Viewpoints: Delivering business success through embedded talent agility

More than 95% of leaders say access to talent agility and cross-border skills is critical today – and will only grow in importance over the next five years. But while the intent is clear, execution is still catching up. 

As organisations navigate rapid technological change, shifting workforce expectations and persistent skills shortages, talent agility is moving from a strategic priority to a practical necessity. Increasingly, the challenge is not recognising its value, but building the systems, structures and mindsets needed to deploy skills quickly and effectively across the business. 

Here, three HR leaders share how they are turning that ambition into action.

Talent agility is about enabling an organisation to stay relevant. It’s about your ability to spot future needs or trends in skills early, and ensuring your people have both the mindset and learning opportunities to build and deploy these new skills at pace.

To do this effectively, you need the right systems and data in place, so you can match the skills you need to solve the problems you have. In a perfect world, your system should be able to track all employees’ skillsets, updating them in real-time. In practice, this is something many organisations are still trying to build. 

At my previous firm, one thing we focused on was creating a common language and set of competencies that we used across the organisation, when it came to talking about skills. Some were simply core values that every employee should have, such as integrity. Others were more technical or functional based. 

Finally, we had leadership qualities that allowed us to judge management potential. These competencies fed not only into discussions about talent and future skills, but also performance development and appraisals. By joining up discussions around skills, it allowed us to see where we needed to develop and what needed to be brought in externally.

So much of getting talent agility right is about planning ahead and actioning your insights. As part of our five-year business strategy, we’d bring senior leadership teams around the table to examine the skills needed to succeed. What do we have now, and what will we need?

Then, we would make decisions on the skills we believe we could develop from within, versus what we needed to start hiring. It was about being proactive and taking that decision then, rather than a couple of years down the line.

For the skills we wanted to develop internally, we would identify the talent we believed could go through development. We would put them into academies and develop job rotations. These could be within a specific country, region or cross-border. We would even set up job rotations across functions – so an actuary could go into product development. If the skills and appetite are there, then we were willing to take a risk on our people. 

It’s also about sometimes understanding your position in the market. One example of a skillset we tried to develop internally was creating a conversational AI that could talk to clients. People with those abilities are hard to attract, as many would rather go to a tech company over working for a health insurer. So, we felt we could develop talent internally through upskilling, reskilling and cross-border mobility to get that done. 

As an industry, we talk about the future of work and skills a lot. But success is about turning those words into a roadmap that your organisations can follow. Rather than simply talk about talent agility, we need to take practical steps to make it a reality.

Talent agility means being able to react quickly and flexibly, matching people and their skills to future work. Within my HR team, one way we leverage talent agility is by using flexible project-based teams – almost every project I’m working on today has flexible teams involved.

We do this through our talent marketplace, where our people – regardless of where they are based – can enter their skillsets and aspirations, and find relevant learning and opportunities. While it has been a multi-year change effort, we have seen the greatest value from the marketplace through these flexible teams, where individuals can find opportunities to work on projects alongside their current roles, aligned with their manager and their development goals. 

For the business, it provides a way of bringing in talent with market expertise and different perspectives to solve specific problems and deliver projects.

Novartis is a multinational organisation with an excellent network of corporate centres, which allows us to leverage diverse local talent pools. For example in our Prague hub we have talent from across Europe, while in our Mexico centre we have amazing talent from across South and Central America. 

Working across borders we need to be mindful of compliance requirements including who can do what work and from which location. We use a globally consistent job evaluation and pay equity framework, ensuring pay is competitive based on local market, role context, and legal requirements.  

Another challenge is the speed of change in both technology and the world of work. We’re investing in our skills infrastructure to consolidate all people and skills data, connecting skills intelligence with job architecture.

Coming from a previous role in Rewards where I owned the job architecture it was something that was complex to maintain, with a year-long cycle of examining how roles are changing and what job descriptions should look like. 

