Case Study: How J&J Uses Transparency and Career Mapping to Upskill Employees

Many organizations take a basic approach to skills-based talent management. Canva, for example, uses a strikingly simple skills framework, which focuses on 12 core skills that “you need in order to be successful."

However, there are also benefits to getting much more granular with skills data, especially for large enterprises with tens of thousands of employees spread across different business units and countries. We’ve spoken with large companies that are interested in adopting this more granular skills-based talent model but don’t know where to start. 

Johnson & Johnson is already on that path. So far, the skills data have mostly been used to improve employee learning and development, but the company is currently incorporating them into hiring and workforce planning. Here’s what you need to know:
 

What Johnson & Johnson is doing:

Johnson & Johnson recognizes roughly 5,000 skills across its organization, with new skills added every quarter. Those skills form the backbone of the J&J Learn, the company’s internal learning and development platform, which recommends development opportunities, like courses and mentors, to workers based on their career aspirations and the skills they want to develop. (Johnson & Johnson refers to its approach as "skills-inclusive" instead of "skills-based" because skills are just one aspect it considers alongside elements like an employee's experiences, aspirations, and personal traits.)

“We've really increased the transparency across the organization,” says Christina Norris-Watts, head of assessment and people practices at Johnson & Johnson, “so you can look at any other job at J&J, look at the skills needed for that job, and map your path from where you are now to that job based on the skills.” Presumably, this type of feature helps the company retain employees, as it gives them a chance to explore career opportunities within Johnson & Johnson. 

Once an employee selects a skill they want to develop, the platform recommends relevant courses. Employees can also search for possible mentors within Johnson & Johnson who already have that skill, and they can search for gigs—temporary projects—to apply for that will help them develop it on the job. 
 

How they did it:

Building this system required work upfront. The company hired an outside vendor to help update its job architecture, grouping similar jobs into categories, like “marketing” and “data science,” within its human resources information system. Johnson & Johnson then added other dimensions beneath each grouping. For example, a person’s job in “marketing” could be further broken down into the type of marketing, like “pharmaceutical marketing,” the person’s level at the company, and the track they’re on, such as whether they’re on a technical or people management track. 

Once it had this new job architecture, Johnson & Johnson worked with another vendor to assign skills to roles. Norris-Watts tells us that every job within Johnson & Johnson has between 20 and 30 skills attached to it. When an employee starts out on J&J Learn, they can rate their proficiency level on those skills and discard skills that have been assigned to their job but aren’t actually relevant. They can also add skills they have that aren’t currently assigned to their role, which can help unlock opportunities for them to move around internally. 
 

Where Johnson & Johnson is going:

Johnson & Johnson started by focusing on learning and development. But now that it has that skills data, it can bring it into other talent areas. For example, Norris-Watts tells us that the company is looking to incorporate skills insights into its hiring process. This includes giving hiring managers guidance on the most critical skills to focus on. “When you're hiring someone, you don't have time to assess certain skills, so you've got to prioritize which skills you're going to be measuring,” she says. Johnson & Johnson is updating interview questions to better assess those critical skills.

The company is also starting to bring this data into the workforce planning process. The goal is to understand the gap between the skills of the employee base and the needs of the company. This work is ongoing: “We have a lot of data on skills that we share with our HR business partners, but it's not data that we feel confident enough for them to make any employment decisions based on,” says Norris-Watts. “It's just more of a starting point.” Her team is working with those HR business partners to understand how they can improve their skills data to help them make better workforce-planning decisions. 
 

Written by Jacob Clemente.

© 2024. This article is reprinted with permission by Charter Works Inc. All rights reserved.