The gap between saying skills-first and being skills-first

Written By Catherine Andersen

Skills-based talent management isn’t just a trend. Skills architecture is being baked into system plans as we speak. The question is whether there is a gap between what’s being said, and what’s really happening.

Every workforce plan eventually comes down to one question: build the capability you need internally, move it from somewhere else in the organisation, or buy it in the market. Most organisations answer that question on instinct, because they don't have up to date data on what skills they already have.

Government workforce planners are well down the road of running people, capability frameworks and talent pipelines from a central source, on both sides of the Tasman. Australia's Digital Government Strategy names the shift explicitly - from role-based forecasting to a skills-first approach so that they can forecast based on skills (and gaps) with a level of accuracy. New Zealand's Public Service Commission reset plan, released in July, directs agencies to build shared capability frameworks and manage a cross-agency talent pipeline. Neither is a recruitment initiative. Both are about visibility: knowing what capability sits where, so you can decide whether to develop it, redeploy it, or go and hire it.

Private sector employers are currently lagging behind the public sector on the visibility problem specifically. A quarter of Australian employers now rank demonstrated skills above career history when they go to hire - so the appetite for skills-based decisions is there. But only 55% of organisations map skills to jobs at all, and just 38% run a single enterprise-wide skills library. Without that mapping, grow, redeploy, or buy isn't really a decision. It's a guess.

The cost of guessing is rising. AI-exposed roles are seeing their required skills change roughly twice as fast as less-exposed roles. An organisation that can't see its own capability is making grow, redeploy, or buy calls on data that's already stale.

Where to start, without a year of workshops

You don't need an enterprise-wide taxonomy programme before the benefits of a skills based approach can take shape. Work through it step by step. Start by identifying one function where you're genuinely unsure the resourcing is robust enough, and get real visibility into it in a week or two. SFIA v9 gives you the role-profile scaffolding to start you off on the process; and is behind a lot of the role descriptions in the practitioner profiles maintained at www.talentjam.io.

  • Inventory the work, not the org chart. Sit with your two strongest performers in the function and list what the work requires now, not what was scoped two years ago.

  • Map that against what you already have. Express requirements as skills at a level, using SFIA levels where you can, and check them against your current team's capability and against who else in the organisation might already hold that skill.

  • Let the gap decide the lever. Only once the gap is defined does hiring, development, or redeployment become the right answer for it.

  • Keep the profile live. A gap you mapped once and never revisited is back to guesswork within a year. Revisit the profile each time the role or the market shifts, and it stays a decision tool instead of a one-off exercise.

One question

If you had to justify your next grow, redeploy, or buy call with data instead of instinct, could you?

Sources

  • Michael Page, Talent Trends 2026 (Australia); as reported by ChannelLife Australia, 14 May 2026: channellife.com.au

  • Mercer, Skills Snapshot Survey 2025/2026 (2023 comparison figures from the same survey series: mercer.com

  • PwC, 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer — New Zealand analysis, released June 2026: pwc.com (PDF)

  • PwC Australia, 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer media release, June 2025 (degree-requirement trend, 2019–2024): pwc.com.au

  • Public Service Commission Te Kawa Mataaho, Delivering Digital Government — Reset Plan, released 2 July 2026: publicservice.govt.nz (plan PDF linked from the release)

  • Australian Government, Data and Digital Government Strategy: workforce plan, in-demand skills (includes the 2024 DTA Digital Workforce Data Pilot findings): dataanddigital.gov.au

  • Digital Transformation Agency, APS Career Pathfinder tool (SFIA 9 upgrade in progress): apsprofessions.gov.au

  • SFIA Foundation, SFIA skills profiles for around 200 APS Career Pathfinder roles: sfia-online.org

  • Government Chief Digital Officer, digital workforce guidance, published July 2025: dns.govt.nz

  • TalentJam skills intelligence: talentjam.io

Catherine Andersen
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