The #1 Skills Mistake That Slows Big Companies Down
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we sit down with Ilja Bitterling, VP Skills Intelligence & Performance Management at Deutsche Telekom, to unpack how large organizations can finally make skills data usable, trusted, and decision ready.
Ilja explains why skills intelligence is not about inventories, but about creating a shared language that connects workforce decisions, performance outcomes, and future readiness. He breaks down how Deutsche Telekom moves from fragmented skill signals to clear, comparable insights leaders can actually act on.
Most importantly, he shares why performance management and skills cannot live apart anymore, and how organizations that connect them move faster, allocate talent better, and avoid betting the future on outdated role assumptions.
🎓 In this episode, Ilja discusses:
Why fragmented skill data slows workforce readiness
What it takes to make skills credible at enterprise scale
How shared skill language improves mobility and planning
Why skills intelligence must support decisions, not documentation
How Deutsche Telekom connects skills and performance, not just roles
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00:13
Elia, how are you doing, my friend? Great to be here, thank you. How's the event been treating you? Well, it's a lot, right? It's flashy boots, it's inspiring talks, it's great people to connect with. It's been good so far. Yeah, and you did a session today. Tell everyone a bit about... Or was it yesterday you did a session? No, it will be this afternoon. Oh, you haven't done it yet? So I've got the exclusive. Yeah, you got the sneak peek. Yeah, tell everyone a bit about the session title and what you're going to be covering.
00:40
So what I'll be covering is basically Deutsche Telekom's transformation to becoming a skill-driven organization. I think many organizations are on the same path. We have quite a long history with managing skills and developing skills in our organization. But what we realized is that the real value lies in embedding skills in all the processes that need skills. And that is quite a daunting task because there's quite a few, not only HR processes, but also the business that needs these skills in order to operate their business.
01:09
their units, and that's the journey that we're on. Yeah. So I suppose let's start from the beginning. What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced in terms of moving from basic skill management to fully integrated skills-based talent ecosystem?
01:25
Yes, definitely. So we've had quite a long history with maintaining skills. We've had a legacy platform where people were able to maintain their skills. We already had a skill taxonomy defined quite early, like some organizations are still wrapping their head around that. We've had it quite early, but what we realized is that
01:44
That platform was mostly a platform that people, it's just another thing to maintain for employees. We were very interested in the data from an HR perspective, but the employees were just not seeing the value. And we were thinking, okay, how can we turn that around? And it's all about
02:00
connecting the skills for the employees and their experience with all the development opportunities that are there within the organization. That's how we try to complete the picture. So connecting it with learning, connecting it with jobs, the internal job marketplace, connecting it with projects that they might be able to work on, even finding a mentor to develop their skills. So we're trying to complete that picture. And of course, now with AI supporting, we can make that in a personalized fashion.
02:23
Yeah. Where did you start? Talk about like if someone's listening right now and they're early on the journey, just walk us through your journey in terms of how you got started and maybe looking back, is there anything you would have done differently? Having know what you know now.
02:41
Yes, so what I think the challenge is, is to sort of see the big picture, but start small anyway, right? So skills can have a benefit for many different use cases. I think it's a good idea to have an idea of where you need to use skills. You need it in learning, you need it in recruiting, you need it in performance management. Just to have an idea how that all comes together and then start small.
03:04
Our challenge on the way was, since we already had a history with skill management and we really wanted to do it different this time and do it better, that increased our scope already quite a lot, right? Because we already connected skills to learning, we connected skills to a little bit of performance management, but we had to increase our view to also include the recruiting space and all of that in order to provide benefits to our employees. But if you start from scratch, I would start small. Where's the biggest business problem? And start there.
03:33
Talk me through, I think connecting skills to learning is something that's come up quite a lot in my conversations. Talk us through how you've done that.
03:40
So what we do is we ask people where their skills sit today. We ask also which skills they would like to develop for the future. We also give orientation, which skills are relevant for the future. And based on each of those use cases, we make personalized learning recommendations. So it could be because people have a skill gap in their current role. It could be because they want to develop towards a new future role and they're missing certain skills.
04:04
It could be because they have an interest in a certain skill that they think will be relevant for everybody, like AI. Based on those different use cases, we personalize the learning recommendations for them. And then later on, we loop that back to the system once you've completed your learning or training. Like, hey, have you updated? Have you increased your skills? You might want to net the system. Yeah. Have you done that in-house or externally with a partner? External with a partner. Who are you working with? We're working with Eightfold. Nice. Nice.
04:30
What we think was the best at the time, or still is, connecting the complete skill verse.
04:37
Yeah. What's been your, because one of the things I've seen, and we're speaking to many companies on this journey, is how you then communicate this to employees in the business. Could you talk through your strategy around what works best? Because obviously this is, you now really want employees to own their learning and their careers, and it's quite a big shift, you know, a mindset shift, culture shift. Could you talk a bit about that?
05:03
So there's a couple of things that we want to highlight with our employees. First of all, Deutsche Telekom has a challenge with perceived career development opportunities.
05:12
So our employees tell us that they don't see enough development opportunities around. So we try to connect with that and say, here now is a platform that helps you make the opportunities transparent in your organization. And that's also a thing where a large multinational organization, opportunities still often reside at a local level. And we're trying to reduce those barriers. That also...
05:33
comes with some cultural challenges. Like not everybody likes to exchange talent across the group in an equal fashion, but we're working with our leaders to sort of really have this talent accelerator behavior. But towards our employees to come back there, we're trying to sell this, there's a company of opportunities and here's a platform that supports you finding those. Another thing is that I think many people today are worried, also worried about where is the industry going? Where's my job going? Where are the skills going?