As in many organisations, work moves faster than these cycles, so we need to be able to respond quicker. With AI, there are more opportunities to infer skills based on job titles and role description, which keeps data more relevant and helps our people get better opportunity recommendations.  Of course there always needs to be human review and clear governance around how AI-generated insights are used.

There are also ethical considerations when it comes to the use of AI in talent marketplaces. Employees need to understand how their data is used, and how recommendations are generated by the algorithm. We regularly assess and monitor bias in partnership with our provider, and adjust where needed.

For me, true talent agility at an organisational level is not a buzzword, but an organisational capability. It is the ability to access the skills and capabilities an organisation needs to succeed, irrespective of constraints related to geography or traditional structures, in a timely manner that enables business outcomes. At its core, talent agility is about optionality: having multiple pathways to solve business capability and resource gaps in an increasingly unpredictable and constantly changing environment.

Talent agility itself can be very broad. There are several dimensions to it, including cross-border talent access, employee autonomy, the shift toward skills-based talent intelligence and continuous learning, and the growing impact of AI on the talent landscape. Each represents a facet of talent agility, but their relative importance is highly contextual, and it is important for an organisation to be clear about what it means when defining talent agility and whether it is referring to the individual or organisational level. An organisation needs to understand which aspects of talent agility will create the most value at a given moment in time, based on the business context.

In my current role at Maple Leaf Foods, beyond creating a culture of continuous learning that enables the rapid upskilling of our team members, talent agility is coming to life more tangibly through the application of artificial intelligence. We see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a force multiplier for how work gets done.

We are experimenting with AI agents to support current workflows in several parts of our business processes, as well as cobots (robots that work alongside team members on the plant floor). We have begun introducing cobots that operate alongside frontline employees, taking on physically demanding and repetitive tasks such as lifting heavy product packs in some of our plants.

The impact is immediate and practical: reduced strain on employees, improved efficiency, and more consistent output. This is talent agility in action – not by moving people, but by redesigning work itself to better align human capability with organisational need.

One example of how we are experimenting with AI agents within the HR team is reducing friction in manual HR processes through the development of bespoke interview guides. Our Talent Acquisition team developed an AI-enabled agent that generates tailored interview questions based on role profiles and job descriptions. It is a simple intervention, but one that enhances consistency, saves time, and allows our teams to focus on higher-value interactions with candidates rather than manually customising each interview guide.

I believe that the growing importance of talent agility is a direct response to the level of ambiguity and pace of change organisations are facing. Navigating this environment is ultimately a leadership challenge. It requires resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to make decisions without perfect information.

At an organisational level, it means building the capacity to pivot, whether that involves scaling seasonal talent, leveraging new technologies, or rethinking how work is structured. Agility is not just about speed; it is about having the flexibility to respond in multiple ways as conditions evolve.

Talent agility is not a static destination. What it means for an organisation today may not hold true tomorrow. The role of leadership is to continuously reassess which capabilities matter most now and how to access them effectively. What works for one organisation may not work for another. The differentiator is not the tools we adopt as HR practitioners, but the clarity of our intent and our ability to pivot at pace when that intent needs to change.

To find out more about talent intelligence and the future of work, please visit Deloitte

_{Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”), its global network of member firms, and their related entities (collectively, the “Deloitte organization”). DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) and each of its member firms and related entities are legally separate and independent entities, which cannot obligate or bind each other in respect of third parties. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more. This article contains general information only and does not constitute professional services or advice from the Deloitte organization.}

More than 95% of leaders say access to talent agility and cross-border skills is critical today - and will only grow in importance over the next five years. But while the intent is clear, execution is still catching up. 

As organisations navigate rapid technological change, shifting workforce expectations and persistent skills shortages, talent agility is moving from a strategic priority to a practical necessity. Increasingly, the challenge is not recognising its value, but building the systems, structures and mindsets needed to deploy skills quickly and effectively across the business. 

Here, three HR leaders share how they are turning that ambition into action.