 4-6 months estimated savings to generate 40 unique skills-based role compositions