How to give feedback: Your six-part checklist
Feedback can feel like an emotional minefield, yet it is a leadership responsibility. This first article explores three essentials: timing, intent, and balance....
Talent
Standard Chartered: 4 tips to crack the jobs-to-skills transition
Standard Chartered’s Chief Strategy and Talent Officer, Tanuj Kapilashrami, says it’s time to shift from a “jobs-based” to a “skills-powered” model.
In 2019, Tanuj Kapilashrami showed the Standard Chartered management board why the company’s talent strategy had to change.
Kapilashrami – CHRO at the time – presented a new workforce strategy. It followed the premise that there were many “sunset” jobs at the bank that she expected to become obsolete in waves over three, five, and eight years due to changing client needs, the evolution of technology, or the automation of tasks. In parallel waves over this period, new “sunrise” roles would emerge to be filled.
The analysis revealed a picture of such dramatic oncoming change – both commercial and social – that the bank simply could not afford to keep managing the workforce as it had been.
“We started looking at build/buy/borrow choices around talent and the commercial value associated with those options, along with the wider impacts the changing demand for skills would have on employability,” explains Kapilashrami. “We showed what it was going to cost the business over the next five years to remove all the sunset jobs and hire for the sunrise jobs. That’s when the management team, starting with our CFO, began to get very interested.”
Kapilashrami showed that reskilling and redeploying an existing employee would save $49,000 compared to hiring externally. There was also a significant opportunity to increase productivity for the organization by supporting colleagues in obtaining future-focused skills. When applied across the business, which today includes more than 86,000 employees in 54 markets, the financial and social impact would be greatly magnified. The new strategic workforce plan forms the foundation of Standard Chartered’s shift to a “skills-powered” approach to talent.
Skills are the new currency of the workplace
Underpinning the skills-powered approach is a fundamental rethink of how work is organized. “Since the second Industrial Revolution, the whole construct of work has been driven by the idea of a job,” explains Kapilashrami. “But technology and broader market shifts are rapidly disrupting established roles. It’s leaving a lot of value on the table in terms of lost productivity, because people are typecast, with no recognition of their underlying skills.”
Kapilashrami had a different vision: “Imagine being able to structure an organization where your skills flow to carry out a specific task, as opposed to a traditional job.” The objective was to enable that flow. This required a much clearer picture of the existing talent base. “I wanted to prove that there was a huge number of untapped skills in the company,” Kapilashrami explains.
A major milestone in bringing the strategy to life was the launch of Standard Chartered’s Talent Marketplace, the bank’s own internal “gig” economy. “It was a game changer,” says Kapilashrami.
The Talent Marketplace platform enables employees to create profiles that showcase their skills, rather than just listing their job descriptions. Managers across the business post ‘gigs’ – opportunities that require skills not present in that manager’s existing team – which are then matched to the most suitable employee profiles. AI helps the operation run smoothly.
Over half of Standard Chartered employees currently use the Talent Marketplace platform which launched in 2020, unlocking more than US$8.5 million in productivity from gig-based activity.
The gigs are time-sensitive tasks that colleagues take on alongside their main duties. For example, an individual with coding skills could be matched with a different department for just 2–3 hours a week, filling a small but vital skills gap in an ongoing project. In a recent internal survey, 82% of colleagues said they were keen to take on short-term assignments outside of their roles. Guardrails ensure employees spend no more than eight hours a week on gigs.
For employees, this offers exposure to other areas of the business and allows them to practice and develop their skillsets, boosting their employability and helping them transition out of sunset roles. For the business, it improves productivity by providing in-house skills, on tap, to be deployed as needed, without relying on recruitment. This has been particularly effective in putting the business’s data scientists where they are most urgently needed at any given moment, says Kapilashrami.
