Make talent quality your leading analytic with skills-based hiring solution.
The future of work is skills-first. Despite the many benefits of skills-based hiring, implementing it can be challenging. It demands a shift in mindset from those who have long relied on degrees as a stand-in for skills. Employers must also take a critical look at each role to determine whether a degree is truly necessary, as well as revamp job descriptions and postings to clearly outline the essential skills and competencies.
Many companies struggle to transition from current talent models to become a truly skills-based organization (SBO). To get to the bottom of why, Satish Kumar, CEO of Glider AI, sat down with Sandra Loughlin, Chief Learning Scientist at EPAM Systems, to discuss what it takes to build a high-performing, skills-first workforce. From job architecture to skills validation, this conversation provided deep insights into how organizations can better align learning, hiring, and talent management with business strategy.
“Skills are only one half of the equation. The other one is tasks.” – Sandra Loughlin
In a skills-based organization, tasks and skills are closely related but serve different purposes. Tasks are the specific activities or actions an employee performs to complete a job. They are the “what” of work—what needs to get done. Skills are the capabilities, knowledge, and expertise required to successfully complete tasks. They are the “how”—how someone accomplishes a task.
Many companies claim to be skills-based, yet they forget to define the tasks associated with those skills. Tasks require skills. A task like “analyze customer feedback data” requires skills such as data analysis, pattern recognition, and communication. Skills can apply to multiple tasks. For example, problem-solving is a skill that could be used for tasks in customer service, software development, or operations.
By differentiating between tasks and skills, a skills-based organization ensures employees are evaluated and developed based on real capabilities, allowing for more flexibility, efficiency, and talent mobility. According to Loughlin, EPAM’s success is rooted in its task-based model—ensuring that skills development is directly tied to work outputs.
“Companies spend billions on training, yet most employees don’t complete it, or worse, they don’t retain what they learned.” – Satish Kumar
Traditional corporate learning programs often fail because they don’t align with real-world work demands. Employees are expected to passively consume content, but there’s no structured way to apply and validate that learning.
“The only way to determine if someone has learned something is to have them demonstrate it in an authentic task.” – Sandra Loughlin
“AI is both a disruptor and an enabler of skills-based organizations.” – Sandra Loughlin
AI is reshaping the way enterprises approach hiring, upskilling, and workforce readiness. While AI-driven skills intelligence helps companies identify skills gaps, it also plays a critical role in validation.
“If you don’t have AI, skills validation is extremely expensive at scale.” – Sandra Loughlin 🚀
For enterprises struggling to transition into a skills-first model, AI offers an efficient way to identify, measure, and develop workforce skills.
Many organizations forget to link learning efforts with real business outcomes. EPAM, however, has a structured approach to skills-based performance management.
“You are rewarded with career growth if you can demonstrate validated skills—but if you don’t, you can’t keep your job.” – Sandra Loughlin
This approach ensures continuous employee development, where:
“The ROI of a skills-based organization is measured in business agility—how quickly you can realign your workforce to strategy.” – Sandra Loughlin
Building a skills-based workforce isn’t just about adopting the latest L&D tools—it requires a mindset shift across HR, TA, and business leadership.
“If companies don’t invest in becoming skills-based now, they will struggle to remain competitive as AI and automation continue to transform work.” – Sandra Loughlin
For HR, TA, and Talent Management leaders, the question is no longer “Should we adopt a skills-first strategy?” but rather “How fast can we get there?”
Satish Kumar (00:01.934)
Hello, everyone. This is Satish Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Glider AI. Here we are with Sandra Lofling in this podcast. And we are going to talk about cracking the skill code from a skill misconception to skill mastery. We are going to have a deep dive with Sandra on creating a skill-first workforce. Hi, Sandra.
Sandra Loughlin (00:31.599)
Hi Satish, thanks for having me.
Satish Kumar (00:34.318)
Absolutely, we are excited to have you here. So we will go through a quick introduction first, and we will jump into the session. I see that you are a chief learning scientist at EPAM. Can you explain this role and your journey in this role at EPAM?
Sandra Loughlin (00:59.035)
Yes, it’s a pretty unusual title. So my background actually is in learning science. So prior to joining EPAM, I was faculty at the University of Maryland and my doctorate is in learning science, which is, it’s not the science of teaching because most learning happens outside of a formal, like educational context. So it’s really the psychology and neuroscience of learning, what happens in the mind and the brain.
