Is L&D backing the wrong horse with skills?

Is L&D backing the wrong horse with skills? Laura and Michelle nearly didn’t write this chapter for The L&D Leader. Everyone was already talking about skills, and they weren’t sure they wanted to add to the noise. What they discover is that the real question isn’t whether to back skills, but whose horse it is in the first place. Drawing on two organisations that took completely different paths, Epam’s thirty-year skills architecture and McKinsey’s four-week email experiment, they explore what it looks like to build performance rather than just label it differently. Neither organisation built a course. It’s an episode about the difference between talking a good skills game and knowing what’s needed. And why picking the right skill deliberately, for a while, is more likely to deliver results than going broad.

Resources

The L&D Leader – Principles and practice for delivering business value by Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers (book)
learningchangemakers.com/resources/the-ld-leader

International Labor Organisation – Definition of Skills
ilo.org/resource/glossary-skills-and-labour-migration

TRI principles: closing the performance gap
learningchangemakers.com/tri-principles-closing-the-performance-gap

Learning Uncut podcast – Putting skills to work at Ericsson with Peter Sheppard
learninguncut.global/podcast/147

Learning Uncut podcast – McKinsey’s Feedback Skills Surge with Lisa Christensen
https://learninguncut.global/podcast/163/