Andrew is an experienced recruitment strategist and thought leader in the field of skills and employability. He has run his own world-beating niche technical search firm, and also worked in strategy roles in the world’s biggest recruitment enterprises. He is also a doctoral student, examining how professionals create their digital online avatar selves.
Now he is running his own Skills Acquisition Advisory, bringing the most sophisticated thinking available to address recruitment problems for his clients. He works with both SMEs and corporates, and develops novel methodologies for each engagement, as he believes that every skill problem is different.
Our values
Courage. Curiosity. Compassion.
Andrew Kable’s Skills Acquisition Advisory operates at the intersection of some powerful secular trends, which have the potential to overwhelm organisations that do not respond proactively.
The first is the rate at which skills are changing. Linkedin predicts that the 60% of the skills required for the average job will have changed by 2030. If you continue to use jobs as the unit of analysis in your organisation then the effective deskilling of your workforce could be happening right now without you knowing.
The second is the increasingly radical transparency of the workforce. Tools like LinkedIn have developed big data techniques and tools that give incredible real-time insights into the professional workforce. Organisations which are not leveraging these insights in their workforce planning activities may be trying to hire workers who don’t exist, overpaying for capability, or attracting uncompetitive talent.
The third is the increasing dominance of a handful of cloud and workforce productivity providers. These tools have both made it possible for small business to operate based on the same platforms as the biggest enterprises, and are also starting to create a certain level of organisational homogeneity, as their influence on work flows through to cultures. It has never been easier for talent to move between organisations and quickly ramp productivity. Could these big cloud firms ultimately start to disintermediate undifferentiated corporates?
The fourth trend is a lack of tolerance in society for inequity within organisations. This include unintentional or “disparate impact” practices, where organisational policies appear neutral, but actually negatively impact a protected group. Firms need to get ahead of this trend and ensure that they are not just takers of broader structural inequity.
A Skills Acquisition approach, which builds solutions from first principles (how can we meet this skills requirement rather than how do we fill this job) can get ahead of, and even leverage, these trends to gain competitive advantage