The new skills paradigm

• The new skills paradigm
• The new leaders
• The new workplace model

In a world where high-value skills shift constantly, every company, community and country must continuously master new fields and acquire new kinds of expertise. Most importantly, so must each one of us. For instance, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, most Americans will hold between five and 10 jobs in various professions or industries over the course of their lifetimes.

One example is Learning@IBM, a collaborative, personalized portal that delivers relevant content and tools to employees anywhere, anytime. It helps them find one another to share expertise, skills and best practices. In addition to its emphasis on collaboration, the portal enables each IBM employee to develop his or her own individualized learning plan. Averaging 727,000 visits a month, the IBM Learning sites provide a wide variety of career-expanding industry and technical information that is tailored to the employee’s job role and interests. Employees can acquire new skills and disciplines, from nanotechnology to the latest “green” technologies, and successfully reposition themselves within a growing and changing marketplace. IBMers are also learning from each other through social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and instant messaging. New technologies automatically alert employees when experts in any given area of the business are available online to help them. This reduces their sense of isolation and enables IBMers to reach out to colleagues for advice.

IBM’s Workforce Management Initiative (WMI) enables employees to showcase their expertise, manage career-related tasks and find new jobs, projects or mentors through a personalized intranet tool, “Your career,” integrating with our global employee directory, BluePages. By providing their resumes and completing skills assessments, employees showcase their expertise to managers and leaders worldwide, enabling the company to match people to projects, engagements and job opportunities. And through Learning@IBM Explorer, IBMers can create a dynamic plan to sharpen their skills for professional growth.

WMI’s skills database is available to managers and leaders in 63 countries through Professional Marketplace—a project engagement application that matches supply with demand and included more than 153,000 IBM professionals' skills and expertise in October 2007. IBM’s Global Opportunity Marketplace (GOM) allows 20,000 interview invitations to be sent to uniquely qualified candidates within the company in six business days. Using GOM, India processed more than 376,000 applications in the tool’s first nine months of use.

2007 IBM Corporate Responsibility Report

A new model of global citizenship among individuals, organizations and society at large.

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