Now is the time to embrace a skills-first approach to talent – at all stages of the lifecycle. Whether your challenges are around hiring, engagement, retention, filling talent gaps or unlocking productivity, looking at talent and work through the lens of skills is the crucial first step. Opportunities will outstrip talent capacity for the next several years, if not decades. So how do you actually get the work done? Moreover, talent practitioners are no longer just competing against other businesses, but also the changing expectations of candidates themselves. To keep up, they need to alter the way they think about talent, and do so drastically. Companies have hard choices to make relating to the workforce, and a skills-first approach can help you make better decisions, faster. Skills data should power everything: from tactical redeployment to strategic workforce planning. This report will look at what it means to be a “skills-first” organization; the myriad benefits this approach brings; and the steps you need to take in order to get there.