SumTotal Launches Skills Blueprint, a Market-Informed Recommendation Engine in Partnership with Lightcast

SumTotal Skills Blueprint, powered by Lightcast, gives licensed customers the job and skills blueprints to supercharge their upskilling, reskilling, and talent development efforts.​

SumTotal Systems, a Cornerstone company and a global leader in talent acquisition, onboarding, learning management and talent management solutions, announced it has launched its Skills Blueprint product add-on in partnership with Lightcast, a leader in labor market analytics. This partnership will supercharge upskilling, reskilling and talent development efforts for SumTotal customers.​

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“We have developed Skills Blueprint in partnership with Lightcast, at a time when highly regulated enterprises and their learners have an unprecedented need for accessing comprehensive and accurate data,” said Jim Gill, Executive Vice President & General Manager, SumTotal. “Paired with SumTotal’s existing skill-based functionality, Lightcast data will elevate how SumTotal customers identify, partner with, and grow talent across their workforce​.”

“Lightcast’s data within Skills Blueprint will provide people and organizations with actionable insights on the marketplace for skills,” said Pete Massar, VP Lightcast Partnerships. “That cleareyed view of the value, supply, and demand for skills will ensure that talent and opportunity have a well-lit path to each other.”

Skills Blueprint will provide SumTotal customers with market-level analytics around jobs and skills. This market data will help SumTotal customers streamline the rollout of talent development solutions, including internal mobility and career development functionality; this data is immediately relevant and updated in real time. ​Powered by Lightcast, SumTotal customers can easily enhance their internal skills data based on a market-validated skill taxonomy, allowing for faster gap analysis and more focused development efforts.

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Using Skills Blueprint to build or enhance internal skill data unlocks expansive capabilities, including:

• Building a Future-Proof, Competitive Workforce: Market-informed job and skill data provide a competitive edge to all levels of an organization. With access to job data from Lightcast, stakeholders gain an unmatched level of insight needed to support agile, efficient, on-the-spot decision-making, driving profitability across the organization. Managers and leaders can build more robust and competitive job profiles to develop high-performing teams and power employee upskilling, while individual contributors can gain visibility into market-informed career options to discover new opportunities based on their acquired skills and interests.

• Improve Delivery of Learning & Development: Taking a skills-based approach and targeting training to fill specific skill gaps, organizations can maximize ROI on their training investments by leveraging content as a development opportunity. For example, if a company requires new developers to take coding courses, it can then reframe these resources as learnings for other employees. This ensures organizations don’t waste resources where proficiency exists and is already validated.

• Smarter Resource Allocation: A skills-based approach enhances resource allocation activities by empowering organizations to pair the right resource with the right skill set to meet the needs of a specific engagement. By starting with skills, an organization can define required capabilities at a granular level. These skills are then mapped to employees to identify strengths and areas of improvement. Organizations that leverage a skills taxonomy and a skills-based approach to resource allocation are sure to see better outcomes, increased staff satisfaction, and improved customer satisfaction.

• Enhance Employee Mobility & Retention: A skills-based approach breaks down the concept of the “vertical career path,” along with “role-based” or “team-based” projects. As a result, employees can move more freely around an organization and are able to access informal and formal opportunities that would not have existed before, leading to increased employee retention and greater organizational effectiveness.

This new market comparison tool underscores SumTotal’s commitment to providing you with powerful data to make more informed decisions. Skills Blueprint will seamlessly integrate into existing skill functionality, to help you start, improve, or modernize your skills taxonomy in real time. Implementation of Skills Blueprint will be initially available from November 2022.

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