The results have been impressive. Over half of Standard Chartered employees currently use the Talent Marketplace platform, which launched in 2020, unlocking more than $8.5m in productivity from gig-based activity. Moreover, nearly 40% have established ‘Skills Passports,’ which match their credentials to curated recommendations for learning and gig opportunities. As of mid-2025, internal deployment (the internal hire rate) is at over 50% compared with around 30% in 2023, helping the bank save over $55m in hiring costs and fees since 2023.
What’s more, employee engagement has risen while attrition among high performers has fallen. “A large percentage of the workforce recognizes that the world is changing very quickly, so they are choosing employers that will invest in their career development and growth,” points out Kapilashrami. “The skills-powered model is a powerful tool to attract and retain talent.”
Creating the skills-powered organization
Kapilashrami identifies four key lessons for CHROs from Standard Chartered’s transition to a skills-powered model:
- Use AI to tailor the employee experience
AI manages the skills-matching process on Standard Chartered’s Talent Marketplace and shapes how employees view their individual skillsets. “AI is able to take HR technology and hyper-personalize it, focusing on the experience,” explains Kapilashrami.
“GenAI augments employees’ performance feedback, making it more actionable and linking it to our learning library,” she continues. “It all feels very personal, which makes it far more palatable, far more interesting, and far more fun.” The outcome: 38,000 colleagues – 40% of the workforce – engaged in the bank’s future skills learning in 2024.
- Ensure leadership commitment
CHROs need to ensure leaders buy into the skills-powered model. “Let’s be honest, businesses are not obsessing about this pivot from a job-based to a skills-based architecture, but it is a big cultural change,” notes Kapilashrami. “It requires a huge amount of skill and confidence from the leadership team, led by the HR organization.” CHROs should start by building the business case to get the attention of the rest of the C-suite. Once they have that, they can set about demonstrating the bottom-line benefits.
- Use feedback to redefine the line manager role
The shift to a skills-based organization challenges the traditional parameters of the line manager role. Standard Chartered scrapped its alphanumeric performance rating system in favor of a model based on ongoing performance feedback. “Everyone in the company undergoes an annual 360-degree performance assessment from partners, stakeholders, and clients,” says Kapilashrami. “The line manager collects feedback from these diverse sources in a very structured way, with a focus on development.”
- Start with proof of concept
Kapilashrami advises CHROs to “start narrow” – ensuring that the first steps have a defined direction, so they can demonstrate successes and absorb lessons before going deeper. “When we first took the strategic workforce plan to the board, we said our next step was to run five proof of concepts (PoCs),” she recalls.
Selecting five sunset jobs, she identified matching and adjacent skills before engaging employees to discuss the company’s changing requirements and their career options. Of the five test cases, three worked and two didn’t, says Kapilashrami. “But it proved that it doesn’t have to be ‘one in and one out,’” she emphasizes. “It was evidence that we could support people to develop into adjacent roles.”
As technology continues to transform business, a task-based work model will become both a natural and an essential next step. CHROs have an opportunity to spearhead that work in their organizations. Standard Chartered is proving what’s possible.
Expert
Related
Purposeful Third Acts
We’re living through a longevity revolution where, for some people, the traditional concept of retirement is becoming obsolete, says Zabeen Hirji...
AI and Education
Minimizing the risks of AI in education means bridging the ‘relevance gap’ to develop the kind of thinking young people will need to thrive in their careers. ...
From jobs to skills: How CHROs can unlock radical productivity gains
In a volatile world, organizations must adopt a skills-powered approach to talent management to boost agility, resilience, and growth....
Learn Brain Circuits
Join us for daily exercises focusing on issues from team building to developing an actionable sustainability plan to personal development. Go on - they only take five minutes.
Explore Leadership
What makes a great leader? Do you need charisma? How do you inspire your team? Our experts offer actionable insights through first-person narratives, behind-the-scenes interviews and The Help Desk.
Join Membership
Log in here to join in the conversation with the I by IMD community. Your subscription grants you access to the quarterly magazine plus daily articles, videos, podcasts and learning exercises.