Satish Kumar (01:01.868)
Yeah.
Sandra Loughlin (01:28.741)
when people have to learn something new, particularly really complex things. I became aware of EPAM while I was faculty at Maryland. And because they had heard from clients that their people were like, EPAM was like really good. Like they clearly like they were learning stuff all the time. They had all of these amazing skills.
And the clients wanted to understand like what was the secret sauce that EPAM had and EPAM didn’t know. So they reached out to me to like come and see what I, you know, what I thought. And what I discovered was this incredible skills-based learning organization, the likes of which I have never seen before or since.
Satish Kumar (02:18.08)
Wow, wow. And for those who don’t know about E-PAM, can you tell us E-PAM does?
Sandra Loughlin (02:24.347)
Yes, and if you don’t know about ePam, you’re not alone. Very few people have ever heard about us. So we are a $5 billion, 60,000 person software engineering firm. Our claim to fame is that we make incredible digital platforms for our clients, and particularly platforms that leverage data and AI.
Sandra Loughlin (02:52.455)
If you think about EPAM, like you think about these like apps that you interact with, all these like really complicated technology platforms, chances are EPAM has helped to build that.
Satish Kumar (03:05.846)
Amazing, So before we dive into, I would like you to share an interesting story about your skill journey, either at EPAM or outside. Now that you talked to so many clients and people outside, will be good to hear.
Sandra Loughlin (03:24.711)
Honestly, the most interesting skills journey that I’ve encountered is EPAMS because it’s been a 30 year journey. skills has been part of EPAM and our core business and how we think about our employees and our work since the very beginning of the organization. So for us, because again, we’re professional services, like our business is like skills, like we have to
We sell people to our clients to do amazing work. And from the beginning, our leaders, software engineers, data scientists, wanted to do that in a really data-driven way. So we started the whole skills journey with staffing. But then people realized, these data are very helpful for learning and hiring and performance management and so many other things. And so today,
30 years later, we are the most mature skills-based organization that at least I have seen anywhere.
Satish Kumar (04:33.416)
Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you, Sandra, for sharing that. Now, say skill-based organization or SBO work model has a strong potential in our modern workplace. However, company-wide adoption of SBO has many challenges, riddled with rigid framework, outdated skills, maybe insufficient skills, or maybe a missing link between skill
and the business, right? And companies who have adopted, as you said, are at various maturity level of their skill-based organization for both talent acquisition and talent development, right? So before we go into weeds of this SBO, I would like you to explain a few key terms that we’ll be using throughout the conversation that are related to SBO, right?
It could be job architecture, competency framework, taxonomy versus ontology, skills, task, right? All these in the context of skill-based organizations. So why don’t we start with FASP? Can you explain what job architecture is?
Sandra Loughlin (05:47.675)
Yes, so job architecture is the definition of a job and the definition and the coordination amongst all the different jobs, right? So job architecture really helps you understand a job, role in the context of all of the other roles in the organization.
Satish Kumar (06:08.706)
Great, competency framework.
Sandra Loughlin (06:12.303)
A competency framework is a way of thinking about what, I mean, people call it competencies, should people have to fulfill their job. So this tends to be big picture capabilities like communication or leadership. And this is how, until very recently, most organizations kind of defined like what should people be able to know and do in the role.
Satish Kumar (06:42.528)
Awesome. Taxonomy versus ontology.
Sandra Loughlin (06:46.929)
So I think about them, one is, so a taxonomy is an organ, in this case, an organization of skills, right? There’s a hierarchy, so you have like little baby skills that I roll up into increasingly more complex skills and then to capabilities or competencies. And when it’s a taxonomy, it’s static. So it’s not moving very quickly. An ontology is a different way.
of relating all of these different skills, competencies, concepts that is dynamic. It’s always changing. And it’s a knowledge graph model, meaning that you’re, think of it as like a web as opposed to like a hierarchy of like, know, more and increasingly more and less complex things.
Satish Kumar (07:37.332)
Absolutely. I will say that lot of people will get clarity with this definition, taxonomy and anthology. What about skills?
Sandra Loughlin (07:47.953)
So the way that we define skills at EPUM, so we define skills as the things that people bring to the work to get the work done. And this can be everything from technical skills to self skills, like self skills meaning like self awareness, curiosity, more things that people often consider traits, as well as soft skills or business skills.
you know, with other people, managing expectations, managing your time and that sort of thing.
