TalentJam Connections · July 2026 · 7-minute read

Skills first, at least on paper

The evidence for the shift to skills-based talent management in New Zealand and Australia, and how deep it goes.

Both public services are now writing skills architecture into system plans, and a quarter of Australian employers rank demonstrated skills above career history. There seems to be a gap between the rhetoric and the plumbing though.

Editor's note

I spent the past week thinking about the impact of the Public Service Commission's Digital Reset Plan, which turns out to spend a surprising share of its 30 pages on people, capability frameworks, and a talent pipeline run from the centre. Canberra's workforce planners are already further down the same road. The market data says private employers are moving too, though not as far as some market talk suggests. This issue of the newsletter collects the evidence on both sides of the Tasman, then offers practical advice about what to copy.

The 60-second takeaway

Skills-based talent management has stopped being a theme and started appearing in system documents. The APS workforce plan names the move from role-based forecasting to a skills-first approach; New Zealand's Digital Reset Plan tells the GDDA to set capability frameworks and run a talent pipeline. In the market, 25% of Australian employers now put demonstrated skills ahead of career history, but only 55% of organisations map skills to jobs at all. One thing to do today: take your hardest-to-fill role and rewrite the ad without the qualification line. If nothing else in the process changes, you haven't gone skills-based, you've just gone quieter about credentials.

Tech talent intelligence

A real shift, in shallow water

Michael Page's Talent Trends 2026 research puts a number on the shift: 25% of Australian employers now prioritise demonstrated skills over career history and education when hiring, and another 61% weigh them equally. Roughly one in six plans to move to a skills-first approach, and among employers already hiring that way, 97% report clear benefits, mostly a sharper read on ability and cleaner assessment criteria.

The infrastructure numbers tell the same story at a slower speed. Mercer's Skills Snapshot Survey 2025/26 finds 38% of organisations running a single enterprise-wide skills library, up from 30% in 2023; 55% now map skills directly to jobs, up from 47%; and the average share of jobs with skills mapped has crept from 69% to 72%. So adoption is deepening, but nearly half of organisations still can't say which skills sit inside which jobs. This suggests that "skills-based" is mostly a statement of intent at this point.

25%
Australian employers who put demonstrated skills ahead of career history and education (Michael Page, Talent Trends 2026)
55%
Organisations mapping skills directly to jobs, up from 47% in 2023 (Mercer Skills Snapshot Survey 2025/26)
≈200
APS roles with published skills profiles in the Career Pathfinder tool (APSC and DTA)

Why the urgency now isn't mysterious. PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer finds the skills required in the most AI-exposed jobs changing roughly twice as fast as in the least exposed, and its New Zealand analysis shows the most exposed quartile of occupations averaging 78 newly required skills per occupation since 2019, against 41 in the least exposed. NZ job ads asking for AI-related skills went from about 3,900 in 2024 to 9,600 in 2025, which represents 2.7% of all postings. Degree requirements are loosening at the margins too: PwC's 2025 barometer had degree stipulations in automation-exposed roles falling from 80% of postings in 2019 to 74% in 2024. My read: roles are being rewritten faster than qualification frameworks can follow, so employers are reaching for more direct measures of capability. The data supports that explanation, but it's analysis, not a survey finding.

Governments are writing it into the plumbing

The APS workforce plan under Australia's Data and Digital Government Strategy says it in plain language: the service has "a significant opportunity to transition from traditional role-based forecasting to a skills-first approach", built on frameworks like SFIA. It isn't starting cold. The APSC and DTA have defined skills profiles for around 200 roles in the Career Pathfinder tool, and the DTA is now upgrading it to SFIA version 9, reconsulting agencies and industry on the role definitions. The honest footnote sits in the DTA's 2024 workforce data pilot, which found agencies applying the frameworks inconsistently and struggling to produce reliable skills forecasts. Tooling exists; discipline varies.

Wellington's version arrived on 2 July, when Public Service Commissioner, Sir Brian Roche, released the Delivering Digital Government Reset Plan. It's mostly a delivery-and-governance document, but its people recommendations are the most explicitly skills-based language yet to appear in an NZ system paper: standardise the technology leadership and accountability model across agencies, close digital capability gaps, and have the reset GDDA set capability frameworks and manage a cross-agency talent development pipeline. It lands against a backdrop the government itself described in a September 2025 Cabinet paper, agencies procuring in silos and competing against each other for scarce digital skills. The direction matches Canberra's. The difference is that Australia has been building the tooling since 2020, and New Zealand is starting the capability architecture and the delivery reset at the same time.

Only one in four Australian employers puts skills first, but the skills plumbing is going in How employers weigh skills when hiring Prioritise demonstrated skills over career history 25% Give skills equal weight with experience and education 61% 97% of employers already hiring skills-first report clear benefits Skills infrastructure in organisations 2023 2025/26 Single enterprise-wide skills library 30% 38% Skills mapped directly to jobs 47% 55% Average share of jobs with skills mapped 69% 72% Sources: Michael Page Talent Trends 2026, Australia (reported May 2026); Mercer Skills Snapshot Survey 2025/26 (2023 comparisons from the same series). TalentJam
All figures above also appear, with sources, in the article text and the source list below.

This month's playbook

One job family, properly

Skip the enterprise-wide skills taxonomy programme, without the right tooling that could be a year of workshops before anyone gets hired differently. Take one job family, the one you struggle to fill at the moment, and rebuild it skills-first in a week or two. SFIA v9 gives you the same role-profile scaffolding both governments already use; and is behind a lot of the role descriptions in the practitioner profiles we maintain at www.talentjam.io.

Tools & signals

Worth your time this month

One question

If the qualifications line vanished from every job ad you run tomorrow, which part of your hiring process would break first: the screen, the interview, or the pay banding? Hit reply and tell me. The sharpest answers run (anonymised) next month.

Next month: when the role stops being the unit of account, what happens to pay bands? The early trans-Tasman evidence on skills-based pay.

Sources