11/20/22, 8:27 PM T-shaped skills profiles and the human factor | McKinsey & Company

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Operations

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Ops 4.0—The Human

Factor: A class size of 1
Can your organization offer every employee a unique learning
experience?

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By
Markus Hammer
Passionate about the “human factor”: helping
people develop broad skills and deep functional
expertise. Experienced operations practitioner,
faculty member, and author.

By
Maya Harris

By
Kiran Ramnane

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By
Erin Blackwell

OPS 4.0 | CAPABILITY BUILDING | DIGITAL

July 19, 2021 ‑ Over the past four years, this

blog has looked at the human side of the
technology-driven transformation that is
reshaping business operations. We’ve made
the case for large scale, systematic
capability-building efforts, arguing that
companies won’t capture the benefits of
new digital technologies if they don’t equip
their people with the skills to use them
effectively.

That idea is gaining momentum. In a

McKinsey survey conducted in August 2020
of 1,240 business leaders around the world,
nearly 80 percent of respondents
characterized capability building as
extremely or very important to the long-term
growth of their companies, up from 59
percent before the COVID-19 pandemic. A
few months later, 69 percent of respondents
in another survey told us they were doing
more capability today than before the crisis.

While recognizing the need for upskilling is

one thing, designing and delivering an
effective program is another. Not only must
companies deliver training at an

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unprecedented scale, they must also ensure

that each individual in the organization gains
the right combination of skills. With dozens
of roles and thousands of candidates, each
with different needs, aptitudes, interests,
and learning styles, Ops 4.0 capability
building is a formidable task.

Successful companies are meeting this

challenge by taking a “customer-back”
perspective. Based on a clear understanding
of the skills, behaviors, and mindsets the
organization requires, these companies
identify capability gaps and improvement
opportunities across their workforce. Then,
instead of offering “one size fits all” training,
they design their capability programs based
on detailed analysis of the needs of
individual learners—while instilling a culture
that fosters learning throughout the
organization. That involves the application of
a few powerful principles.

The T-shaped skills profile

For any given role, some skill requirements

are universal. Every team member may need
to be comfortable working with data, or
solving problems in a structured way, for
example. Beyond those basics, however,

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they will also want to develop a deeper

understanding of topics that allow them to
make a real difference in their job. That
could be the application of machine learning
to optimize a specific industrial process, or
how to design in sustainability into products
and services. The result is a T-shaped skills
profile, with a broad set of generally
applicable skills, supplemented by a spike of
specific expertise (exhibit). An effective
capability program must be able to deliver
both sets of skills, and the business needs to
keep track of where those spikes of
specialist knowledge are within its
workforce.

Exhibit

Learning on demand

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People learn faster and remember more

when the content seems relevant and
directly applicable to their jobs. When the
pandemic forced millions of staff to work
from home last year, most quickly became
adept at the use of remote collaboration
tools. Successful capability-building
programs allow staff to access training when
they need it, for example through frequent
scheduled courses, apps, or video-on-
demand services.

Multiple delivery formats

With so much ground to cover, companies

can’t rely on traditional classroom-based
learning as their sole way of imparting new
skills. Leading organizations are employing
a mix of learning approaches. They offer
self-service formats such as podcasts,
videos (some mimicking popular viral-video
formats), and e-learning modules; run
instructor-led virtual sessions via webcast or
video-conferencing platforms; and provide
multiday intensive courses that involve both
intensive learning and valuable network-
building opportunities.

There’s a lot to do, but companies don’t

need to do it all themselves. The strongest

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capability-building programs draw upon a

range of resources, including brick-and-
mortar academic institutions, specialist
online universities, and commercial training
providers. Supplemented by bespoke in-
house content, these options can give an
organization the building blocks it needs to
create a unique classroom for every
employee.

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