Satish Kumar (08:24.59)
And in that context, tasks in the case of a skill-based organization.
Sandra Loughlin (08:30.693)
I’m so glad you asked about that. That’s often the missing link in many companies that I see. So for us, like it is as important to define people, so skills, as it is to define the work to be done. And we do that in the context of tasks. So we define tasks as the major activities and deliverables that are associated with a role. And our whole goal is to optimize the match of people to work skills to tasks.
Satish Kumar (09:01.93)
Awesome. Awesome. Great. Now that we have clarified the basic terms, let’s dig now into the real matter we wanted to talk. So in a study sponsored by Glider with Lighthouse Research, we looked at the state of L &D based on interviews with 1,000 plus enterprise HR leaders. And it was great to see that a skill-first strategy remains a top priority in 2025. The data also showed employees at companies which adopted a culture of learning were 4x more likely to stay. It’s all positive, except that the same research found that only 37 % of managers are having conversation with their employee about skills development.
There is lot of systemic challenges in deploying a skill-first people strategy. But do you have any specific model or example of a successful deployment of a skill-first people strategy from hiring a talent to talent development? Maybe you can highlight an EPAM example that you started earlier.
Sandra Loughlin (10:23.205)
Yes, so EPAM leverages skill and task data across the entire talent lifecycle, starting with workforce planning. So trying to understand what tasks are we needing as a business to be able to do in whatever two to three years? What are the skills associated with those tasks? Do we have those tasks or those skills in the organization today? If so, where? If we’re not.
Where can we get them? Do we need to buy, borrow, or build them? So everything from that to using skills to hire, using skills absolutely to educate and upskill and re-skill people, using skills for performance management. So at EPAM, you can’t keep your job or grow in your career if you don’t have the skills that are required for your job. We use it in every aspect of the employee. journey and we believe that that is central to our ability to function effectively as a business.
Satish Kumar (11:32.055)
For sure. So this data that I shared earlier, only 37 % managers are having conversation. Is it more of a cultural thing or how is that they’re not aware of that when you talk about this?
Sandra Loughlin (11:46.705)
So I mean, I’m sure it is, right? In many organizations, well, it’s a cultural thing and it’s a data thing. So I would say like, know, managers are likely not having skill-based conversations, performance, you know, with their employees because they don’t necessarily know what are the skills required for that job. They don’t necessarily know what are the skills that the person has. And even if they do, you know,
Are the managers supported and incentivized to have those conversations? What’s the downside if they’re not gonna do it? These are the kinds of things that organizations who want to be skills-based have to address. The transparency around the data and then the support and incentive structure for managers to be one source of…a validation for skills and a mechanism for helping employees understand what gaps they have and find resources for closing them.
Satish Kumar (12:54.654)
makes sense completely. And if you look at the skill first people strategy for an organization, if they want to transition towards that area, do you recommend a skill-based hiring first or a skill-based talent development first?
I mean, ultimately, the skill has to play a role both in the talent acquisition and talent development. Do you have any recommendation why one versus another or can both coexist? Can both be launched together?
Sandra Loughlin (13:33.799)
So they can, yes, they can. would say, skills transformation is a business tactic, right? You do it to solve a business problem that you’re struggling with as an organization. Companies have different struggles. And so I would say kind of where you start in terms of like how you’re applying skills should be a tactical response to the problem.
So if you have an issue with hiring, you have skills gaps in the organization, you can hire for them, then start there. It could be that your company is dealing with, I don’t know, let’s say AI disruption, where you have to, you can’t hire for the skills because they don’t exist in the market. You have to re-skill people and up-skill people. In that case, I would start with talent development.
So I think that where does, there’s no one place to start. It will depend on the company and anywhere in the talent life cycle, I think is fair game to start.
Satish Kumar (14:44.59)
Good. So overall, basically you’re saying the business driver at the moment tactically should pick which way to invest first. But there are core infrastructure things that are needed to support, right? I mean, if you don’t have the framework, don’t have the skill repository, don’t have the definition of proficiency for skills,
Sandra Loughlin (15:04.625)
Yes.
Satish Kumar (15:12.334)
speaking either of them is going to be challenged. So irrespective of which one you pick, still you have to invest on some foundational level, right? And sometimes if you’re thinking tactically, it will become challenging to justify the ROI, right? So how do you counter that?
