Talent Engineering – From Subjective to Objective
Andrew Tozer, BP
I’m going to hit the space bar and hope, I think, is the way we’re going to go. So, hi, I’m Andrew. In a self-help kind of way, I’m going to admit that I am an engineer. And that’s a nerve racking thing in a room full of HR professionals, because, quite honestly, I know very little about HR, but I’m going to try and persuade you about engineering. And the part of engineering that I’m going to try and persuade you about is the way in which we think and use data to make decisions. So this particular piece is about understanding what your people can actually do, really ensuring that you’re absolutely sure that you’re right about what they do, but ultimately, of course, testing yourself about why do we care?
Now, in our organization over the last couple of years, we’ve had a thought that, actually, if we were clearer on those things, we would generate this: A more compelling employee value proposition that would give us some more predictable talent pipeline, which is super challenging right now, and ultimately leads to a better business outcome. You know what you have and therefore you can deploy it more effectively. One of the things we’ve tried to do at BP is get really clear on data. So we think data gives you three things. We think it allows you to get better insights into the skills that you have. We hope that it leads to less bias in some of our talent management decision making. And ultimately, it gives you better quality decisions, underpinned by some really objective facts, rather than some of the subjective stuff we’ve seen before.
The point is that the data we use is skills. And in this room, I don’t really need to define it, but just to be clear, we think of skills as knowledge plus experience plus behaviors. What you know plus what you do plus how you do it. And if you get a good handle on that, we think the talent management process has become easier. We’ve got three tools we use. We use a skills taxonomy. We’ve literally written down all the skills that each of our folks at BP need to be successful in the role they’re in today and the role that they want to do next. That skills taxonomy is useless without learning and development to go with it.
So, I’m sure like many of you, we use a platform called Cornerstone, and that’s our learning management system that houses all of our training, our learning and development offers, and allows us to track and record who has done what. Not in pursuit of doing more training or going on a course, but in pursuit of up-skilling and being better at what they do today. Now, Cornerstone is good, but it’s not ideal in terms of a learner experience. And so, what we’ve done in the last couple of years is, we overlaid it with Degreed. And Degreed is a learning management system, but really specializing in experience.
So it does a lot of the tracking and recording, but it also allows us to present training as, really, a way to build skills rather than a way just to attend courses. And Degreed has been really successful for us, because it helps people see the link between what they’ve learned and what they can do. And that’s what this shows. The overall context for us at BP starts with that taxonomy, the list of what we want people to be able to do. We get specific about which employee has which skills. And then we ask the business to tell us what skills they need. That gives us some skill gaps that we then have to close and we have to figure out how to do that. Now, we’ve got some choices. Those are shown on the right-hand side. We can build, we can buy, we can borrow, we can partner.
We’re all very familiar with build, the idea of up-skilling people in your organization. But where skills are scarce, we buy. But there’s a payoff here for both the organization and, crucially, the individuals within it. So our team members, they feel the bottom part of this slide most particularly, and that’s the idea that suddenly their conversations are much more specific. The skills they have can be linked directly to the roles that they have, both in the role they’re doing today, but also the role they want next. And ultimately, our learning offers can be more tailored and more personal. You’re not just Googling for a course, you’re actually searching for a skill and the course comes with it. The bottom line for us is, we think it generates far better talent conversations. We’re bringing skills data to the forefront, and we’re trying to get that data to work for us, servicing people who we might not otherwise be able to identify in a company of over 80,000 people.
For individuals, though, it feels like those conversations are more powerful, more personal. The team leader really gets it. They understand what the team member is trying to achieve and it feels like it’s a bit more of a contract where genuine progression can happen, rather than somebody suggesting they go on this course because I did it once. Which has been a frequent cause of real, real concern in the past about how you bring your employees forward and, ultimately, how you hang on to them. Ultimately, if we’re trying to be really, really, I guess, strategic about it, we think it democratizes opportunity. It’s early days, for sure, but we’re seeing that the use of this data allows us to get rid of some existing biases, tap into people that we might not have otherwise recognized in the company. And ultimately, we ask our line managers, as we say in the bottom right, to really prioritize the development of their team.
And their progression as a line manager will be influenced to the extent they build capability. Their job is to build our future workforce. And it’s the same for individuals, and we really tried hard to make sure that this use of data tangibly changes the career path of our people. And we say for folks in our teams, your progression is influenced by the extent to which you build your capability. Prove to us you’re learning, developing, and we’ll prove to you we’re serious about it by putting you into a role that’s very specific. What this gives you is a tiny little insight into what we’re doing at the company at the moment. It’s still early days, but it’s showing some real benefits so far. Love to share more and happy to chat at the end. Thank you so much.
Watch the video of Andrew delivering his session over on Vimeo >>>> DisruptHR Aberdeen 2.0 – April 24 2025 on Vimeo
