Megan Bickle is the Director of Culture, Employee Engagement and Employee Listening at Western Digital. In Megan’s experience, roles can be viewed as a collection of skills. Viewing roles this way allows organizations to be more responsive to the evolving needs of the business in terms of the skills needed for development and hiring. Megan believes that job architecture is essential to becoming a skills-based organization. Skills were a part of their overall integrated talent management strategy, infused throughout the organization. Capability models and job structures were built in tandem. In this conversation, Megan shares her experience building a skills-based organization as the Global Talent Management and Organizational Development Leader at GE Digital.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...

• Learning more about Megan Bickle [4:45]
• What a skills-based organization is [6:03]
• Why job architecture is important in skills-based organizations [9:04]
• How a capabilities-based architecture works in practice [18:06]
• Accounting for the evolution of the skills themselves [22:13]
• How learning/development dovetails into talent practices [24:34]
• Managing the ownership of the architecture [28:19]
• The lightning round [33:07]
• How the skills effort evolves over time/lessons learned [36:48]
• How people analytics were involved in the process [39:30]
• The strategy for assessing employee skills [42:37]
• Why Megan does the work she does [48:32]

Resources & People Mentioned

• BOOK - Good to Great by Jim Collins

Connect with Megan Bickle

• Connect on LinkedIn

Connect With Red Thread Research

• Website: Red Thread Research
• On LinkedIn
• On Facebook
• On Twitter

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