Sandra Loughlin (15:32.721)
So this is where the conversation, I think, around the skills-based organization is limited. In general, in my experience, the people having the conversation about skills are in the people organization. So they’re in the HR organization. There are absolute ROI opportunities for applying skills that are, you know,
Sandra Loughlin (15:59.223)
ROI and value creation for typical HR metrics. Like you can hire better people faster, cheaper, right? You can theoretically have higher ROI for learning. But the real ROI for an organization, the real kind of reason to do all this work and spend all this money and go through all the headaches is not about any single one of those HR metrics. It’s about business agility.
So if you think about human capital as the engine of any business, it’s the way that the company will realize their business strategy. If your human capital is not optimized, you don’t have the right skills in the right organization, in the right volume, at the right time and location, then you can’t achieve your business objectives. really thinking about, in my point of view,
The ROI of a skills-based organization is not something that is frankly very easy to quantify. It relates to how quickly and effectively you can realign the organization to the business strategy on an ongoing basis.
Satish Kumar (17:16.596)
So based on what you’re saying, you try to get a quick win for the tactical need that you have, and then you progressively expand the implementation in other areas.
Sandra Loughlin (17:31.847)
Yes, and you won’t realize the full ROI for a while, like until you have gone through and applied it to all these different use cases with high quality data at scale. And that just, that takes time.
Satish Kumar (17:47.918)
Absolutely. Good. So let’s change gear a bit and talk a little bit about the talent development and how SBO can really benefit in the training and learning of employee. One estimate say that company has spent $180 billion in 2023 in all the skilling programs with minimal ROI. So how do people typically learn to acquire new skills in an enterprise? What is broken with the traditional talent development process at organizations?
Sandra Loughlin (18:30.225)
There are several things that are broken with the traditional way. And there’s, I mean, I completely believe that statistic. Like it rings true for me. There are a few things broken. So the first one is the fact that learning isn’t done to people. Like they have to be motivated. They have to want to do it. So.
Right now there’s a lot of the ROI failure of traditional learning programs is because people just aren’t doing it. You spend all this money to build courses, people just don’t take it up and so you’ve just kind of wasted all of that money. That’s one problem. A second problem is that even if people are motivated to learn, they don’t necessarily know what they need to learn because they don’t know what their skills gaps are relative to their role.
or they don’t know the skills gaps that they have relative to the role that they want next, which could, which may or may not be like the natural next progression in their career. So you have those problems. And then beyond that, know, ROI for learning requires that there is some sort of delta in what people knew and could do before the learning program.
Sandra Loughlin (19:51.399)
and knew and could do after the learning program. And right now, without high quality validation mechanisms, it’s really difficult to assess that ROI in a really meaningful, business valuable, tangible way. I guess the last thing that I would say is broken, it just kind of goes back to what I said at the very beginning. Most learning doesn’t happen in a formal context.
It happens with natural feedback as people are trying things, seeing what works, what doesn’t work, observing other people, doing research on their own. There are many, many, many ways that people learn on the job and so much of that lives outside the traditional talent development or training context.
Satish Kumar (20:44.866)
That is very interesting point you said. So how organizations can capture that learning and truly pull that the data in to find out how proficient that workforce is because only the traditional channel is capturing that proficiency data today.
Sandra Loughlin (21:09.849)
Yes, and this goes back to the whole task thing, right? In our world at EPAM, the way that we assess and validate skills and also our learning programs is by giving people tasks that are authentic to the work that they do. So for example, if I’m trying to assess an instructional designer, either because I want to hire that person or because I want to assess them for the next role or assess them even in their current role,
At EPAM, what we do is we give them instructional design work to do, and we see how well they do it. Historically, that was pretty expensive to do because it requires humans to look at that and validate it and give feedback. But one of the most incredibly valuable and interesting uses of AI is to provide a lot of support
Sandra Loughlin (22:08.001)
in that validation so you can get the same high quality proficiency indicators with using less, not none, but less human time. And so this is where I get really excited about some of these organizations that are bringing to the market authentic skills validation tooling by just putting people in realistic contexts and asking them to do work.
Satish Kumar (22:37.952)
I’m glad you said that, Because what we are really talking about is a hands-on task, right? It’s not just watching some video or attending some lecture session, but truly giving them an opportunity to play with what a real world activity would look like and then assess in the process.
