In HR strategy conversations, adopting a skills-based approach is a popular idea that many organizations are recommending, including LinkedIn and major consulting firms. It means that, rather than cataloging job titles and previous employers, companies engage in hiring, performance management and development based on a cataloging of the discrete skills of each employee and team and measuring against the skills needed for the future.
While a lot of the effort of cataloging skills has been administrative, technology companies like Workera are aiding this shift. The company lists Booz Allen Hamilton, Siemens Energy, BCG and Eli Lilly among its clients, along with the U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps.
The primary purpose of the platform is skills verification, including widely used AI readiness assessments and training, developed by founder and CEO Kian Katanforoosh, who was mentored as a graduate student at Stanford University by Andrew Ng, the famed tech entrepreneur and professor who co-founded Coursera.
“We're going into an environment that will see the largest number of career transitions that we've ever seen in humanity, in the next five years,” Katanforoosh told Newsweek. “Today, career transition is very manual in most companies…and frankly, it's a lot of shots in the dark.”
Katanforoosh is now also a lecturer at Stanford, where he helped Ng launch a deep learning program. Ng’s investment firm is a backer of Workera, along with New Enterprise Associates, Owl Ventures, Sozo Ventures and individual investors Richard Socher, Pieter Abbeel, Lake Dai and Mehran Sahami. The company raised over $44 million after a Series B round in 2023 led by Jump Capital and earlier this year announced 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
"By integrating Workera into [Accenture's learning platform], we're equipping enterprises with the tools to personalize learning journeys and optimize workforce capabilities using skills intelligence data," Kishore Durg, global lead of Accenture LearnVantage, said in a statement. Accenture announced a strategic partnership with Workera in January.
The goal of Workera’s platform is to assess employees’ skills and create customized learning plans for each individual employee. It has developed an ontology for over 7,000 skills that it can verify across any job type, with an emphasis on AI readiness. The company launched an AI mentor, Sage, in 2024, aimed at supporting employees in their development plans.
Katanforoosh also envisions opening opportunity within organizations for people who stand out among their peers for having future-ready skills.
“At scale, the majority of employees feel like they don't have a chance to showcase their skills, don't have a chance to show what they're capable of, and be selectable for those new careers, those new programs, those new educative learning activities,” Katanforoosh said. Technology can help “create a meritocratic backbone that is skill centric and is going to put the right person in front of the right learning in front of the right project with the right team.”
Ultimately, Katanforoosh said he sees the platform as an accelerator of learning, enabling organizational transformation, employee progress and career transitions, allowing the company to be agile in fast-changing times.
“I like the term learning velocity because I believe that the companies that are going to win in the next era are those that will have the highest learning velocity,” he said.
Katanforoosh went on to describe the challenges of the current environment as companies try to adapt their workforces for the future.
“The traditional way of doing that is the company says, ‘We need these skills for the future, and we selected a course,’ and everybody takes that course, and we know from history that it doesn't work,” he explained. “Very few people engage…we can't go back to the traditional approaches, especially with today's technology that can allow us to personalize so much.”
The company’s AI assessments and training are based on a competency model of 30 essential skills, Katanforoosh said. “It explains AI terminology, AI at work, AI in daily life, and it explains what good looks like.”
He recommends that companies looking to adopt a skills-based approach conduct two assessments, one that is standardized so they can understand how they stack up against the rest of the working world, and another that is internal and more role-specific to create internal benchmarks. The platform also covers the so-called “soft skills” or power skills as some people call them.
“Some people call them character skills, or behavioral skills, including teamwork, problem solving, creative thinking, durable learning, leadership, management,” he shared. “The interface needed to measure those skills is different than measuring math or measuring coding… those assessments use voice heavily… sometimes you're shown a picture, a graphic, a process, and you need to answer questions about it, or interact with a role play.”
Workera's use cases present an interesting approach to emerging technology. Instead of finding a process or workflow to automate or replace with tech, companies using Workera are deploying AI for aspirational strategies that would have been much tougher without data models and generative AI.
"The first step in workforce transformation is grasping what skills you have," Mike McMahon, co-founder and managing partner of Jump Capital, said. "Unlike most inference-based solutions derived from degrees or work experiences, Workera provides a high-fidelity signal and a powerful engine to target and accelerate learning and steer talent acquisition. We believe Workera will be the breakout winner in this emerging space."
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