Start with the work: why Colt chose TechWolf to build its skills foundation

Skills programs fail at the foundation

It's very hard to kick off a skills transformation journey with a messy job architecture. If roles are too broad, too generic, or out of date, every skill profile built on them inherits the error. Career paths point to roles that don't reflect the work, and workforce plans count the wrong things.

Colt, the global network and connectivity provider, saw the symptoms before it saw the cause. Leaders never said the job architecture was broken. They said they couldn't see career paths, couldn't plan future skills at scale, and that recruitment took too long in some areas.

Earlier attempts had tackled those symptoms one at a time: a skills initiative, then a rethink of grades, then a career development project. Each one made sense on its own. Together they never held, because nothing connected them.

"Where we failed in the past is trying to do piecemeal elements of skills, or rethinking our grades, or looking at career development. The bit that brought this all together for us was our job architecture."
Jonathan Jacobsen, VP Reward at Colt Technologies

Demand side first

There are two ways to build a picture of skills. Supply-side approaches start with people: CVs, profiles and candidate data. They tell you what your workforce has. Demand-side approaches start with the work: the roles, the tasks and what each one requires. They tell you what the organization needs.

Both matter, but the order matters more. Workforce planning, internal mobility and career paths are all questions about demand. Start with supply and you end up mapping people's skills onto job titles that were never designed to carry them.

Most skills vendors are born as recruitment solutions, where supply comes first because the business is finding candidates. Colt ran a full RFP, and that distinction ruled out a large part of the market.

"So many of them have come from a recruitment background. Their technology is built on the assumption that you're going to start with supply. We wanted to start on the demand side."
Jonathan Jacobsen, VP Reward at Colt Technologies

Job architecture is the connecting layer

A job architecture is more than an org chart with titles. It defines the distinct roles in an organization, the levels within them and what each one involves. Grades and pay attach to it. Skills and proficiencies attach to it. Career paths are routes through it. Fix any of these separately, and they drift apart again.

That makes the job architecture the natural place to start an end-to-end skills program, and it is why Colt came to TechWolf with a structural problem rather than a shopping list. The redesign was not in the original scope, but it shaped the decision.

"It wasn't what we originally signed up for, but it absolutely helped us believe that TechWolf was the right partner to look at this more holistically."
Jonathan Jacobsen, VP Reward at Colt Technologies

Phase one: redesign without the usual cost

Colt's existing architecture was a couple of years old, had taken significant effort to build, and was too generic in places to carry skills reliably. The usual fix is to buy an off-the-shelf architecture and tailor it by hand.

Colt had no appetite for that. A generic catalog would have meant months of stakeholder interviews, line-by-line data reviews and validation rounds to make it fit, and the team had already lived through one heavy manual build. It wanted a structure that started from its own work, not someone else's template.

TechWolf's Job Architecture Redesign Agent analyzed the work behind Colt's existing roles, proposed a structure of distinct roles, and drafted a job description for each one. Colt's core team reviewed and changed the structure, and Talent Acquisition, who use job descriptions more than anyone, validated the descriptions. The judgment stayed with Colt; the manual effort did not.

"It's allowed us to get there requiring less manual intervention, less of us having to go out and talk to the business and pick through lines and lines of data. It's taken less manpower on our side."
John Ambrose, Director of Talent, Learning and Performance at Colt Technologies

The structure and job descriptions for HR are validated. For the other functions, the structure is reviewed and the job descriptions are being loaded, so skills can follow directly.

From project to operating model

The real test of a job architecture is not the day it goes live. It is whether it keeps up as the work changes, and with AI reshaping tasks inside almost every role, the work is changing faster than any refresh cycle.

Colt is already planning for that. It wants a job architecture center of excellence that reviews the market regularly and uses the Agent to model role redesigns before making decisions, with TechWolf supporting the handover. Skills, proficiency, career paths and workforce planning then all build on one structure that stays current.

That is the difference between a skills project and a skills foundation.

See the Job Architecture Redesign Agent live at SAP Connect, Las Vegas, 5 to 7 October.

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