Satish Kumar (23:01.642)
whether they learned it or not. And with skills changing so fast, so rapidly in the current world, it is becoming more and more challenging to really impart that knowledge to traditional medium and not knowing whether they actually learned it or not. Because remember, the trainers are also very limited in that case. So ability to be able to validate those skills through whatever medium they’ve learned, would be the key for organizations to really harness the power of that workforce.
Sandra Loughlin (23:39.847)
Yes, and what’s super cool about these skills validation tools is that they are easily turned into learning tools. It’s the same tool, right? You’re giving someone a problem, they’re working through it. There’s an AI coach saying, hey, did you think about this? Oh, that wasn’t so great, try that again. And one tool is helping people learn and…it’s providing intelligence to the organization on what a person is able to do today.
Satish Kumar (24:12.404)
So for all these employers, how can they connect employee learning to their work performance? mean, one thing we just said right now that, hey, we create tasks that are relevant to their job, right? Are there any other ideas that you have for employers to be able to link their learning to real job performance.
Sandra Loughlin (24:42.949)
Yes. So there’s a few different things. So number one is like, there’s a lot of data in systems of work on what people are doing. So right now in most organizations, systems of record, like all your HR and L &D and HRIS systems and ATS systems, the data don’t connect with the systems where people actually get work done. So one way is to bring those data together.
And you have to define skills correctly. there’s already data that can be harnessed. But beyond that, you need to pull in additional data sources, especially for things like softer human skills. So being empathetic and being really good at, let’s say, client management is very important for a bunch of roles. There’s no really clean objective. way to see that in someone’s work product. only is, it’s best validated by other people saying like, know, Sandra’s great at client communication or she’s not very good, right? There’s a lot of the data around soft skills is actually perceptual. And so another thing that I, you know, we do at EPAM and I think will be done more broadly is not just authentic tasks, not just data connection between systems of work and systems of record, but new sources of data where we’re asking people to give an ongoing feedback in a variety of contexts over time on people’s skills. None of these individual data sources are perfect. Like this is the nature of data, right? To get really strong signal from noise, you need a lot of data points, you need to
Sandra Loughlin (26:33.063)
put all of those together. And so this is where I see a lot of organizations will ultimately need to go is bringing all of those data points together and distilling the best information they can on it or from it.
Satish Kumar (26:48.974)
So the 360 degree review that typically happens in organization and there as a part of that, if you can truly gather the feedback on those software skills which are not captured otherwise would be key to push the data and really infer their competency on those.
Sandra Loughlin (27:11.639)
Yes, but it’s not necessarily in the 360 feedback as we know it today, right? 360 feedback is not that many people. It’s like a generic holistic statement. And it’s not typically skills-based. And so the way that we do it is, let’s say, working on a project with a colleague. The system at EPAM will ask my colleague, hey, can you do me a favor? On this project you know, can you give feedback to Sandra on, you know, these three skills that she’s supposed to have, right? In addition to my colleagues, they will, like who can do it, who, you know, who are asked to do it, they don’t necessarily have to. The project manager on that project, like part of their job is giving me that feedback. And so it’s specific to the work that I’m doing and that they have seen. They’re also gonna ask clients, like how did Sandra do?
Sandra Loughlin (28:07.847)
Right, it is 360 from, but it’s much more concrete than how we typically do 360s today.
Satish Kumar (28:13.198)
but project-based.
Satish Kumar (28:17.356)
Wow, that’s very interesting. So with every project that you’re engaged with, there is a of microfeedback gathering happening for your peer, with maybe your manager, or with maybe the client. And that really could be feeding into your competency data. That’s amazing. I’m sure a lot of companies can learn from this for sure. Absolutely. Now.
Sandra Loughlin (28:28.273)
Yes.
Sandra Loughlin (28:39.653)
Yep, exactly.
Satish Kumar (28:48.31)
Without AI, we can’t complete this job, right? So the AI has the potential to automate almost anything, right? Anything what role does AI play in skill-based learning and hiring? How does, or rather how important it is for workforce readiness and the agility in the world of AI to bring skill and really track the progression of fiscal year within the organization.
