Skills-Edge Suite, Global

Attract and retain critical skills by advancing pay-for-skills.

Only 12% of companies formally monitor supply and demand of skills

The skilled talent you need may be working for you today, but will they be there for you tomorrow? As industries develop and organizations change and grow, skill gaps appear, and certain skills become obsolete. To propel your organization forward, you need to fill those skill gaps efficiently, either through precision hiring or by redeploying or reskilling employees. Many organizations are finding it challenging to make timely decisions about whether to reskill, recruit or outsource for a particular skill because they lack good information. While 80% of companies recognize that using skills-based approaches to rewards would help with attraction and retention, only 12% of companies formally monitor supply and demand of skills. We can help.

Introducing Mercer Skills-Edge Suite

Mercer Skills-Edge Suite is an integrated service offering of consulting, technology and data that gives you the information and insight you need to advance skills-based talent and pay practices across your company.

Understand which skills you have and which skills you need

Set up your organization for a successful future by implementing a robust skills strategy. By proactively filling skills gaps and paying for the skills most important to your organization, your team will become more agile, flexible and future-proof.

Balance your short-term tactical needs with longer-term transformational objectives with these flexible products under Mercer Skills-Edge Suite.

SKILLS LIBRARY
A skills taxonomy based on market data, curated by Mercer and mapped to the Mercer Job Library. Knowing what skills your organization will focus on is the first step in using skills data to support your organization’s strategy.

SKILLS PRICER
This self-service web application 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.

SKILLS PAY PLANNER
An AI-driven tool designed to arm organizations with intelligent pay at the employee level - based on business strategy - combining skill scarcity and business criticality, along with other business-related employee performance data.

Mercer Skills-Edge Suite at a glance

	Skills Library	Skills Pricer	Skills Pay Planner
Feature	A market-derived, Mercer-curated skill taxonomy mapped to Mercer Job Library that aligns with our products to address any number of use cases.	This self-service web application 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, and adjust reward accordingly.	An AI-driven tool designed to equip organizations with intelligent pay recommendations, based on business strategy, skill scarcity, and role criticality in combination with other business-related performance data.
Function	Mercer Jobs Library is augmented with curated skills data to deliver a dynamically updated skills library.	Uses predictive modelling to evaluate skills relevance and market demand amd determine skill impact on pay.	Uses machine learning to aggregate multiple data sources on skills along with employee performance and other business-critical data, to provide a base pay recommendation for individual employees.
Benefit	Add a skills dimension to your job library. By updating your job master data, you build a data foundation for other skills needs.	Make informed talent acquisition decisions and address skills-based compensation throughout the employee life cycle. Skills value, relevance, demand and trend data are provided for each job.	Manage talent effectively and impartially via skills-based reward. Make the transition with tools that link skills to pay at the employee level.
Data Requirement	No data is required from you to use Skills Library.	No data is required from you to use Skills Pricer.	Certain employee data is required in order for Skills Pay Planner to provide skills-based rewards recommendations at the individual employee level.

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?

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 thousands of unique skills to our Jobs Library, making it the fastest way for Mercer Job Library users to incorporate skills into their strategy. Not a Mercer Jobs Library client? Our team of experts can match your jobs to our Library to get you started quickly.

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 so you can stay up to date on new and emerging skills, see how skills are changing and learn which skills are becoming obsolete.

An integrated, data-driven framework helps you deploy skills-based solutions for recruiting, talent assessments, and career pathing.

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

How does Skills Library work?

We curate our Skills Library using a variety of supply and demand sources of global talent data.
We obtain key skills information using large-scale data collection that targets millions of online job profiles and descriptions.
We update the Skills Library 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:

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 machine learning to report pay premiums, 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 uses machine learning and industry-leading data sources to analyze which crucial skills drive pay premiums, the premium value for each skill, and relevance and demand information for a job.
Human-curated by rewards experts and utilizing advanced analytics, Skills Pricer enables reliable and respected data to use in acquisition, retention, compensation and development strategies.
Skills Pricer provides a viewpoint on the criticality and scarcity of each skill to each job.

