Building skills foundations at a global healthcare organisation

A leading US-based healthcare and insurance provider, with an employee base of 77,000 and an additional 35,000–40,000 contingent workers, was grappling with significant workforce challenges. 

Skill Collective was engaged by the organisation’s newly appointed Chief Learning Officer (CLO) to deliver a three-phased programme focused on: 

• Providing strategic advisory services to fix career pathing 

• Creating clear skill-to-role mapping across 6,000 roles 

• Building the foundations for a scalable, skills-powered technology ecosystem 

The organisation was undergoing rapid transformation. Following the pandemic, business growth had surged – but the underlying operational structures, from customer service to technology, had failed to keep pace. Employees were eager for career development, yet pathways were unclear. Although the organisation had deployed platforms like Phenom to enable internal mobility, it lacked the foundational data and clarity to make career development meaningful and actionable. 

At the same time, major HR transformation was underway. A new Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) was restructuring the HR function, removing layers of leadership, and introducing newly defined roles across Talent Acquisition (focused on high-volume hiring), Talent Readiness (Talent Management), and Learning – now led by a CLO driven to create a skills-powered learning culture across the organisation. 

Skill Collective was engaged to: 

• Assess current workforce and technology capabilities 

• Guide the organisation on designing a career pathing approach that empowered employees to own their career journeys 

• Help align HR’s skills strategy to real business outcomes 

• Ensure the HR technology ecosystem (Phenom for Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Skills Management) could effectively support this transformation 

The organisation’s aspiration was simple yet powerful:
An employee should be able to log into the platform, identify their current role (e.g. Project Manager), and clearly see their next two to three career moves (Senior Project Manager and beyond) – supported by the necessary learning and skill-building opportunities. However, skills projects had previously been launched, paused, and restarted multiple times without success. A fresh, structured approach was urgently needed. 

The programme was delivered in three interconnected projects: 

Project 1: strategic advisory and capability review 

• Hands-on, pragmatic advice on what the organisation could realistically achieve 

• Career pathing mapped across the workforce 

Project 2: skills-to-role mapping 

• A deep analysis of over 6,000 roles 

• Mapped, validated, and corrected skills data feeding into Phenom, Degreed, and Workday 

• Cleaned, structured datasets to ensure the entire HR technology ecosystem could function effectively and consistently 

Project 3: technology ecosystem impact assessment 

The organisation was planning to implement Workday Skills Cloud but had little understanding of the potential downstream impacts. Skill Collective was brought in to: 

• Conduct a comprehensive capability review across the Workday Skills Cloud ecosystem, looking at the benefits and impacts of implementation  
• Deliver an impact assessment of the Workday Skills Cloud launch, identifying risks such as automatic, inaccurate skills attribution and the potential for widespread data integrity issues if not carefully managed 

Skill Collective has successfully delivered the initial three projects, laying down the essential Architecture, Technology, and Governance foundations needed to move the organisation towards becoming truly skills-powered. 

Crucially, the work has focused on creating greater alignment between HR and the business – ensuring that future skills strategies are built on a solid operational and data-driven base. 

The next phase (Project 4) will focus on building a skills-powered strategy for their Customer Service function. This phase will involve: 

• Conducting a skills audit of the Customer Service team to determine current capabilities and future needs 

• Strengthening the Talent Readiness function to ensure skills development is embedded within broader talent management strategies 

• Linking their skills strategy directly to business outcomes, such as: 

• Increasing customer satisfaction by 1% per call 

• Reducing customer service call handling times by 10% 

• Enhancing customer experience ratings by 5% 

This project was never about launching another technology feature.
It was about fixing the foundations – creating a sustainable ecosystem where employees could truly navigate and own their career growth, HR could regain trust and relevance with the business, and the organisation could finally connect skills to outcomes that matter. 

Transformation isn’t about ticking a box.
It’s about doing the real work first – and doing it right.