6 Best Practices from Delta Air Lines’ Skills-First Journey

Harvard Business Review’s 2019 research predicted that, within 15 to 20 years, new automation technologies would eliminate 14% of the world’s jobs and radically transform another 32%. This transformation will affect the jobs of more than 1 billion people globally. Even more shocking is that this research did not consider the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which is accelerating work disruption.

While new technologies can potentially remove repetitive and manual responsibilities for employees, they also are taking on increasingly sophisticated tasks that will significantly impact both companies and employees. Artificial intelligence and other new technologies are altering the nature of work to the degree that millions of workers will need to be entirely reskilled — not just upskilled — for organizations to remain competitive. McKinsey & Company estimates these changes could lead 14% of the global workforce, 375 million workers, to change occupations by 2030.

Contrary to perceived fears that AI will mean fewer available jobs, The World Economic Forum estimates AI will create at least 12 million more jobs than it eliminates by 2025. Organizations must tap into the skills required for this new work to fill these roles. Given the talent scarcity, with a 3.7% U.S. unemployment rate in January 2024, companies can’t rely on finding these skills in the external talent market. They must invest in internal skill building.

To reskill their workforces in response to disruptive technologies and market dynamics, organizations must shift from rigid, hierarchical job architectures to more agile, dynamic models. These models will create pathways based on skills rather than jobs. At their core, these changes uproot outdated frameworks and processes, requiring a mind shift in how work is done and how talent moves across the organization.

In this second installment of our two-part series on the reskilling revolution, we explore how Delta Air Lines is at the forefront of this skills-based approach. Through this real-life case study, we learn how the airline is successfully navigating such pivotal organizational changes. Based on Delta’s experience and learnings, we also share six best practices for building a future-focused skills culture.

Delta Air Lines’ Flight to Skills-First

At Delta Air Lines, the call to action began with the CEO, Ed Bastian. In December 2020, Bastian championed a “skills-first” journey to remove unnecessary barriers to professional development. The spark for this initiative was to create more equitable career growth and compensation for frontline employees. But Bastian’s commitment went beyond creating employee equity. He knew a skills-first approach would drive better business outcomes. Out of this belief, Delta’s work evolved from a focused initiative to an all-company priority.

For Bastian, this skills-first strategy provided more opportunities to leverage Delta employees’ experiences for the customer’s good. He believed bringing frontline workers into management would help everyone in the organization better understand “what it’s like to work on a ramp, in the cold, with a frustrated customer on a flight,” says Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The strategy also made good business sense because, as Bastian told leaders, “If you take care of your people, they take care of your customers.”

Delta’s new skills-first approach required a significant cultural shift. Asking an organization with 100,000 employees operating in a decentralized, siloed model to move to an enterprise-wide view of work is a heavy lift. Fernando Hueda, Delta’s General Manager of Compensation Design, said, “This is like trying to turn the Titanic in a pond.” However, the drivers and value proposition for change were clear.

As Natalie Katz, General Manager of Skills Strategy at Delta, describes it:

“I think there was the instability of the airline industry generally at that time that was scaring people. Other industries were hiring like crazy and paying really high salaries, and we were seeing people leave (which was new for Delta). So, there is a whole value proposition around career pathing and transparency that gives employees confidence that they can stay at Delta and either grow or change their careers. I think that was a lot of the beginning mode. How do we proactively get to know the skills of our internal talent and provide them with a great value proposition of career transparency and growth internally?”

Working closely with organizational leaders throughout the validation process helped reinforce the value of keeping the skills on a broader scale. Lia Santos, a Mercer partner integral to the Delta initiative, says the airline realized the key to organizational support was making the connection that a more agile, skills-embedded job architecture would open new channels for talent sourcing and boost employee career growth. If the airline’s job and skills architecture were too nuanced, Delta would lose the value of the exercise and would not achieve these goals.

To continue to prioritize skills and stay ahead of future skills needs, Delta created a Skills Strategy group in early 2023. The group focused first on building a skills taxonomy housed within the Talent Management function. Next, it began aligning skills with career growth by leveraging an enterprise-wide skills architecture.

“There’s such value to say, for the areas of the business where we don’t have internal talent ready today, how do we proactively build these pipelines of talent to prepare for a future-ready workforce’? Through a skills architecture, we know exactly what we’re looking for and if we do or don’t have that talent readily available,” said Katz.

Pulling from Delta’s successful evolution to a skills-first organization, we distill six key practices that fueled the success of this ambitious project. Alongside each practice, we’ll share more of Delta’s journey, lessons learned along the way, and opportunities for future growth.

#1: Make the Business Case

Senior leaders and employees need to understand the business case for adopting a skills-based approach, and there’s plenty of compelling data to support this move. According to Deloitte, skills-centered organizations are:

• 107% more likely to place talent effectively.
• 49% more likely to improve processes to maximize efficiency.
• 57% more likely to anticipate change in the market and respond effectively and efficiently.

By developing an internal skills marketplace, organizations can rapidly access the workforce skills needed to respond to changes and stay competitive in the face of market disruptions.

