Bridging the skills gap:
Nick Shaw on transforming skills-based management with Spotted Zebra
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The global skills shortage has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges facing organisations today. At the forefront of tackling this crisis is Spotted Zebra, a pioneering skills intelligence platform that helps enterprises become skills-based organisations.
We sat down with Nick Shaw, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Spotted Zebra, to discuss how the company is helping businesses align talent supply with demand. Drawing on his background in occupational psychology and passion for optimising human potential, Shaw shared insights into Spotted Zebra's unique approach and the future of skills-based hiring and development.
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Nick, you studied psychology and have spent your career understanding people in the workplace. What led you to co-found Spotted Zebra and how does the company address the skills gap challenge?
My journey to co-founding Spotted Zebra really goes back to my deep interest in what influences the way people behave and perform at work. Through my studies in psychology, I became particularly fascinated by the different environmental and contextual factors that affect behaviour. I realised that my main area of interest was understanding people in the workplace and how to create opportunities that optimise their performance.
Because we all know that when you're in a role where you're supported and able to give your best, that's when you'll be most productive and fulfilled. So how to provide an environment that enables individuals to reach their full potential was really at the heart of what I became focused on, first through my studies and then in my work as an occupational psychologist.
But what I observed is that organisations were struggling to keep pace with the demand for rapidly changing skills. And that's really at the core of the skills gap crisis we're facing today.
Can you walk us through how an organisation would start their journey with Spotted Zebra? What is the process of identifying skills gaps and creating a plan to address them?
It's a great question because for many organisations, just figuring out the starting point can feel overwhelming, even though they recognise the urgency of the skills challenge. So when we engage with a new client, we always begin by clearly defining their demand and supply equation.
On the demand side, we look at the company's strategy and growth plans to determine the roles and skills that will be most critical to their future success. That could be a shift from brick-and-mortar retail to e-commerce, or a move into a new product category requiring different technical capabilities.
Then on the supply side, we assess the skills that exist in the organisation today, at both an individual employee level and in aggregate. We also identify adjacencies, so skills that are related and could be upskilled or reskilled to meet demand.
Once you have that clear picture of demand and supply, you can create a very targeted workforce plan to close your most pressing gaps, whether through hiring, learning and development, or internal mobility. The key is to make it an ongoing process so you're continuously aligning skills to value.
How do you ensure that the insights generated by the Spotted Zebra platform are unbiased and that the platform is enhancing rather than replacing human judgement?
This is such an important consideration and something we are deeply mindful of as we build out our capabilities. We are very clear that our role is to provide organisations with data-driven insights about the skills that are most important for success in a particular role, and to help them understand the skills that exist within their workforce. But ultimately, the decisions about who to hire or reskill always lie with the HR professionals and managers who can consider the full context.
One of the key ways we maintain objectivity is by grounding everything in best practices from occupational psychology. Our job analysis methods, skills taxonomies, and assessment design are all scientifically validated. We're not relying on black-box algorithms, but rather surfacing the most predictive, job-relevant information.
We also have checks and balances built into our processes. For example, while our platform might identify certain skills that are emerging as important for a role based on market data, those recommendations are always reviewed by an expert before being finalised into a role profile. The technology is there to augment human expertise, not automate it.
At the end of the day, any decision that impacts someone's career is a high-stakes one. Our aim is to equip organisations with the most relevant, reliable data to inform those choices. But the ultimate accountability always sits with the people who know their business and talent needs best.
You mentioned the Spotted Zebra platform integrates with a company's existing HR tech stack, rather than trying to replace it. Why is this ecosystem approach important and how does it drive value for your clients?
We believe strongly in putting the client's needs at the centre and recognising that becoming a skills-based organisation is a journey. Most companies have made significant investments in their HR systems over many years, and we want to help them get more value out of those investments, not rip and replace them.
Our platform is designed to be modular and interoperable with the leading ATS, LMS, HCM and talent management technologies. We can ingest data from all those sources to create a holistic skills picture for the organisation and for every employee. And the insights and solutions we generate flow back into those systems to drive better decision-making across the talent lifecycle.
What this means for our clients is they can start with the skills use case that's most pressing for them right now, whether that's hiring for hard-to-fill roles, upskilling a critical segment of the workforce, or improving internal mobility. And then they can layer in additional skills-based processes over time, all within their existing workflows.
This approach dramatically accelerates time-to-value. Rather than spending months or years on a full-scale technology transformation, our clients can start realising the benefits of a skills-based approach in a matter of weeks, in a way that's sustainable for the long term.
Ultimately, solving the skills gap is going to take an ecosystem-wide effort. No single provider can address every facet of the challenge. So we need to champion openness, interoperability and data-sharing across the HR tech stack. That's how we'll drive meaningful outcomes for organisations and for every worker.
Looking ahead, how do you see Spotted Zebra continuing to evolve its solution as the skills landscape shifts? What's your long-term vision for the company?
The pace of change in the world of work is truly unprecedented and I believe the skills gap is only going to become more acute in the years ahead. The half-life of skills is shrinking rapidly, and the idea that you can acquire a static set of competencies that will sustain you for a 30 or 40-year career just doesn't hold true anymore.
So our product roadmap is really centred around helping organisations build a system of intelligence that allows them to continuously track the supply and demand for skills, both within their own workforce and in the external market. We're investing heavily in skills ontologies and inference capabilities that can identify not just what skills someone has, but their level of proficiency, how those skills map to different roles and career paths, and where the biggest gaps and opportunities lie.
At the same time, we're also focused on embedding those insights into the flow of work and the moments that matter most for managers and employees. So how do we surface the right learning content or gig opportunity for an individual based on their skills profile? How do we help managers have more meaningful career conversations and development plans? How do we make skills the common language of talent mobility and workforce planning? Those are some of the key questions we're working to address.
Ultimately, our vision is to enable a world where every person is doing work that is meaningful to them and creates value for their organisation and society at large. When we can facilitate that alignment of passion, capability and need at scale, that's incredibly powerful. It has the potential to not just close the skills gap, but to fundamentally redefine the employee-employer relationship for the better.
So while the path ahead is complex, I'm deeply energised by the opportunity ahead of us. We're committed to helping our clients navigate this skills revolution and excited to help shape a future where everyone can reach their full potential at work.
