The Job Description is Dead. Long Live the Skill.
Your organizational chart is a lie.
It’s a comforting fiction, drawn in neat boxes and solid lines, suggesting that work happens in silos and authority flows vertically. But walk the floor (or slack the channels) on a Tuesday afternoon, and you see the truth. The work doesn’t care about your hierarchy. It flows horizontally, diagonally, and often chaotically, bypassing the very structures you built to contain it.
We are operating 21st-century software companies using 19th-century management technology:
The “Job”that static, bundled collection of responsibilities tied to a single title is an artifact of the Industrial Revolution. It assumes stability. It assumes that if you hire a Marketing Manager today, the requirements of that role will remain roughly the same in three years.
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In an era where the half-life of a learned technical skill has dropped to roughly 2.5 years, hiring for a static role is not just inefficient; it is negligent. It creates ossified structures that snap under pressure.
We need to stop hiring for titles and start trading in the atomic unit of the new economy: Skills.
The “Hollywood Model” for Enterprise
Think about how a blockbuster movie gets made.
Ridley Scott doesn’t have a standing army of sound engineers, lighting technicians, and costume designers sitting on payroll, waiting for a mandate. No. A project is defined (Gladiator II). The necessary skills are identified. A team is assembled from a liquid pool of talent—freelancers, agencies, specialists—based entirely on their capability to deliver specific outcomes for that specific project.
They converge. They execute. They disband.
This is the Hollywood Model, and it is the future of your enterprise.
In a Skills-Based Organization (SBO), we move from ownership to access. Managers currently “own” talent. They hoard it like dragons sitting on gold, terrified that if they let their best data scientist work on a project for another department, they’ll never get them back. This friction kills agility.
By deconstructing jobs into projects and gigs, and dismantling employees into skill sets and capabilities, you create a fluid internal market. Talent flows to the highest-value problem, not the loudest manager.
The Cognitive Dissonance of “Experience”
Why do we still demand “10 years of experience” for a role involving Generative AI? The technology hasn’t existed for ten years.
We rely on tenure as a proxy for competence because we are lazy. It is easier to scan a resume for brand-name employers and years of service than it is to assess whether someone actually possesses the cognitive flexibility to navigate a non-linear environment.
Here is the brutal reality: Tenure is often just scar tissue.
A candidate with 15 years of experience might just have one year of experience repeated 15 times. Conversely, a junior developer who spends her weekends contributing to open-source libraries might have more relevant, kinetic skills than your Senior VP of Engineering who hasn’t pushed code since the Obama administration.
When you shift to a skills-based model, you democratize opportunity. You stop looking at the pedigree and start looking at the potential. You uncover the “hidden workforce” already inside your company—the customer support rep who knows Python, the sales admin who understands UX design.
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Mental Model: The Skill as Currency
To make this work, you must change the fundamental currency of your organization.
Currently, your currency is the Headcount.
“I need budget for two more heads.”
“We are freezing headcount.”
Headcount is a blunt instrument. It’s binary. You either have a person or you don’t.
In an SBO, the currency is Capabilities.
“I need 400 hours of Python expertise and 20 hours of strategic oversight.”
This allows for fractional allocation. It allows for the “Gig Economy” to exist inside your firewall. It sounds radical, but Accenture, Unilever, and IBM have been quietly pivoting to this model for years. They aren’t doing it to be nice. They are doing it because they realized that in a world of exponential change, static hierarchies are brittle. Networks are resilient.
The Trap: Don’t boil the Ocean with Taxonomy
I see CHROs get excited about this. They buy a massive AI-powered LXP (Learning Experience Platform). They hire consultants to map out a “Global Skills Taxonomy.” They spend 18 months trying to define every single skill required for every single role.
By the time they finish, the market has shifted, and the taxonomy is obsolete.
This is the waterfall method applied to human capital. Don’t do it.
Focus on the critical few. What are the 20 to 30 skills that actually drive value in your specific industry right now? Is it prompt engineering? Is it consultative sales? Is it supply chain resilience? Map those. Track those. Reward those. Let the rest be messy.
Monday Morning: The Tactical Pivot
You cannot transform your ship into a speedboat overnight. But you can start drilling holes in the silos.
- The “Side-Hustle” Pilot: Launch an internal talent marketplace for 10% of your workforce. Allow managers to post “gigs” (5-10 hour/week projects). Allow any employee, regardless of department, to bid on them if they can prove the skill. Watch what happens. You will see energy released that you didn’t know existed.
- Rewrite the Executive Job Descriptions: Start at the top. Instead of a list of duties, list the problems that need solving and the skills required to solve them. If the C-Suite isn’t hired based on skills, the rank and file never will be.
- Kill the Degree Requirement: Unless you are hiring a structural engineer or a brain surgeon, remove the Bachelor’s degree requirement from your job postings. It is an arbitrary gatekeeper that filters out hungry, self-taught talent.
The war for talent is over. The talent won. They have options. They have leverage. They want to work on interesting problems with interesting people, not climb a greased pole for a slightly larger cubicle.
Structure your company around the work, not the title. The hierarchy is dead. Long live the network.
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