From skills gaps to growth paths: How Dayforce is reimagining workforce capability

How do we know what our people can do today and where they could grow? It sounds simple, but if you've ever tried mapping your workforce's skills across roles, regions, and reporting lines, you know it's anything but. Too often, skills data lives in spreadsheets, managers lean on instinct, and organizations miss out on hidden potential.

At Dayforce, we believe skills are the connective tissue of a high-performing workforce - and that many companies are still operating without a map. That's why we've spent years listening to our customers, studying workforce trends, and building a skills engine and ecosystem designed to help organizations close the skills gap with a future focus.

Where the industry is now - and where we're going

Let's be honest: many organizations are still in the early stages of this journey. Skills data is fragmented, hard to manage, and often lives outside the systems leaders use every day. For many teams, it's still Excel or gut feel. That's not a failure. It's the reality. Our job at Dayforce is to support your journey to something better.

We're helping customers move from job-based models to skills-based strategies. That means building tools to track proficiency, even in hard-to-measure back-office roles, introducing concepts like inferred vs. affirmed skills, and incorporating observational feedback into future releases. We also get that adoption takes time. Most companies need 5-6 years to build a mature skills infrastructure. But with AI supporting acceleration of much of the heavy lifting - auto-tagging content, matching skills to roles, generating recommendations - we're helping compress that timeline without cutting corners.

Here's how.

Chapter one: From job descriptions to skill signals

The most recent phase of our journey began not in a lab, but in the trenches of talent acquisition. Recruiting teams needed better ways to assess candidates beyond years of experience or past titles. Our acquisition of Ideal.com in 2021 gave our all-in-one human capital management (HCM) platform the ability to help leverage skills for candidate screening and matching and identifying the skills necessary for specific jobs in the recruitment phase. Skills help recruiters screen candidates more meaningfully, spot adjacent strengths, and avoid missing out on great talent because of rigid role requirements. It was the beginning of a broader shift from role-based to skills-based thinking.

This really marked the beginning of a new era for skills in the Dayforce platform, setting the foundation for later enhancements to skill-based recruitment and new development in talent management and learning.

Chapter two: Turning on the lights for employees

Once our modern skills capabilities had taken flight, it wasn't long before the conversation moved from hiring to talent development. After all, the best way to build skills is to start with the talent you already have.

That's where Career Explorer came in.

Launched to help employees visualize their growth potential, Career Explorer uses AI to help identify existing skills, map out future opportunities, and suggest concrete development plans. It is designed to bridge the "I want to grow" with the "Here's how." Employees can see what roles they're most aligned with, where their gaps are, and what they need to learn to move forward. It's a powerful shift from career hope to career clarity. The solution was such a powerful contribution to HCM innovation out of the gate that it was named one of the "Top HR products of the year" in August 2024 by Human Resource Executive and the HR Technology Conference.

This isn't just a tool. It's an act of recognition. We see that your people want more than a paycheck - they want possibility. Career Explorer helps give it to them in plain sight.

Chapter three: Learning that connects

Once you know what skills to build, the next step is learning. But many learning platforms treat content as an endpoint, not a stepping stone, and they don't answer the key question: If I take this course, what will I be able to do?

Our acquisition of the LMS provider Eloomi in 2023 changed that for Dayforce. It gave us the foundation to launch the fully reimagined Dayforce Learning, a platform designed to connect learning with outcomes. Through the help of AI and machine learning, Dayforce Learning can now read through a course's metadata and content, auto-tag it with relevant skills, and assign those skills to employees upon completion. This means less manual effort for administrators and far more relevant, personalized development experiences for learners.

We built a technology that doesn't just store courses, it understands them. And then it does something even more powerful: it can link them directly to the Dayforce skills taxonomy or a customer's own custom skills library.

This isn't just about access to learning. It's about helping employees self-enroll in content that actually enables them to move forward, and helping organizations track that progress in real, measurable ways.

Chapter four: The future of workforce management is skills-based

The next frontier? Workforce management (WFM).

Traditionally, WFM tools focus on availability. But what if shift scheduling also considered ability? That's the future Dayforce is building. By integrating verified skills data into scheduling logic, frontline employees could soon qualify for specific shifts based on what they've learned, not just when they're free. Imagine a world where gaining a new certification doesn't just make you feel more prepared, but can open up more hours, more opportunities, and potentially, more pay.

We're already laying the groundwork for this because flexibility shouldn't just benefit the employer. Skills-based scheduling has the potential to create a more equitable and optimized workforce, where growth is both visible and rewarded.

What makes the Dayforce skills engine different?

We're not building a collection of disconnected tools. We're building a unified system that gives organizations a real-time view of workforce capability and a roadmap to grow it.

• Want to reduce attrition? Help employees see what's next.
• Want to improve performance reviews? Tie feedback to skill growth.
• Want to optimize scheduling? Match people to the right work - not just the available work.

At the heart of our system is the Dayforce skills framework, built from the ground up for transparency, adaptability, and scale. It's powered by three core pillars:

• Ingestion: Structured skills data from standard libraries (like ESCO) or your own custom definitions
• Management: Admin tools to link skills to roles, track proficiency, and align to learning
• Application: Skills that show up across the employee lifecycle - recruiting, development, performance, and soon, scheduling

And underpinning it all? AI and machine learning enhancements. These technologies aren't bolted on - they help power the experience, from auto-tagging content to recommending development based on role, performance, or feedback.

This is how we close the loop: connecting what people know, what they do, and where they could grow next.

We see you - and we're with you

We know what it's like to stand at the edge of a big transformation and wonder where to begin. That's why our skills strategy is designed to be practical, incremental, and realistic. You don't have to do everything at once. You just have to start - and we'll meet you there. We've built a skills engine that can help you handle complexity, we've designed tools that can grow with you, and we've assembled a team that understands your reality, not just your roadmap.

Because this isn't just about technology. It's about trust. And that's the difference with Dayforce.

Start your skills journey with Dayforce Talent


This blog post contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this blog post are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the potential impacts of new workforce management tools, future product developments and features, including the availability of skills-based scheduling, and our expectations, hopes, intentions, or strategies regarding the future. These statements may include words such as "anticipate," "estimate," "expect," "assume", "project," "seek," "plan," "intend," "believe," "will," "may," "could," "continue," "likely," "should," and other words and terms of similar meaning in connection with any discussion of the timing or nature of future operating or financial performance or other events, but not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. These statements are only current predictions and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our or our industry's actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those anticipated by the forward-looking statements.

This blog post should be read in conjunction with the risks detailed in the "Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements", "Forward-Looking Statements", "Risk Factors", and other sections of Dayforce's Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K and other reports we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Except as required by law, we are under no duty to update or revise any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date of this blog post.