Webinar
Fixing the skills debacle:
why the most important workforce conversation became its own worst enemy
Wed, 22 September, 8:30AM PT / 11:30AM ET
Tara Cooper
HR Technology Analyst & Advisor, Mercer
Kate Bravery
Global Talent Advisory Leader, Mercer
Blake Proberts
CEO, Acorn
The skills movement promised agility. What most organizations got was a multi-year implementation, a taxonomy nobody uses, and a spreadsheet someone is still maintaining in HR. Motion without progress, while the business keeps asking the question it had at the start: do we have the people we need to execute our strategy?
Acorn’s CEO and Co-Founder, Blake Proberts, sits down with Mercer’s Tara Cooper and Kate Bravery for a frank conversation on where the skills agenda lost the plot, and what talent leaders can do to get it back.
Attended by teams from
HR Technology Analyst & Advisor, Mercer
Tara Cooper
Tara leads Mercer’s Global HR Tech Analyst and Advisory practice, where she researches how HR technology performs once it leaves the demo stage. She brings a rare vantage point with over 17 years of experience driving vendor go-to-market at HireVue, SmashFly, and Beamery, early-stage founder advisory, and independent research that holds the industry accountable to outcomes for real workers.
Global Talent Advisory Leader, Mercer
Kate Bravery
Kate is a Senior Partner and Mercer’s Global Head of Talent Advisory, with leadership experience across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the US. She leads Mercer’s thought leadership and knowledge programs, authors the annual Mercer Global Talent Trends report, co-authored Work Different, and champions using AI to accelerate people advisory. A corporate psychologist, Kate advises on the future of work, including collaboration with the World Economic Forum, and has deep expertise in talent challenges across growth markets.
CEO, Acorn
Blake Proberts
Blake is CEO and co-founder of Acorn, the skills and development platform, where he has spent over a decade on how organizations prove that learning actually changes what their people can do, arguing that learning without skills visibility is just content consumption and that AI fails without the skills architecture underneath it. He has spoken at ATD’s International Conference and Exposition and Australia’s National HR Summit, and his writing on skills, capability, and learning ROI has appeared in ATD, Training Industry, G2, and eLearning Industry.
What you’ll learn
Why most skills programs stall before they deliver
The structural reason agility turns into architecture, and what it costs when the business stops waiting for an answer.
Where to start when comprehensive is the enemy of useful
A new starting point Acorn and Mercer use with talent leaders to focus on the skills that actually move the work, not the taxonomy that documents it.
What enabling performance looks like in practice
How the shift from managing performance to enabling it changes what talent leaders do day to day, and the signals to look for that it’s working.
