Vitality, a leading health and life insurer in the UK, has a compelling core purpose: to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. They have pioneered shared value in insurance by incentivising members to live healthier lives – benefiting them, the company, and wider society.
This shared value model also finds expression in Vitality’s approach to becoming a skills-based organisation by aligning the goals of its 2,500 employees with business goals. The aim is to build the organisational capabilities that will deliver the business plans of today and tomorrow, and to facilitate career development personalisation at scale.
A talent marketplace introduced in 2024 is one of the building blocks of this strategy. The marketplace is employees’ front door into Vitality’s skills and learning ecosystem. It also provides the business with valuable skills intelligence.
The talent marketplace had two initial objectives:
- To increase employee engagement and retention by making career paths to every role, visible to every employee, and by helping employees identify and close skills gaps, and
- To use skills intelligence to create a future-ready workforce, by understanding skills deficits and surpluses.
The marketplace has already contributed to improved employee sentiment on career opportunities, and to retention of high-performing employees. And skills deficit insights are guiding learning solution investment choices.
The next priority was to improve longer-term skills forecasting. The FSSC future skills framework provided a springboard for conversations with business executives during a strategic talent and succession planning review. This process yielded consensus on a shortlist of critical skills, which has shaped skills development priorities: the focus now is on skills most in-deficit and in-demand.
The next steps in Vitality’s journey are to:
- Infuse a skills-based approach into other elements of the employment lifecycle
- Launch ‘gig’ and ‘skills mentor’ talent marketplace features
- Continue curating learning opportunities for skills in high demand.