Most companies chase a skills strategy and end up with a portal nobody opens. Ian Bailie has built this twice, once at Cisco a decade ago, the hard way, and now at Synopsys, a 40-year-old company that just doubled in size and absorbed a $35 billion acquisition. His take is blunt: stop turning skills into an HR project. Lead with what AI is doing to the actual work, fix your job architecture first, and give people a reason to care before you ever ask them to touch a profile.
00:45 — The Kyle Forrest question: how to actually get HR, IT and finance in one room
02:30 — Why “we're HR, and we have the solution” is the wrong way in
06:00 — Doing this at Cisco 10 years ago, before the tech existed
07:50 — The Synopsys stakes: doubled size, a $35B acquisition, 40 years of legacy
11:30 — 3,000 people, one job title: when job architecture is too simple
15:00 — Why he refused to buy another skills portal
22:00 — One taxonomy, three platforms: Degreed, Avature, BetterWorks
27:40 — Automate, augment, human-only: reading the task data
31:00 — Giving people the agency over how AI changes their job
38:30 — HR's moment, and the risk of missing it
