Building a skills foundation that keeps pace with AI-era work

TL;DR

Cotality, the property data and analytics company formerly known as CoreLogic, is making skills the operating currency of its workforce, a bet that AI is only making more urgent. We caught up with CHRO Kendra Angier on the TechWolf podcast, early in our work together, to hear how that bet is taking shape. Her story is candid: a nine-month attempt to hand-build a skills taxonomy that stalled under its own weight, a reset around a dynamic foundation with TechWolf working behind Workday, and the first signals coming through.

Business context: a rebrand that doubles as a workforce promise

For years, CoreLogic was known as a financial-services data company, deeply tied to the mortgage industry. Taken private by two private equity firms, it has been on a transformation that the rebrand to Cotality now makes explicit: data, analytics and AI for the whole property ecosystem, across real estate, mortgage, tax payment services and insurance. Kendra Angier, Cotality's Chief Human Resources Officer, treats the new name as a commitment as much as a brand, to customers and employees alike, to connect data and AI faster and solve harder problems.

That promise translates into a specific planning horizon. Angier deliberately plans the workforce 12 to 24 months out, not ten years and not even three. Skills, jobs and the way work gets done are changing fast enough that anything built to a longer, static plan is obsolete by the time it ships. The bet is to stay skill-centric and move the workforce in smaller, more frequent tranches: refreshing skills roughly once a year for most of the organization, and as often as every six months for technologists, product managers and data scientists.

“I don't know what a 10X engineer is going to mean in 24 months, but I have an idea what we need to do between now and then to get our workforce to that level.”
— Kendra Angier, CHRO, Cotality

Challenges: why building skills by hand did not scale

Cotality did not lack ambition or data. What it lacked was a way to make skills dynamic and maintainable without overwhelming a lean HR team. Three things stood in the way.

• A nine-month false start. Angier's first instinct was that the company simply needed a skills taxonomy, so the team began negotiating skills with leaders and building one by hand. About nine months in, the governance and upkeep had become overwhelming, the work lived outside Workday, and validation looked unsustainable. The team hit pause and stopped.
• A skills layer missing from an otherwise solid base. Cotality had already completed a job re-architecture and implemented Visier, giving leaders real-time talent data on performance, turnover and team makeup. What none of it captured was skills, the one layer the whole strategy depended on.
• Language that sounded too much like HR. Bringing the CTO, COO and CFO along meant dropping HR framing and speaking in their terms: growth, margin, efficiency and operational change, rather than leading with the line that skills are the new currency.

“About nine months into the project I thought, this is insane. The governance, the upkeep, it's outside of Workday. How are we going to validate this? So we hit the pause button and we stopped.”
— Kendra Angier, CHRO, Cotality

How we helped: a dynamic skills layer behind Workday

After the reset, Cotality's requirement was clear: Workday stays the system of record, employees keep interacting with Workday, and the skills engine works behind the scenes and stays dynamic. TechWolf fits as the middleware doing that work, with HR teams and validating leaders using the TechWolf platform directly.

Trusted data. Cotality uploads its job descriptions and validates them in real time against the external market, with the flexibility to benchmark different roles against different industries: financial services for some, high-technology SaaS for others. A strong match, 80% or higher, between an internal role and the outside market gives the team confidence to move quickly on job profiles and the core skills that matter.

Executive insights. Cotality wanted more than a catalog of skills. It wanted to see how jobs themselves change as AI reshapes the work, framed as assist, augment and automate. Those insights feed workforce design: where roles can be reshaped, where skills are common across functions, and where adjacent roles can be combined. The example Angier returns to is software development, asking what core skills a single, AI-supported role would need where a company once had separate back-end, front-end, quality and coding jobs.

Embedded actions. Validation lives where people already work. Through Teams and Slack integrations, Cotality can push a short prompt to an employee, asking them to verify the core skills for their role, and ask subject-matter experts and leaders to set the right proficiency for each level, from associate professional through senior principal. Employees do not have to go into Workday to take part.

“Skills is the new currency, but to lead with that probably isn't the most effective. You learn the love language of your leaders and translate what you're looking at into that.”
— Kendra Angier, CHRO, Cotality

Early signals: what the foundation already unlocks

The work on skills is still young, so what Angier shared on the podcast is an early read. They point in a clear direction.

A common view of roles, for the first time

Cotality did not previously have a single place to see its job profiles. Now around half of all job families are in process in TechWolf, and the team can compare a common role, a software engineer in the US, Canada, Australia and India, on the same terms. That shared view simply did not exist before.

Adoption measured, not assumed

Cotality is surveying employees as it asks them to update parts of their job profiles, which lets the system infer skills from real backgrounds. Sentiment on the new skills process is running at an 80%+ NPS, an early read on whether the experience feels frictionless. Managers and employees are showing early optimism about where the program is heading.

Days of work, done in minutes

The validation and matching that used to run on pen and paper, days of it, now runs in minutes through the collaboration tools employees already use. Angier calls that shift a game-changer for how quickly the team can stand up and check job profiles.

“When you do pen and paper, it takes days. Now we can do that in minutes.”
— Kendra Angier, CHRO, Cotality

Project challenges: the honest parts of an early build

• Owning the false start. The instinct to hand-build a taxonomy was a detour that cost the team months. Angier also credits it with teaching everyone how hard, and how important, the work is, which strengthened the case for a tech-enabled approach.
• A small but mighty team. Working with a lean HR team, Cotality's answer to scale was to create a dedicated program manager role. This senior principal of skills and workforce intelligence reports directly to Angier, on an 18-to-24-month mandate that cuts across compensation, job architecture, HR technology, and talent development.
• Finding the right altitude on skills. The team landed on a deliberate point of view: roughly 20 to 25 core skills per role, a mix of professional, technical and functional, rather than chasing every tool and language. Specific technologies change, so the durable skills are the ones that let people move across tools quickly.

Next steps: toward a dynamic talent exchange

Cotality is still early, and the roadmap is concrete. Near term, the team is completing job descriptions at scale, using NotebookLM and agents to speed the drafting, and turning on Career Hub in Workday so employees can see where they are, where they want to go, and the skills and experiences to get there. Cotality is also implementing Sana as its learning platform to push skill-building into the flow of work.

The longer bet is what Angier calls a dynamic talent exchange: moving people to where the work is through project-based and gig assignments, so a leader can scan the organization for the skills a project needs without an intermediary. That reshapes how performance, reward and growth work along the way.

“I think about chief human resources officers becoming chief work officers. Work will be done with technology and people working together.”
— Kendra Angier, CHRO, Cotality