Sandra Loughlin (29:20.295)
So AI and skills-based organizations go hand in hand, right? It is bidirectional. So you cannot do at scale high quality skills without AI. You need to use AI to help you get skills intelligence. So what skills do people have? Like lot of that is being inferred from systems of work and other places. You also need AI to help with task intelligence. What are the tasks for the role? you know, and because roles are changing all the time, AI is able to scrape labor market data and a bunch of other sources to figure out what is, you know, how is work changing? How are the tasks changing? And then beyond that, like skills validation is one of the cornerstones of successful skills based organizations. And as we just discussed, if you don’t have AI, it’s extremely expensive to do at scale. And so
AI is just critical to getting all that stuff done. At the same time, AI is creating the need for organizations to be skills-based. when AI comes, AI is going to be working, AI agents and humans are going to be doing work. And it’s going to require humans to develop new skills. It’s gonna change some of the jobs that we actually have.
And so AI is a disruptor that creates the need for a skills-based organization and it is a critical mechanism to become skills-based.
Satish Kumar (30:58.766)
Absolutely, you said it right. So.
In the process, as new skills are getting discovered, new tasks are getting added, new kind of trainings are needed, do you believe there is system in place today that can keep up to date and keep updating their maybe competency framework data, skill data, their ontology, maybe creating a new cohort of skills together? Are there systems today? and maybe using some ATPAM to be able to keep everything fresh.
Sandra Loughlin (31:39.089)
So yes and no. So there are data feeds, right? Skills, intelligence, task intelligence, where again, they’re looking at labor market data, they’re looking at your competitors, looking at the very specific roles in your industry, they’re looking at, you know, patents and other things. So there’s tools that will say, here is what we’re seeing out in the world, right? There are also tools that can be scraping and looking at your internal data.
To see what skills you have in the organization. However, that’s not all the skills that are going to be required. Some of the most important skills in any organization is how work happens in that company. Your own processes, your own IP, your own way of doing things. Even though you have all of this external data, someone still needs to sit down and look at it to make sure that it matches the needs of your organization. So let’s just take software engineering as an example. EPAM is extremely sophisticated in software engineering. There can be a company that also has software engineers, but the skills and the tasks are going to be different. EPAM is going to need something different than this other organization.
So we might use the same data feeds, but the way that we use them and how much we change them, what should really be something that is done by humans, at least for now, in the organization. So there needs to be a governance infrastructure where the business and experts on the roles are curating all that external information on an ongoing basis to make sure that it fits and stays current for what the business requires.
Satish Kumar (33:40.568)
Got it, got it. As we were talking, something came to my mind when you made a remark earlier that sometimes people are not motivated to learn, right? And companies are investing so much money. They have access, they have granted access to so many learning portals, right? And employees are learning by playing video.
Maybe doing some simple practices, right? In the process, what can companies do to really ensure the ROI of their investment and get the employee pool at the productivity level that they expect post-training? Are there any practical guidance around it?
Sandra Loughlin (34:36.049)
So this to me is a true learning organization, right? It’s an organization made up of individuals who are constantly learning. They know what they need to learn, they’re motivated to do it, and they have the right stuff to learn from. To me, skills-based performance management is the key, right?
Sandra Loughlin (34:58.567)
The reason that employees aren’t necessarily learning all that they should be learning today is not because they are opposed to learning. If you look at, I mean, pretty much any survey, everyone’s like, like I think you had mentioned, right? People really like the idea of learning, but everybody is also super busy. And, you know, am I gonna spend 20 hours this week learning this cool new thing when I have all these like fires to put out in my email? In general, the answer is no.
And so, skills-based performance management creates the what’s in it for me. It creates the benefit for people to actually leverage all the resources, both formal and informal, learn. If they know that they can’t keep their job or they can’t go to that next level, that next step in their career that they want, unless they can show that they have those skills, psychological gap creates an incentive for people to learn. It’s super effective. And that’s one of the things that I discovered at EPAM that was so exciting is the use of skill data for performance management is what creates EPAM as a learning organization.
Satish Kumar (36:19.63)
So you did actually tie performance with the learning. And that’s critical part because either there is a or there is a threat. So in this case, no carrot will work. But beyond that, and maybe the motivated one will take that carrot and go towards that, right? How do you bring accountability in employee?
That they’re learning, that really perform at certain level post-learning. And I’ll give you an example. Traditionally, what I’ve seen that organizations pay for your tuition reimbursement if you get grade A, B, or B, B plus something, right? So things like that are in nature, some were available today outside. But within the organization, of course, you can tie it to your self-performance, your promotion, your project placement.
