Skills-Based Talent Metrics Toolkit

The Skills-Based Talent Metrics Toolkit provides a practical starting point for moving from policy intent to implementation, from implementation to evidence, and ultimately from evidence to continuous improvement.

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Across the country, governors and state leaders are rethinking how the public sector attracts, hires and retains talent. In recent years, states have increasingly adopted skills-based approaches that reduce unnecessary degree requirements and place greater emphasis on the skills and competencies people bring to the workforce.

Skills-based talent practices are not about replacing one pathway with another. They are about recognizing that skills can be developed and demonstrated through multiple pathways-including education, credentials, training, work experience, military service and other experiences-and ensuring hiring and talent practices can recognize that full range of qualified talent.

As states and territories move further into implementation, a new set of questions is emerging: Are these changes expanding access to public sector employment? Are agencies attracting different or larger pools of qualified candidates? Are hiring practices actually changing? And ultimately, are skills-based approaches helping states recruit and retain the talent they need?

Answering those questions requires the public sector to move beyond measuring policy adoption toward measuring impact.

To help states and territories make that transition, the National Governors Association (NGA) partnered with Lightcast to develop the Skills-Based Talent Metrics Toolkit-a practical resource designed to help public sector leaders establish meaningful measures, use existing workforce data more effectively and build the evidence needed to understand whether skills-based strategies are working.

Building the Case for Lasting Skills-Based Change: Our Why

As states and territories have moved from adopting skills-based policies to implementing them across government, NGA recognized that sustaining momentum would require more than policy change alone. State and territory leaders need ways to understand whether new approaches are working-whether changes to hiring and talent practices are improving workforce outcomes and, ultimately, strengthening states' ability to deliver services to constituents.

Measurement is also critical to sustaining the organizational change these efforts require. For decades, degrees, job titles and years of experience have served as familiar proxies for determining whether someone is qualified for a role. Moving toward a greater emphasis on skills and competencies requires leaders, hiring managers and HR professionals to change deeply established practices. Data can help make the case for that change.

Through NGA's work with states, we saw a need to help leaders connect skills-based policy and practice changes to measurable outcomes-and demonstrate the return on investment of those changes. Doing so gives states the evidence they need to identify what is working, refine what is not, build confidence among stakeholders and make informed decisions about where successful approaches should be expanded.

The Skills-Based Talent Metrics Toolkit was developed to help close that gap: giving states and territories a practical framework for moving beyond tracking whether a policy has been implemented toward understanding what changed because of it. This shift-from measuring activity to measuring impact-is essential to embedding skills-based practices into how states recruit, hire, develop and retain talent over the long term.

The Next Challenge for Skills-Based Hiring: Measuring What Changes

NGA's work with states and territories has demonstrated that there is significant momentum behind skills-based hiring. Governors, state human resources leaders and agency leaders are increasingly exploring ways to expand how qualifications are recognized-looking beyond reliance on any single proxy to consider the full range of ways individuals develop and demonstrate the skills needed to perform a job. Yet implementation looks different from state to state-and so does the ability to measure it.

The toolkit builds on NGA's Empowering Progress: Harnessing Skills-Based Strategies to Drive Public Sector Excellence report and reflects continued engagement with public sector human resources leaders. That work surfaced a recurring challenge: while states and territories are experimenting with skills-based strategies, they often lack the data, systems or shared measurement approaches needed to determine what is working and where adjustments are needed.

Importantly, public sector leaders do not need to wait until they have a perfect data infrastructure or fully modernized human resources system to begin.

Instead, the toolkit offers states and territories a way to start with the systems and data they already have, establish a baseline, test approaches through targeted pilots and gradually strengthen their measurement capabilities over time.

Starting With the Questions States and Territories Need to Answer

One of the central lessons from this work is that measurement should begin with the questions or challenges leaders are trying to answer and solve for-not with the technology or data available to them.

Through engagement with public sector HR teams, NGA and Lightcast identified three fundamental questions that can help organize measurement efforts:

Are we keeping our people? Are we finding the right people? Are we making skills-based changes?

From those questions, the toolkit identifies a set of priority measures that states and territories can use to examine outcomes such as employee turnover and retention, applicant volume, offers and hires made to candidates without degrees, changes in degree requirements, the use of multiple competency signals in job postings and the visibility of skills within the workforce.

Rather than asking states to implement every measure at once, the toolkit prioritizes metrics based on both their potential value and their feasibility. This allows states and territories to begin with measures that can produce meaningful insight using existing systems while building toward more sophisticated skills-level measurement over time.

A Practical Path From Piloting to Scale

The toolkit is designed to support states and territories in choosing where to begin along with what to measure based on priorities.

The toolkit provides a step-by-step approach for launching a focused skills-based pilot: identifying a participating agency or team, selecting a metric tied to a workforce challenge, establishing a way to distinguish employees or positions participating in the skills-based intervention, adding relevant skills-level data where possible, and then calculating and comparing outcomes.

This approach recognizes an important reality of state government: transformation rarely happens everywhere at once.

A focused pilot can give states and territories an opportunity to test new approaches within existing HR and applicant tracking systems, establish baseline measures and compare outcomes before expanding an initiative statewide. It can also help leaders determine which strategies are producing meaningful results before investing in broader implementation.

The toolkit also places technology within a broader implementation context. While technology can help make skills visible and usable at scale, sustainable skills-based talent management also depends on talent lifecycle processes, HR operations, organizational decision-making, data governance, and leadership and management.

That distinction matters. Skills-based transformation is not simply a technology project or a change to job descriptions. It is a broader change in how to understand, manage and make decisions about talent.

Building the Evidence Base for What Works

For the public sector, better measurement serves a purpose beyond reporting.

It creates a feedback loop.

When agencies can connect skills-based interventions to outcomes-such as applicant volume, hiring, retention or workforce mobility-they can begin identifying which practices are producing results, where implementation needs to change and where successful approaches should be expanded.

Over time, that evidence can help public sector leaders move from isolated skills-based initiatives toward more durable talent management strategies.

It can also help the public sector answer a question that is becoming increasingly important as skills-first policies mature: What comes after policy adoption?

The next phase of this work is not simply about counting how many degree requirements have been removed. It is about understanding whether those changes are creating better pathways into public employment, improving how the public sector can identify and deploy talent, and strengthening the capacity of government to recruit and retain the workforce it needs.

The next phase of this work is not simply about tracking changes to job requirements or hiring policies. It is about understanding whether skills-based approaches are helping public sector leaders recognize the multiple pathways through which people develop skills, broaden access to qualified talent, improve how to identify and deploy that talent, and strengthen the capacity of state and territory government to recruit and retain the workforce it needs.

The Skills-Based Talent Metrics Toolkit provides a practical starting point for doing just that-moving from policy intent to implementation, from implementation to evidence, and ultimately from evidence to continuous improvement.