In addition to organizations understanding the ROI, employees must understand how they will benefit from the changes. Upskilling and reskilling provide workers with the continued role growth and expansion they actively seek. As Harvard Business Review reports, when workers clearly understand strengths-based career paths, they are willing to stay and grow with the organization.

Delta spent considerable time building understanding across the organization throughout their skills-first initiative. These efforts have changed how the organization and employees think about career paths and progression within Delta. According to Hueda, embedding skills into agile job architecture shifts employee mindset about career growth:

“With a skills-based approach, employees shift the focus from advancing vertically to understanding what they are missing to be ready for the next level and, therefore, asking questions like: What are the experiences that I need? What is the training that I need? What will make me ready for new opportunities? This approach helps them build their own flight plan.”

While Delta successfully changed the organization’s mindset, in reflection, they could have communicated the case even more strongly at the beginning. As Katz acknowledges:

“We took a bottom-up approach, which worked because it allowed us to move quickly. But I do think there was opportunity for us to drop more informal internal communications while we were in “build mode.” I say that because we have seen some redundancy where some parts of the organization have done their own skills work in the last year. Now, we’re trying to catch up to them and determine how we can get them aligned with the enterprise approach while not losing sight of all the great work they’ve already done. This is critical because one of the biggest drivers of value in creating this skills architecture is consistency in nomenclature and consistency in structure.”

#2: Focus on the Most Urgent Use Cases

Skills-related changes must be inextricably tied to long-term business objectives and infrastructures. This process includes:

1. Prioritizing areas that have the biggest impact on business outcomes.
2. Focusing on the parts of the business that are transforming and growing fastest.
3. Utilizing a skills-based approach for business continuity and talent attraction and retention.

By zeroing in on the most significant business opportunities, companies build confidence that adopting a skills-based approach will solve their most pressing business needs.

For Delta, the most urgent use cases were learning and development and talent acquisition. Identifying skills and talent internally was not always easy. Too frequently, this led to external searches for open roles that, with more available intel, could have been sourced internally. This had a direct impact on Delta’s business continuity and costs.

By centering HR practices on skills, Delta is expanding the pool of internal talent while creating more opportunities for upskilling and reskilling on their learning platforms. Using a skills taxonomy to link internal employee skills with open roles enables Delta to fill roles internally rather than externally. This approach also increases visibility and transparency, giving Delta employees more ownership over their career paths.

#3: Identify a Manageable Starting Point

During the initial phase, Delta’s skills-first work was partly led by the DE&I and Learning and Development teams within HR. Focused on improving talent acquisition, these teams succeeded in eliminating a college degree requirement for 94% of non-executive roles. This change positively impacted talent acquisition results on the frontline, where Delta was experiencing high levels of attrition. The airline also created an apprenticeship program where employees can “earn while they learn” to advance internally.

In response to the organization’s growing digital and analytic skills needs, Delta’s team created a data analytics academy where employees could acquire the tools needed to enter the analytics field without traditional education or cost barriers. This created an internal pipeline for filling analytics roles critical to Delta’s strategic direction.

Because there was executive buy-in and readiness for change on the frontline, in addition to a significant impact on business outcomes, Delta established credibility for the skills-based model. Piloting the skills-based approach within a subset of an organization, Delta has a use case to permeate and embed new practices gradually within larger groups. For organizations building skills-driven talent and pay practices, Mercer advocates for the gradual approach that Delta took. In addition to facilitating adoption, this allows the organization to make incremental improvements along the way.

While the skills-first approach got its start within Delta as they desired to tap into the talents of frontline employees, the company’s rolling success cases helped them expand the initiative over time — better leveraging and developing skills across all business levels.

#4: Integrate Compensation

Concurrent with Delta’s work focused on frontline employees, the airline began evaluating the experiences of salaried workforce members. The impetus for this focus came from leaders’ feedback to the compensation team that many salaried employee pay practices were not market-competitive. Delta was struggling to compete for highly skilled external talent and retain internal salaried employees, especially in the technical ranks. Engaging with Mercer in 2019, they worked to create a more agile, enterprise-wide job architecture that could respond to changing market conditions.

With Mercer’s help, Delta began moving away from a broad-banded pay-grade system toward a more flexible structure. The new structure offered greater visibility into market data, ensuring jobs were paid at the correct value. The project focused on building a more agile job architecture with job families and sub-families that could be tied directly to market data while responding to market changes. This work informed how Delta could change talent pay practices to be more competitive and broaden the employee value proposition to better attract and retain critical talent.

While this job architecture and compensation work was not initially focused on skills, Delta ensured that the work was closely aligned with the overlay of skill integration begun in 2020. Mercer’s extensive skills library, which embeds skills into job families and profiles, aided Delta’s team in building skills directly into their job architecture and compensation designs. Without this integration, job architecture, compensation and career progression could have been at odds with the company’s new skills-based approach.  

