You Cannot Build What You Cannot See: Anticipating Future Skills & Capabilities

The Challenge
L&D functions primary role is to build capability in others. Rarely does L&D turn that lens on themselves. This case study focuses on a large life science organization's L&D department that set out to provide professional development to itself. The plan was to build a skill library with learning journies, though initial skills were identified and named, they were only measured for proficiency and importance. This L&D function had little ability to align its own capabilities clearly and even less ability to anticipate what it needed now or how to prepare for the future. With a significant organizational mandate requiring the function to build entirely new capabilities around AI, the lack of visibility into their own capability picture was no longer a manageable gap, but a starting line problem.

The Approach
The work began grounded in a skills baselining effort that had already identified and measured skills across the department by importance and proficiency. However, in initiating the skill library phase of the project, additional interviews with department leaders revealed the skill picture was incomplete. Entry level skills and executive leadership skill statements were omitted from the initial effort to baseline the skills. There was no visible arc of what it meant to grow inside this function from entry point to executive director.

The interviews also revealed that the operations team within the L&D function did not have the necessary skills for a smooth transistion and these skills were not part of the first initiative.  What does someone need to know and be able to do at the baseline, so that the function has a shared language and shared foundation regardless of where someone sits or how they enter the L&D department?

Currently both phases of work have not been managed and sustained by the L&D function fully. For example, in rolling out the professional development learning journies, setting up a central location for everything had not been considered.

But that gap pointed to something even larger. Executive directors were not coordinated in their professional development efforts with their teams. These insights informed the leanring journey framework and tools.

Lessons Learned
This work highlighted several questions that the L&D function could only answer partially. Having the answer to the following questions for informing leadership or project work would position L&D as trusted advisors:

• Do we have this skill?
• How well represented is that skill across the function?
• How complex and/or experieciend does this skill need to be?
• Where are we thin skills?
• What skills are completely absent and considered necessary? 

Without being able to answer those questions there is no baseline to build from and nothing to benchmark against. 

Overall Impact
Wherever your function sits — without documented skills, skills documented but not measured, or measured but uncertain on how to shift those skills to be AI-ready — the L&D function cannot see itself clearly and cannot anticipate what it needs. And what it cannot anticipate, it cannot build.