Susan LaMonica is CHRO at Citizens, a Rhode Island-based financial firm, where she and her team trained more than 5,800 employees on in-demand skills, integrated AI into workforce development and earned top wellbeing accolades in 2024.
She’s accomplished what many HR leaders have on their to-do list, including one of the most talked about organizational topics: reimagining the workforce with a skills focus.
Ramping up a skills-based workforce
Citizens has been migrating to a skills-based workforce for several years, ramping up over the most recent 12 months. LaMonica says this momentum is largely driven by the pace of change. She notes that roles are “coming and going” as they are influenced by the skills that are needed to get work done.
This process started with educating people about what the HR team means by “skills,” leveraging a taxonomy the HR team built around a common language. LaMonica emphasizes the need for a shared language in communication. While the taxonomy is expected to grow, for the moment, the project has started around the roles of today.
LaMonica outlines three levels of context: First, managers and colleagues are focused on the acquisition of skills. Next, all employees embrace a growth mindset, with leaders hiring and developing people who know how to learn. Lastly, everyone is held responsible for learning—on an individual basis as well as managers who drive the performance of others.
According to LaMonica, leaders have to be held accountable for furthering the skills-based culture. Researchers from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School studied 11,300 roles at large companies where degree requirements were removed. Using data on 65 million U.S. workers, they analyzed hiring trends before and after the change.
The researchers found that, on average, firms increased the hiring of workers without a bachelor’s degree by just 3.5 percentage points. “For all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by skills-based hiring has borne out in not even one in 700 hires last year,” wrote the report authors.
LaMonica recognizes that shifting to skills-based isn’t like turning on a light switch, saying that Citizens leadership secured organizational buy-in and went into the endeavor with “eyes wide open.”
Currently, the Citizens HR team is revamping its candidate selection process to better assess skills, carrying forward a “consistent approach to talent and skills” throughout the employee journey. LaMonica says this involves better-preparing candidates to know what to expect once work begins, should they be hired.
“Traditional resumes and cover letters are less reliable,” says LaMonica about a skills-based hiring environment. To counter this, Citizens uses more assessments and panel interviews. “What we are finding in some cases is a need to ask very pointed questions about the skills portrayed by candidates,” she shares.
Now: An internal talent marketplace
Last year, LaMonica and her team rolled out an internal talent marketplace—called Talent Matters—an endeavor based on a vision that formed back in 2018. She says at that time the tech wasn’t robust enough to support the plan, but today Citizens feels supported by its technology vendor partners, a sense of balance that arrived just in time.
According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), the number of high school graduates will peak in 2025 before gradually declining through 2041 due to lower birth rates 18 years earlier. Overall, the nation is expected to experience a 13% decrease from this peak by the end of the projection period.
LaMonica says that HR leaders will need to plan for this by rethinking the talent pool and leveraging the available workforce. She believes the internal talent marketplace “opens the aperture of available talent.”
The talent marketplace is “hyper-personalized,” aligning with the skills, aspirations and values of each employee, according to the CHRO. It is designed to guide Citizens colleagues to learning opportunities, including connections to others in the organization who have proficiency in the desired skill areas.
‘We can’t lose intellectual curiosity’
LaMonica emphasizes the criticality of learning as it relates to AI, which she calls an “enterprise journey” at Citizens, punctuating plenty of use cases and pilot programs. She says this isn’t simply about enhancing productivity or freeing up capacity: “For people to remain relevant, they have to up their skills.”
She says this is where accountability is indispensable, as “people will be pushed to do more sophisticated work” and, “if there is no appetite to improve, they will displace themselves,” not just from Citizens but from the modern workforce.
She puts it this way: “We can’t lose intellectual curiosity.” To this end, Citizen has created several learning academies, which offer opportunities to learn and earn badges that show off accomplishments. She says that managers are encouraged to offer employees the capacity to learn by allowing them time to be intentional—the strategy is to drive accountability for picking up new skills.
LaMonica credits leaders who think with both “head and heart” about making bold moves around employee development, skills-based working and perpetual learning. “We are always resetting the expectations of what good looks like,” she says.
The post The bold shift to a skills-based workforce: A CHRO’s perspective appeared first on HR Executive.