How EY is building a skills-based organization
Discover how EY is scaling a skills-based culture for its 400,000+ employees—combining technology, continuous learning, and a culture of curiosity to keep pace with change.
In a world where work is evolving faster than ever, organizations face a growing challenge: do they have the right skills in the right places to deliver on their strategy? At EY, skills aren’t just a nice-to-have; they’re foundational to the firm’s people strategy and employee value proposition.
Scott Schmidt, Global Deputy Talent Leader at EY, shares insights on how the firm is approaching skills development at scale for its 400,000+ employees by fostering a culture of continuous learning and leveraging technology in new ways.
Why are skills a critical component of a comprehensive talent strategy?
Skills [are] probably the most important thing as we start to look at how the world is changing and what we’re hearing from our customers and clients. Our latest survey on mobility said that 52% of global employers are struggling to fill the skills and roles that they need. And at the same time, 1 in every 3 employees is worried about having the skills that they need for the future. So, there’s a clear need to bring these things together – and how do we continue to evaluate, hire, and develop these skills is going to be the critical question for talent organizations and companies on the whole in the future.
How are skills foundational to EY’s people promise?
The things that our employees tell us that they’re looking for are: How do they develop the skills for the future and how do they continue to stay relevant and improve? How do they have a culture of wellness and personal priorities? How do we have an inclusive culture? Those are the three things.
I think really looking at skills and giving them the tools and continuing to [help them] develop — that’s what our employees want, and it’s also what our customers are looking for. The projects and the work that we do today is vastly different than the work we did two years ago and probably even six months ago, and it will continue to change at pace, so our people and our firm need to continue to develop at that same pace.
What does it take for a company of EY’s scale to adopt a skills-based culture?
It’s not easy. For anyone on a skills journey, [you can’t] snap your fingers. But I’d take it in two parts. First, there’s the human and the cultural aspect of it. We work really hard to build a culture of curiosity, creativity, and innovation. So, I think the people part of that is really important. But then there’s also the tech enablement. Do we have the right tools, learning platforms, and processes, and are we evaluating skills and embedding them in everything we do? And only when the tech and the people aspects come together does it really start to work.
How does EY measure success when it comes to skills?
We measure it in a couple of ways. We looked at our learning outcomes. We’ve deployed to all of our 400,000 people a bespoke AI learning journey — around 150,000 of our employees have already taken [that course]. We offer a program called EY Badges, which is free to everyone and regardless of rank, geography, and location, and we’ve had employees complete 700,000 different badges. So, again [it goes back to] the culture of curiosity.
We’ve looked at learning statistics. We do a twice-yearly people pulse, so we take a sentiment analysis and we’re seeing trends go in the right direction or stay high that we’re delivering on what they’re looking for from the organization, and then we look at adoption of new tools. So, we measure a lot of things, and when you put them together, they tick a lot of boxes.