#5: Prioritize Communication and Change Enablement

Delta realizes helping employees make these new skills-centric connections requires a multi-pronged communication approach. Working closely with key stakeholders to gain buy-in and validate the new job architecture and skills alignment, Delta established strong sponsorships for these organizational changes. The next step is for the team to communicate more broadly.

This will be done in two phases. First, Delta will facilitate conversations at leadership meetings and share information in high-level, bite-sized increments. Second, the airline will create videos and other communication vehicles describing how this work has impacted individuals. This content will then be shared more broadly within the organization. To avoid organizational overwhelm, the rollout will be deliberate: sharing Delta’s vision first, and then providing more details as the communication plan unfolds.

This approach will equip leaders to have team conversations about the impact of the new job architecture and skills-first approach on their 2024 roles. As Katz remarks,

“We’re now at a point of bringing all these pieces together and creating visibility. If we don't communicate broadly, then our employees are not going to understand what’s in it for them — and I think some of the goodness would be lost.”

As Delta rolls out communication about job architecture and skills strategy, it has considered the best ways of integrating this work into the culture. Rather than implementing it across all HR processes at once, Delta continues to focus on the most critical business needs. With intentionality, they are prioritizing the areas that will impact the business most while communicating the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) visibly to employees and leaders alike.

Throughout the process, it was critical to engage HR business partners and subject matter experts in the business to validate what was right for Delta, adjusting as needed to accommodate unique nuances.

From an enablement perspective, Delta is proactively equipping leaders to communicate the organizational benefits of its skills-first transformation. The conversation will be had during 2024 salary reviews and will center around direct employee benefits derived from this new approach. By providing leaders the confidence to discuss pay and career growth, Delta will empower both leaders and employees to take ownership of their career paths while shifting a team member’s focus from limited job options to unlimited possibility.

To leverage a skills-first strategy to drive business outcomes, Delta must also ensure its learning platforms enable skill development. With this in mind, the company will build out learning management content that enables pathways to every taxonomy skill — so workers can chart their own professional development course. This process also encourages employees to focus on the specific skills needed for their current or future job, as well as the needs of the organization.

#6: Plan for the Future & Continually Monitor Results.

To project the skills needed to support Delta’s organizational strategy, the airline is creating a Skills Governance Committee. During its quarterly meetings, the committee will identify critical skill gaps based on current and future business demands. During the process, members will review career sub-families at least once per year, ensuring the airline stays ahead of the curve for market and compensation forces. This process will enable Delta to proactively plan their talent strategy across the enterprise, ultimately giving them confidence that they can deliver on their business strategy.

Delta plans to leverage its Human Capital Management system to keep a pulse on the skills residing in the organization. Until now, this has been a self-reporting process where employees record their skills.

With the help of AI, Delta hopes to begin analyzing the resulting data to determine the organization’s skills trends. Comparing these trends to current and future business strategies will help provide critical skills gap data. This data will help the airline proactively create learning and development programs that drive focused skilling efforts and meet future company needs. Gathering real-time data and defining skills gaps based on business strategy will help Delta accurately project upcoming skills needs and plan for future upskilling.

Summary

The ongoing evolution of automation and AI technologies is fundamentally reshaping work, compelling organizations to reassess their strategies for talent and skills development. Notably, CEOs are increasingly recognizing the need to significantly adapt their businesses to these pressing trends. In their 27th Annual Global CEO Survey, PwC found that 97% of CEOs have taken steps to change how they are creating, delivering, and capturing value over the past five years — with nearly half questioning their companies’ 10-year viability.

Though AI is still in its early stages, the technology’s rapid global advancement compels organizations to make systemic changes. To stay agile and relevant, businesses must deconstruct conventional organizational and job structures, opting for flexible models that respond swiftly to market demands. This process includes adopting skills-based job architectures, fostering personalized career paths, and integrating targeted learning opportunities. Futureproofing the workforce is now a business necessity that requires collaboration across the whole organization, from leaders to employees.

In an evolving AI landscape, organizations that prioritize skills development, nurture internal talent, and plan for future needs will not only adapt to changes — but will also thrive in this increasingly complex business landscape.

Delta's focus on business outcomes as the foundation for its skills-first approach is a testament to the benefits of embracing the reskilling revolution. The airline’s proactive approach began with dismantling traditional hierarchical structures and embracing a dynamic, skills-centric job model aligning workforce capabilities with business objectives.

The six key practices we have outlined, from presenting a compelling business case to planning for future growth, focus on meeting organizational needs while inspiring employees to stay and grow. Acting as the glue behind this titanic effort, Delta’s holistic approach prioritizes equity, careful communication and organizational enablement. The approach underscores the critical need to align leadership vision with employee engagement to achieve success.

Delta Air Lines’ journey to becoming a skills-based organization serves as an inspiring and pragmatic guide for companies navigating this transformative era. Their learnings and valuable insights will help businesses fly more smoothly into the world’s new skills economy.

See What’s Possible — with Acera Partners

To learn more about the benefits of a skills-based culture in the face of AI and a diminishing labor force, or to discuss your reskilling transformation and collaborate with our talent agility experts, please connect with Acera Partners today.

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