Mercer Skills-Edge Suite at a glance

Lay the groundwork for skills-based decision making

Do you have the skills you need to succeed? Are you looking to understand your skills requirements and current bench strength?

Create a skills adoption roadmap, align your organization to it, and identify and map the highest priority skills needed to succeed in the future. The Skills Library helps your organization in multiple ways, including building up skills on current roles that can lead to insights on employee career paths and reskilling opportunities.

Incorporate skills into your talent strategy fast with the Skills Library

Don’t waste time digging through data or trying to create your own custom taxonomy. Skills Library maps over 4,000 unique skills to over 10,000 jobs in our Mercer Job Library

The Skills Library offers a skills taxonomy based on market data — the first step in adding skills to your organization’s pay strategy. We update our Skills Library regularly throughout the year, so you can stay up to date on emerging, evolving and declining skills.

The goal of the Skills Library is to provide an integrated, data-driven framework to help deploy skills-based solutions across a wide range of business domains. Organizations that start with a common agreement on what skills are most important for their strategies experience the best success in using skills for hiring, learning, and rewards.

Skills are mapped to a global job taxonomy — the Skills Library includes data that is globally applicable, allowing you to implement a skills framework across your organization, quickly.

How does Skills Library work?

• Skills Library enables you to quickly overlay a detailed, structured and fully curated skills taxonomy onto all of your jobs.
• Raw skills data are obtained via large-scale data collection efforts that target millions of online job profiles/descriptions.
• The Skills Library is updated routinely throughout the year, adding new and emerging skills, modifying existing skills, and removing obsolete skills.

What’s included?

The skills included in the Skills Library span a variety of traditional categories such as: competencies, qualifications, certifications, hard and soft skills, as well as regionally specific needs. By including all these under the skills umbrella, clients can define roles by the critical needs to succeed in the job.

Example use case:

We naturally describe a role by listing the needs for the person we need. You might be seeking to fill a cost account role and need someone that is obviously good at: accounting, possesses excellent communication skills, has experience with budgeting, is familiar with variance analysis, and holds a certification for a particular country. Those elements underlined are in the Skills Library, because they are what naturally a person lists as skills for the role.

Skills are structured in two Mercer Job Library arrangements that are orientated around type of work and organizational level: Job and Specialization plus Career Stream:

Leverage the Mercer Skills Library data and insights to map skills and related proficiencies directly to your jobs

Do you know what skills are relevant to your jobs in the market? Do you want to leverage best-in-class skills data to design your organization’s unique job and skills library?

Upload your jobs, explore recommended job matches, map related skill data, and then tailor skills and proficiency levels according to your organization’s unique business needs and priorities, all through workflow-driven review and approval.

Incorporate skills into your talent strategy fast with the Skills Library

The goal of the Skills Map is to provide a workflow-driven process to help organizations orient their jobs to skills most relevant to them, utilizing the Skills Library’s set of over 10,000 curated jobs and over 4,000 skills as a baseline.

Organizations that start with a common agreement on what skills are most important for their strategies experience the best success in using skills for hiring, learning, and rewards.

How does Skills Map work?

• Quickly map your jobs to Mercer Skills Library using a proprietary Artificial Intelligence matching algorithm to establish a baseline of skills
• Customize skills for your organization
• Optionally assign an ideal proficiency level to each skill mapped to your job
• Validate, refine and adjust the skills mapped to your unique org structure
• Export jobs with validated skills and utilize in your HR tech stack to elevate your skills-centric organization strategies

What’s included?

Skills Map is a workflow solution, underpinned by the Mercer Skills Library, that empowers you to quickly map skills and related proficiency levels to your jobs, share with other users in your organization for review and approval, then export the final skill-to-job configurations to enable skills-centric initiatives within your organization.

Example use case:

You need to know what skills are most relevant to jobs similar to yours in the market so you can make sure they are included in your job descriptions, postings, and internal mobility discussions. You also need help determining proficiency levels for the skills at each level and might need to somehow categorize different skills to allow substitution. Mercer Skills Map facilitates mapping skills to your jobs so that managers can make informed hiring and talent management decisions that drive business forward.

Reward the critical skills that are driving impact in your organization

Skills Pricer is a self-service web application that reports which skills influence the pay of a selected job. Through this skills-based market approach, you can determine which skills are most valuable to your organization in attracting and retaining in-demand talent. Our interactive platform facilitates the exploration of how critical skills impact pay. Skills Pricer uses advanced modelling to report skill values, market demand and relative importance for the most crucial skills by job.

Mercer’s proprietary algorithm uses our Total Remuneration Surveys, the world’s most robust salary data source, alongside real-time labor demand data, to provide pricing and guidance on which skills are most valuable to your organization when rewarding, attracting, retaining, and upskilling talent.

How does Skills Pricer work?

Skills Pricer: Sample use cases

Understanding the value of skills is essential in the talent management lifecycle:

Reinvent your rewards program with pay-for-skills

Skills Pay Planner enables you to incorporate understanding of premiums of certain skills into your annual compensation planning review, to prevent your most valuable skills from falling behind the market and becoming a flight risk. It is an AI-driven tool designed to arm organizations with intelligent pay recommendations at the employee level, by combining internal skills strategy, skill scarcity, business criticality, and business-related employee performance data.

Automate the process for pay recommendations

Skills Pay Planner helps you to eliminate individual bias in your pay philosophy and align reward with critical skill sets while automating the pay recommendation process. By providing intelligent pay suggestions, Skills Pay Planner helps ease decisions about how to reward your employees.

The system provides you with control on how to make pay recommendations within budgets. Mercer advisory partners with you to tune the system using your data to meet business strategies. The system can be also configured without skills in the equation, using prior historical data and current ranking systems to drive decisions.

How does Skills Pay Planner work?

Skills Pay Planner generates intelligent automated pay recommendations by integrating company, employee and external benchmark data with your unique business strategy via a predictive machine learning algorithm. Skill needs within the organization, the difficulty to obtain those skills, employee base pay competitiveness, performance, career potential and even retention risk are all reflected in salary increase recommendations.

Data plays a pivotal role: the models needs market, company, and employee level data.

Applications of Skills Pay Planner

Bring a skills lens to your salary review process:

The way we think about compensation is changing:

In order to secure top talent without overpaying, companies need a better understanding of demand & competitive rates. A skills-driven approach is needed to help you future-proof your business.

Mercer provides a comprehensive solution that includes data, technology and consulting to help you implement a skills-based approach throughout the entire talent management lifecycle.

By moving from jobs to skills, your workforce will become more agile and flexible. It also helps you improve employee engagement, turnover rates, talent acquisition and productivity.

Set your organization up for a successful future by implementing a robust skills strategy.

By proactively filling skills gaps and paying for most important skills, your team will become more agile, flexible & future-proof.

Benefits for your HR functions: