Workforce development has grown beyond offering a big course catalog or hiring based on job titles. To keep up, today’s top companies are shifting to a skills-based learning strategy that uses AI to drive business impact.
Let’s break down why this approach matters, what AI-powered skills-based learning looks like in practice, and how you can build a strategy that helps your people grow and your organization thrive.
Why skills-based learning, and why now?
The evidence is clear: skills-based organizations see stronger results.
According to Deloitte, organizations that prioritize skills are:
- 57% more likely to anticipate and respond to change effectively
- 63% more likely to achieve business results
- 79% more likely to have a positive workforce experience
Business needs change quickly, and hiring can’t always keep up. That’s why more companies are looking inward. They’re identifying the skills their teams already have, filling gaps with personalized learning, and creating new paths for internal mobility.
And with smart, AI-powered tools, making this shift is easier and more effective than ever.
What is AI-powered, skills-based learning?
Skills-based learning means organizing your learning and development (L&D) strategy around the skills your workforce needs, not just roles or departments. That includes defining key skills, mapping them to roles, and aligning your training content accordingly.
AI takes this to the next level. An AI-powered, skills-based learning ecosystem can:
- Find and organize skills across your organization, using data from resumes, assessments, or behavior
- Recommend personalized learning paths for individuals, based on their goals and skill gaps
- Help managers see where to coach, and where to promote
- Deliver data-driven insights that make workforce planning smarter and more agile
That’s where OpenSesame’s Oro comes in. Think of Oro as a co-pilot for your skills strategy. It helps you pinpoint critical skill gaps, recommend learning paths tailored to your roles and goals, and surface the insights that prove what’s working, so you can build real capability, not just course completions.
How to build your skills-based strategy
1. Start with business alignment
Don’t start with training content. Start with your company’s priorities.
Whether it’s digital transformation, AI adoption, or leadership readiness, your learning strategy should be a direct response to your most urgent business needs. That means talking to leaders across your organization to identify where you need capability now and where you’ll need it next.
2. Define and organize the skills that matter
You don’t need a massive list of hundreds of skills. What you need is a focused set of 20 to 50 high-impact skills that align with your business goals.
Some companies lean on pre-built frameworks, like SFIA or ESCO. Others create their own. Either way, a great skills taxonomy should make it easy to connect job roles, training paths, and growth opportunities.
Oro makes this step smarter and simpler. It combines a 60-second color assessment that reveals your learning style, your job architecture, and OpenSesame’s skills taxonomy to identify and organize the skills that matter most—no spreadsheets needed.
You get a real-time view of workforce capabilities and skill gaps. As roles evolve, Oro helps keep your skills framework up to date by updating its taxonomy quarterly to reflect market trends and emerging demands.
3. Audit and align your content
Now that you know which skills matter most, it’s time to assess your content. What do you already have? What’s missing? What needs a refresh?
A skills-based strategy focuses on building the right capabilities, at the right time, for the right people. That’s where OpenSesame can help. Our curation experts can match high-quality training to your skills map so you can deliver targeted learning without spending hours searching through a catalog.
Oro also recommends training automatically based on the skills identified during each learner’s onboarding. These recommendations are tailored to what they need to know, without giving them extra materials that get in the way of focus. This helps learners stay focused and makes your skill-based strategy more efficient for both the business and the learner.
4. Put the right systems in place
To make a skills-based strategy work, you need systems that support it. That means choosing tools that let you tag, track, and measure skills across your organization.
Look for platforms that capture skill data where it happens. That could include formal training, self-assessments, or peer recognition. The best tools also allow learners to rate their own skills and give managers visibility into progress over time.
Oro makes this seamless. It gives L&D leaders a dynamic view of skill development across the organization and helps learners see how their progress connects to real career growth opportunities.
5. Make skills everyone’s business
A strong skills strategy isn’t just for HR or L&D. It works best when everyone is involved. From the C-suite to individual contributors, people should be able to see, talk about, and act on skills.
Start by enabling better conversations. Give managers simple tools to support skill growth and career development during check-ins and reviews. Help employees understand where they’re strong, where they can grow, and how to take the next step.
Skills should be part of everyday work. That includes performance reviews, career planning, leadership development, and even daily projects.
When you build skills into the flow of work, people take more ownership of their growth. You also reduce the time and cost of hiring by tapping into the talent you already have.
6. Measure, adapt, and optimize
Tracking completions is a nice start, but what really matters is capability. Look at which skills are growing, where the gaps are, and how learning is moving the business forward.
With Oro, you get dashboards that show exactly what’s happening, in real time. You’ll know which areas to prioritize and where to scale back based on your internal data. It’s not just a report. It’s a strategy roadmap.
Ready to build your own skills-based ecosystem?
We’ve created a step-by-step guide to help you go from course catalogs to a skills-based strategy that grows with your workforce.
And if you’re ready to see how Oro can help you activate that strategy, let’s talk.