Skills Pricer: Sample use cases

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

Recruiting can review pay premiums, market demand, and skill relevance to adjust offers for candidates who exhibit critical skills.
HR teams can evolve foundational job architecture and career paths to include skills and enable a more flexible talent marketplace.
Compensation teams can use the data to ensure competitive pay plans and retention of key talent via skills-based pay adjustments and bonuses.

Skills Pricer in three steps

Draws on the comprehensive Mercer Skills Library to map globally-consistent jobs to the skills that drive pay.
Maps the premium for each skill by combining criticality and market data.
Delivers dynamic data sets to an interactive web-based dashboard.

Skills Pricer in action:

Search via job or skill keyword and select job.
View market base pay and skills premium information.
Adjust which skills are included based on your organization’s roles or individuals.
Gain insights into the impact your curated skill profile has on pay.

Why use Skills Pricer?

Attract and retain key talent by using skill premium information to drive pay review decisions.
Understand the potential impact of incorporating skills before factoring them into your total rewards strategy.
Implement simple best practice processes that introduce managers and HR professionals to skills as a decision factor.

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.

The machine learning model looks at each individual’s past performance rating and other metrics such as base-pay competitiveness.
The model requires inputs that inform it about skills that are a priority for the business and desired investment levels.

Applications of Skills Pay Planner

Use Skills Pay Planner as a simulation tool for compensation and rewards teams to test the impact of skills and other factors on pay. It allows organizations to see the shifts from current process to new philosophy, in order to prepare for implications and change management.
Advance to using Skills Pay Planner to guide managers when it comes to compensation adjustments creating equity in how pay adjustments across the organization.

Skills Pay Planner in 3 steps:

Combines business strategy and company data
Runs a predictive machine-learning algorithm
Makes pay suggestions at the employee-level

Bring a skills lens to your salary review process:

Log in to see your pay recommendations based on company skill strategy as first step in compensation review cycle
Review detailed rationale for each employee pay adjustment
Deploy compensation changes with supported AI recommendations for robust compensation discussions

Drill down into recommendations on an individual employee basis
Explore influencing factors at a granular level
Make pay recommendations with confidence

The way we think about compensation is changing:

agile workforce management increases the need to identify, retain and move high-demand skilled talent
COVID landscape demands efficiency and not losing the right talent
digital and tech skills, as well as gig workers are becoming more prevalent in the workplace

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:

Compensation

For compensation specialists looking to optimize their budget: Our solutions allow you to match skills to jobs for better, more productive employee placements. When you have the right skills in the right positions, teams can be more productive and save you money. Unlike other solutions, our skills are already curated and mapped to our job library to simplify the process of onboarding skills to your jobs.

Learning & Development (L&D)

For L&D professionals seeking to create and recommend learning opportunities: Mercer Skills-Edge Suite lets you focus learning on skills, which can have more impact on your company and individual employees. Unlike other solutions, Mercer Skills-Edge Suite enables skill gap analyses which help you identify which segments of the workforce to focus on.

Talent management

For Talent Managers who must attract & retain top talent, Mercer Skills-Edge Suite allow you to focus on key skills, not just job descriptions. Unlike other solutions, not only can you focus your search on skills, but also have more data on trending & high demand skills. A transparent, skills-driven culture allows you to get the right people in the door and retain them, so you don’t have to fill the same spots over and over.

Workforce planning

For workforce transformation specialists looking to future-proof their organizations: Mercer Skills-Edge Suite highlights what skills to focus on in your workforce. Unlike others, we provide data which allows an understanding of which employee segments should be the focus of upskilling efforts – delivering a more cost-effective way to prepare for the future.

HR Business Partners (HRBPs)

For HRBPs who need to retain top talent and create an engaging company culture: Mercer Skills-Edge Suite enables you to create a skills-based culture that drives engagement throughout the company. We provide offerings across the entire talent management lifecycle to give you the most holistic approach to skills.