06:01
They might ask different questions about it, but the real use case is how do I stay relevant? And that's what we want to communicate to our employees. Here's a platform that gives you orientation and that can help you along the journey to stay relevant with the new organization. I think, yeah, from a leadership point of view, it's a big one moving from being talent importers to talent exporters.
06:21
So there's work that needs to be, to your point, that I think sometimes companies overlook that part, but also the ability for me to see these are the skills that are going to be important in the future. And I'm assuming you're actively communicating
06:37
Exactly. To them. It's really exciting. Yes. Because now I know I'm not going to wait for a tap on the shoulder for my next promotion or think, hey, do I have any opportunity here? Let me leave. Now they can see the path ahead. Right. And you provided the learning and and the marketplace, as it were, to help them on that journey.
06:59
Definitely. And I think what we are now trying to find a balance is how many of these skills can we set as a future direction for the organization in its entirety? And to what level of granularity do we need to go on a department level? Because before you know it, you don't want to recommend these are the 30 skills that are relevant for the future. You sort of want to keep it crisp. And that is a difficult balance. That's a tough one. And also with the half-life of a skill being so short,
07:29
it's pretty much hard to predict that far out as well. So...
07:36
Do you have your skills taxonomy? Is that something which is fluid? It definitely is, yes. So we have developed our own skill taxonomy, mainly for the reason that when we require certain skills from our employees to execute their job, we want to be very crisp about what really that skill means, because sometimes it's not that understandable. And we now, of course, we use new technology and market analysis in order to keep that taxonomy up to date all the time.
08:05
Yeah. Doing this across over 100,000 employees? Correct. What's been the biggest challenge across such a large, diverse workforce? You mentioned cultural nuance. What are some of the other challenges? Yes. So Deutsche Telekom's history is quite a decentral structure, right? So we are operating in many different countries with different products.
08:32
And I think our challenge has been is to get them all excited about this platform. And it's one of the first truly global platforms where we have all the people in. And the good thing is that many people are excited. So the story is not difficult to tell, but you have to tell it to everybody.
08:51
And continuously. And continuously. It's not like a one and done. No. It's a continuous effort and it's one after the other. Is this something you also, I'm assuming you're embedding at the beginning of the employee lifecycle? So how early on are you introducing people to the platform in terms of when you're hiring? Is it already in the beginning of the hiring process that they then have access? Or do you have kind of...
09:15
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. Well, we have the luxury of that in this vision of our platform, recruiting is already integrated. So actually, we already have the skill data from when they've applied. And they keep that data when they're an employee and they can build up on it. But they don't start from scratch. Can they access content as part of their onboarding?
09:35
That is not in scope for us yet. No, that would be really interesting. Yes. If you could bring that in early on to tie into proficiency, it would be really interesting to see that. We do, of course, have onboarding processes where also training is part of the pre-boarding, but we haven't connected that to our, let's say, skill landscape. Yeah, that would be really interesting. That would be fantastic. As you look ahead, obviously, you're still on the journey, right? What are you most excited about in terms of some of the work that you and the team have planned?
10:05
So, three things I'd like to mention. First, further break down barriers. I'm very excited about leveraging the global talent that we have, no matter where the people are sitting, and it's part of our strategy also to have more global teams and work more together across the footprint that we have.
10:23
So, and that leads also to more opportunities for our employees. So the second thing that I think will be our challenge going forward is we have all these platforms in HR that we're trying to sell to our employees, but the next thing is how to embed it really into the flow of work.
10:37
And I think the time of sending people to different platforms and different products is over. But we haven't quite figured out yet how to integrate it all into the flow of work. But that, I think, will be the next thing in terms of employee experience that we need in order to also make our product successful.
10:53
Yeah, I think you're right. Like there's so many fragmented systems right now and we're adding more along the way. It's becoming more of a challenge that that's really going to impact the employee experience and cause fatigue, you know, in the business. And I think this is now and one of the challenges is like every one of your vendor partners, they all have their own agents. Exactly. Sort of this agent war. Yes.
11:19
of like where do we service this and uh whether that be within the tools or within slack or teams right let's make sure we have one destination that people that connects to all of that and unfortunately a lot of the systems aren't ai native and they're not set up in a way in a way in which you can vote you can kind of upstream most right downstream more of a challenge
11:46
If that makes sense. Definitely, yeah. You have this feature in Eightfold called the profile assistant, which is brilliant, right? It suggests you, hey, you've completed this training. We recognize that you might have acquired these skills or advanced these skills. But that requires the person to be already on the platform. Exactly. And ideally, that would just pop up or be nudged right into the flow of work in Microsoft Teams. Exactly. And I don't think, I think these things, they're around the corner. Like, I mean, almost, if you want to be competitive in this space, those are table stakes.
12:16
Right now, I'm speaking to leaders every day like yourself and they don't even consider a vendor unless they integrate with their current systems and communication tools.
12:26
But before you know it, each vendor will start their own pop-up. I know. And that's also not the ideal end goal. No one really has the answer right now. Last thing, for anyone getting started on the journey, what would be your parting advice for people that are a bit earlier on the journey than you?
12:46
Yes, I would always advise to look first like where do you have the biggest challenges in the organization, right? Are you slow in recruiting? Are you trying to tackle internal mobility? Are you having challenges finding your internal talent across the group? So identify the use case that you really want to tackle and then build your first pilot around that. Yeah, I appreciate it, man. Appreciate you coming by. Cheers, thanks for having me. All the best and congratulations to you and the team so far. I know it's a journey, but congratulations so far. Excellent.
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Carlo Steenvoorden, EVP HR People Services, Analytics & HR AI at KPN.