A skills-based organisation is an operating-model decision.
At a glance
- Challenge
- An enterprise of 90,000 people had a competency framework in every function and still could not answer an enterprise question: who can do what, and what will we need next?
- Andrew’s role
- Executive sponsor, with the programme lead reporting to me. I made the case, established the ownership, ran the current-state assessment and brought in Deloitte.
- Scale / context
- Global: every function, every geography, and every process that uses skills, from hiring to workforce planning.
- What changed
- Skills Power, Sanofi’s skills-based organisation programme, for an enterprise of more than 80,000 employees; the team carried the implementation on after I left, on the strategy and decisions set before.
Separate frameworks could not show skills across the enterprise
Sanofi had done the conventional thing thoroughly. Competencies were mapped across hundreds of job segments, assessed annually and maintained by hand, and within each function the frameworks did their job. The limitation was between them. Every function had built its own, with its own definitions and its own cycle, and the systems that held them did not connect, so a skill that existed in one part of the company could not be seen from another. The annual assessment was a photograph of something that changes continuously. And the frameworks described jobs, so when the strategy asked which of our people could do a thing we suddenly needed doing, and what we would need next, there was no enterprise answer.
The assessment also highlighted the need for enterprise ownership. Capabilities, competencies and skills sat in different functions with different definitions, and there was no single place where a decision about any of them could be taken. We needed clear enterprise ownership and shared decision rights before we needed a better list.
One skills language connected decisions across functions
The shift was to describe work in one shared skills language, so that a decision in one part of the operating model could use what another part knew: the same unit in hiring, learning, staffing, career moves, succession and workforce planning.
Separate competency frameworks, one per function
- R&D
- Commercial
- Manufacturing
One shared skills language
Clinical study manager
R&D
- Protocol design
- Data analysis
- Regulatory knowledge
- Stakeholder management
Market access lead
Commercial
- Health economics
- Regulatory knowledge
- Stakeholder management
- Negotiation
Quality assurance manager
Manufacturing
- Process improvement
- Data analysis
- Regulatory knowledge
- Stakeholder management
A skill that appears in more than one job
The decisions one language connects
- Hiring
- Learning
- Staffing
- Career moves
- Succession
- Workforce planning
That is what it does for people and for the business. A manager staffing a priority piece of work can find who has the skills for it anywhere in the enterprise. An employee can see what a next role needs, where the gap is, and the learning that closes it. Internal opportunities become visible to the people who could take them. And the company can decide, with evidence, where to build a skill and where to recruit it.
It is a harder idea than it sounds, because it means the strategy has to come first. Strategy names the capabilities the organisation must have; capabilities translate into the skills that make them real; and only then does anyone know which skills matter enough to manage. Starting with strategic priorities keeps the taxonomy focused on the decisions it needs to support.
I sponsored it, established the ownership and chose the partner
I was the executive sponsor. Skills and workforce planning sat in my function, and the programme lead reported to me. I made the case to the leadership team and had it sponsored as enterprise work, framed as an operating-model question.
The first decision was ownership. Where each function had owned its own framework, I put skills under one enterprise owner, with a programme lead accountable for the taxonomy and its governance, and brought the functions that had built the separate frameworks into one steering group, so that the decision rights were shared. I ran the assessment of where we were, including how far from the market we stood on skills data and technology. And I brought in Deloitte, on a mandate we set and scoped as a partnership: the methodology already existed and was worth paying for, and the framing, the sponsorship and the questions stayed in-house.
By the time I left in September 2024 the programme had its governance, its first pilots and an implementation plan, and the team continued implementing the approach after my departure. The strategy and the decisions made before I left shaped more than a year of that work.
Sanofi continued developing its skills-based approach
80,000+
employees in the enterprise population Skills Power was designed to support, in its programme lead’s account of July 2025
700+
subject-matter experts who contributed to the global skills taxonomy, in the same account
Subsequent public accounts describe how the programme developed. Deloitte’s engagement began in 2024 and ran two years across three fronts: the skills-based organisation, the talent operating model and the external workforce strategy; Deloitte’s own account of the transformation is public. The programme became Skills Power, which Sanofi’s Global Skills Intelligence Lead described in July 2025: an idea from 2023, a global skills taxonomy built with over 700 subject-matter experts, dedicated streams for talent acquisition, learning, talent management, technology enablement and change, and pilots of employee-driven experiences in career development and learning, for an enterprise of more than 80,000 employees.
A related example of skills-based mobility at Sanofi is its AI-enabled Career Hub, which matches employees’ skills and interests to development opportunities and internal moves. In Workday’s account of it, employees had filled 7,600 assignments through the hub, and 10,000 applied for a single gig at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
My contribution was the strategy and the decisions that shaped the implementation: the case, the frame, the ownership, the diagnosis and the partner.
Clear ownership helped turn the strategy into implementation
Guiding principles
Name the owner before you name the skills. Every function at Sanofi had a framework and nobody had the enterprise decision. Putting skills under one owner, with a programme lead accountable for them and the functions sharing the decision rights, is what turned a set of documents into part of the operating model.
Strategy first, capabilities second, skills third. The strategy named the capabilities Sanofi needed; the capabilities named the skills; only then did we know which skills mattered enough to manage. Starting with strategic priorities kept the taxonomy focused on the decisions it needed to support.
Combine external expertise with clear internal ownership. Deloitte brought a methodology that already existed and was worth paying for, and worked to a mandate we set. We retained responsibility for the business priorities and the decisions, supported by Deloitte’s expertise.
Decide the data and the technology with the taxonomy, not after it. The current-state assessment showed how far from the market we were on skills data and technology. A skills framework is only as useful as the systems that carry it into hiring, learning and career moves, so those decisions belong in the design.
Redesigning work around AI needs skills and tasks described together
Understanding how AI changes work starts with describing the tasks involved and the capabilities people bring. Task and workflow analysis shows which work changes; a skills foundation then shows where the development and redeployment needs are. Neither tells you the other on its own.
For organisations developing their approach now, the experience offers a useful starting point. The value of a shared skills language is that it connects changing work to the decisions that follow from it: who to develop, who to deploy where, and where to hire.