How to put your skills to work—in ways that work—through skills-based job crafting
- The growth of our people drives the growth of our company, especially when the people we have become the people we need, again and again.
- It’s time to leverage skills-based job crafting to design a career journey where your talents, opportunities and passions intersect.
Ericsson's Chief Learning Officer
Ericsson's Chief Learning Officer
Ericsson's Chief Learning Officer
With Ericsson constantly on the move, our ethos Imagine Possible is at the heart of continually reimagining ourselves. We help our people build the skills we need as an organization, as well as providing them with the right support. This has been a mission of “learning in service and service in learning” throughout my own life, and I believe job crafting is an underused approach to help make our vision a reality.
Unlock the potential of job crafting
Job crafting refers to redesigning many aspects of our work to make it more engaging and meaningful as we build new skills and put them to work. An interesting article from the Harvard Business Review explains what job crafting is and why it can be a team sport, while another one explores its different forms:
- task crafting: altering the type, scope, sequence and number of tasks that make up your job with the intent of reskilling or upskilling
- relational crafting: interacting with new people to cross-skill, teach and learn from each other
- cognitive crafting: interpret tasks in a different way to leverage new skills
Cognitive crafting reminds me of a parable I once heard about three bricklayers. When they were asked about how they see their work, the first worker said: "I do this job well enough to get it done and get paid." The next one replied: "I do this job to the best of my ability, I take pride in my work, and I make a living because I am an expert at it." The third one answered, "I am building a cathedral, one that will give sanctuary to people long after I am gone. My work is therefore a labor of love that enriches me, and I keep learning as I go."
I can relate to and respect all of these perspectives—each of them felt relevant at different periods of my life. But I prefer to see myself as the cathedral builder, continuously shaping my skillset and mindset.
Bring your talents, opportunities, and passions together
I'm grateful to be in my fourth career, and I hope I still have several new opportunities ahead of me. Over the years, I've worked as a camp counselor, an optical and wireless network operations engineer and a digital business leader in consulting and learning services before I became the Head of Learning & Development at Ericsson. Looking back, I’ve realized that skill-based job crafting has always played a key role in my career journey. Looking ahead, I also see this approach as essential to everything I want to do next.
To leverage skills-based job crafting, I need to understand how my talents (T), skills and strengths come together. Secondly, I learn the megatrends that influence our strategy and identify the opportunities (O) that are likely to grow in demand within my organization. Finally, I define the purpose and the passions (P) that energize me the most. This intersection, called TOP, is the blueprint I can leverage to craft my calling.
Craft your calling to unlock growth
Author and coach Richard Leider describes a calling as "doing work you love, in a place you love, with people you love... on purpose." As Leider highlights, the calling almost always takes you out of your comfort zone into the growth zone, where success and fulfillment fuel each other through the challenges you encounter.
How can you find the sweet spot where your talent, opportunity, and purpose—or TOP—intersect? The quickest and easiest way to figure this out is to simply close your eyes and recall the best moments of your career journey so far. What comes to your mind? The experience you recall might be unexpected, but whether you knew it or not, your TOP was there—a time when you were able to make a tremendous difference or overcome a formidable challenge. The key is to detect it from your past, analyze it in the present and design it for your future.
Job crafting in a constantly changing hybrid world
Skills-based job crafting is even more valuable in our global hybrid reality, as we must continually address the effects of pandemics, disasters, geopolitics, demographics, inequity, climate change and digitalization. The hybrid workplace of today and tomorrow stretches across the office space, cyberspace, homes, hearts and minds—more than ever before. Hybrid working environments represent both an unprecedented challenge to make the new ways of working smooth for everyone and an opportunity to redesign work itself through amplified skills-based job crafting.
To capture the evolving world of work, there are so many trending phrases that start with “quiet” and refer to pivotal career moments, such as quiet quitting, quiet hiring and quiet thriving. But I still think that the key to unlocking skills-based job crafting is, conversely, to be loud, proud and supported by the crowd.
An approach that paves the way for growth
First, you need to be loud. As energy flows where attention goes, speaking up about your interests and intentions related to skills-based job crafting will make it easier for others to know how to help you.
Second, you must be proud. Whenever you seek change, you need to be willing to shift from being skilled at what you already know to being unskilled at something you want to learn. While we understand the power of rapid learning, I’m here to talk about the value of a slower, deeper and often stumbling process of shifting your skills. Ironically, when your efforts eventually lead to a breakthrough, it might seem like a sharp turn to others.
In any case, be proud of yourself for the self-caring journey you undertake. I love that in our company, full of experts and lifelong learners, we’re not afraid to be vulnerable and humble enough to take pride in what we do not know yet.
Finally, you need to realize that you are not alone. It takes a village on the move to raise a skills-based job crafter!
How do we foster skill development at Ericsson?
We’re on a journey of systematically scaling the pipeline of experts who are actively developing their skills and putting them to work across Ericsson. With Degreed as our digital learning experience platform for skill-building and the Career Hub—supported by Eightfold.AI—as our internal career management platform, we create an ecosystem to design our future.
As part of our annual performance and development goal setting, each of us designates four focus skills that we prioritize. These skills foster job crafting in line with team needs, personal career ambitions and the global critical skills connected to Ericsson’s growth strategy.
For example, my chosen focus skills include stakeholder and change management, as well as data analytics and visualization. Together with our global Learning & Development leaders, we are actively crafting our jobs to infuse ethical AI, skills intelligence, and infographics, as well as stakeholder and change management into our responsibilities. Just like our critical skills, our roles constantly evolve—that’s why we must be willing to make these changes instead of waiting for them to happen to us. Raising the bar is not something that happens ‘to’ us, it happens through us.
Design your future by putting your skills to work
When it comes to building critical skills, skills-based job crafting is one of the most powerful ways to put them to work. It can help turn potential into momentum and a career into a calling. Sometimes, it can even contribute to creating a safer space for those who decide to join us as we continually reimagine and reinvent ourselves. Skills-based job crafting puts learning into the flow of work, giving us agility and self-compassion to help us find our way and constantly redesign our own future. It enables the people we have to become the people we need, again and again, so that the growth of our people drives the growth of our company.