Right? Maybe deploying on certain project will be tied up to your performance on this learning. But they’re all carrots, right? How do you systematically make them accountable? I mean, the way I’m heading with this is just some validation that they will prove themselves that, I have indeed learned, right? And that should get them at least some credit.
Sandra Loughlin (37:42.027)
Yes, so I think of performance management as both a carrot and a stick. You are rewarded, right, with a new job or a new step in your career if you can show that you have these skills, like, you know, that you have evidence that there’s validation that you have the skill. But at the same time, it’s also a stick because if you don’t show it, you can’t stay in your job. Like, if you don’t have the skills to do your job, you shouldn’t be in that job, right? Of course, organizations should provide support for you, give you opportunities to grow, give you great courses, and they should have a validated way of determining if you have developed that skill. But ultimately, I view skills-based performance management as both a carrot and a stick. And the most critical element to that is good data, validated skills data.
And so, you know, if you can start by giving people like a, again, a performance-based like task that’s to their work and they get feedback that they missed some stuff, people are naturally gonna want to like, generally to fix that. So they’re gonna be more likely to consume educational content or use informal means to learn what they’re missing.
And then at the end, if they have a mechanism for proving that they now have the skills because they are able to successfully do that task, it helps people be more motivated to learn because they see tangible evidence of that learning and they see tangible benefits from doing it.
Satish Kumar (39:29.272)
Great. So would you recommend post-learning through formal channel, right? If it is associated with a skill validation, that’s immediate validation in the eyes of the business owner as well that you indeed mastered that. Otherwise, of course, they can figure out a few weeks, months down the line that you did not learn, but that’s lost opportunity as well, right?
So from business perspective, makes sense to bring both together, learn in system one, but do validate system two, post that, to bring the confidence and the comfort in the mind of the business that yes, now I have a workforce that is ready to contribute.
Sandra Loughlin (40:15.515)
Yes, I think that is in opposition to a lot of what happens in L &D now, which is like the metrics for success is like who clicked through, who endured, who just kept pressing that button to have that video keep playing. Like none of that’s a learn, none of that is evidence of learning. It’s evidence that someone was sitting there while content was being directed to them, but there’s no indication that they got anything from it.
Sandra Loughlin (40:44.827)
The only way to determine if someone has learned something is to have them demonstrate that ideally in an authentic task.
Satish Kumar (40:54.986)
Absolutely. Absolutely. That is what at Glider we strive for in an organization to prove that, to give that validation, and let employees showcase that they’ve indeed learned, earned that, and then they’re ready for the next challenge. We are almost at the end of our session. I’m going to ask one question. What advice do you have? for the talent and learning leaders in the skill-based organization paradigm.
Sandra Loughlin (41:32.429)
It’s hard to pick just one or two. I’ll pick the ones that I think are most critical. So the first is to not just think about skills. Skills is only one half of the equation. The other one is tasks. So when you’re thinking about that, you have to have both sides of the coin. Second is to tie this skills thing, this skills-based organization initiative to a real business problem.
And again, that can be different for every organization. I like to tie it to AI because AI, like as I said before, they’re deeply connected and AI is like a huge thing that companies are struggling with. They won’t be successful without skills. So I like that one, but there are other ones too. And then the third thing is to don’t try to be perfect right off the bat.
Sandra Loughlin (42:27.699)
it will take time to build the infrastructure that you need to be skills-based. So people right now are relying on self-report and manager report. These are not great validation mechanisms, but they’re better than nothing. starting there, but don’t rely too much on those data because they’re not that high quality and look for different ways to validate skills, ideally using tools that leverage AI so that you can.
Sandra Loughlin (42:55.845)
get that validation consistently and at scale.
Satish Kumar (43:01.204)
Awesome. Sandra, thank you very much. This advice was very apt, and I can see how lot of other organizations can benefit from this in their SBO journey. I appreciate your time, Sandra, and I admire what you do, what you accomplished at EPAM. thank you. Thank you from the of my heart for spending time with me today.
Sandra Loughlin (43:24.955)
Thanks for having me. I hope that so many organizations are going to go on that journey because I think they will benefit so much from it. hopefully this podcast will help them a lot.
Satish Kumar (43:38.37)
Thank you.
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