For Delta Air Lines, moving towards a skills-based talent strategy was something that the company’s HR leaders knew just wouldn’t fly by “winging it.”
The airline serves nearly 200 million travelers each year, servicing 275 destinations across 50 different countries, and it employs more than 100,000 associates across the globe to do so.
“What we’ve done so far for Delta Air Lines is really started to revolutionize a lot of skills-based hiring and development within our enterprise,” said Trevor Greer, a solutions partner for talent at Delta Air Lines, at SAP SuccessFactor’s annual customer event SuccessConnect in Lisbon, Portugal in October.
The airline eyed employee retention, upskilling, and equitable career growth opportunities within the organization, whether on the ramp, in the cockpit, or at a corporate office, Greer said.
“There was a huge initiative,” he said of the effort which began in 2019. “We wanted to make sure that our employees felt like they had the full career opportunity here within Delta, that wasn’t just a stop on their career journey.”
Skills taxonomy. The company partnered with the consulting firm Mercer to build its jobs taxonomy, a critical first step for the airline to focus on skills. Using skills from Mercer as a baseline, the organization then went through a “skill validation exercise” to make sure they worked for Delta.
“It wasn’t something that we took off the shelf and then just plugged it straight to our organization,” Greer said. “We used the skills provided by Mercer as a foundation, but then worked with all of our senior leaders, subject matter experts, and employees top to bottom to understand, ‘Are these skills relevant to Delta?’”
All skills—from general manager and below—have been fully mapped by skills, he added. Delta’s skills strategy encompasses around 500 skills, according to Greer.
“What was a little unique about our job taxonomy is not so much of the historical hierarchy of what you might expect,” he said. “We ordered our job taxonomy base a little bit uniquely, in that we still had our job families, but then we broke it down into sub-families.”
For example, Greer said, a data analyst is an IT position, but because of Delta’s massive global footprint, the organization mapped out skills and developments for roles representative for different groups: data analysts on the finance team, those who work for airport customer service, or those who work for the reservations group.
Degree free. The airline also worked to drop degree requirements. According to its 2023 ESG report, 82% of all job openings filled externally in 2023 did not require a college degree, notably eliminating the requirement for 15,000 pilots in 2022.
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“It was setting barriers for others to come into our organization,” Greer said of the requirement. “We want to attract the best of the best. We don’t want something like a college degree to be a barrier for them to apply.”
Greer added that 90% of Delta’s employees are frontline workers, so he and his talent team want to make sure they have the opportunities to upskill into other roles regardless of their educational background.
The runway. To launch the skills-based initiative, the team leveraged the company’s HCM SAP SuccessFactors’ talent hub, opportunity marketplace solutions to house the skills infrastructure, and worked with SAP to iterate their skills data. Inside the suite, skills are tied to learning, so employees can develop their careers at the company.
“Skills are really meant to be a currency that is for employees who want to move throughout the company, that they can develop their skills and take it with them, so that way they can build out a robust portfolio and then use those skills to drive their own career growth.”
Take off. Delta deployed its talent intelligence and opportunity marketplace inside its SuccessFactors suite, but has only launched to certain groups, like the HR organization, as a pilot of sorts. The company plans to expand the program to a number of business groups by the end of the year and enterprise wide by Q1 of next year.
The company is also leveraging the recent take off of AI technology. It deployed an AI engine to help “hiring managers…track requisitions, applying skills to jobs” and making sure skills remain up to date in the system.
The organization also employs a “skills governance board” that meets quarterly to manage the changes, including the addition and removal of skills, according to Greer.
Lessons for HR. “What we’ve seen from lessons learned is make sure you have your job taxonomy right,” Greer said. “Understand the different career levels of your organization, understanding what roles exist in the space, because only by then can you leverage the skills and make it applicable to the employee.”
Greer also said this has been a large change management exercise that required some changes to company culture, to develop bought-in leaders who can direct employees to be in the cockpit of their own career development.