3 Talent Architecture Roadblocks I’ve Faced — and How to Overcome Them

I didn’t set out to work in talent architecture. But somewhere between the messy job descriptions, the org design conversations, and the lightbulb moments with stakeholders, I got hooked.

Done right, talent architecture maps roles, skills, and career progression into a coherent framework and creates clarity and talent mobility. But building a workable talent architecture is also a complex, cross-functional dance. Over the years, I’ve run into roadblocks (more than once), and I’ve heard similar ones from peers like Bree Sykes, senior learning and organizational development business partner at Tripadvisor, and Darin Bond, director of learning and development at Duck Creek.

Here are three that have come up the most — and what’s helped us move forward.

Roadblock No. 1: “Building a talent architecture will take too long and won’t be worth the investment”

For many organizations, building a talent architecture is a multiyear process, but you don’t have to do it all right away.

At LinkedIn, although our first pilot focused on just five job families across three orgs, it felt like scaling Mount Everest. It took us nine months of challenging, manual work with a team of 10 recruiters and sourcers working full-time on this project to launch role documentation. While this initial pilot was a successful proof of concept and led to funding, vendor budget, and executive buy-in, that level of effort is simply not scalable for every role across LinkedIn’s 18,000-plus person organization. 

Thankfully, what once required a major lift to get started is now about to become easier — and both for our business and for employees, we know the investment is worth it. LinkedIn Learning’s Talent Architecture builder will help us more quickly identify the skills and competencies for individual roles and immediately publish those to the organization. 

What this means for our employees is the ability to see internal career paths and to be in the driver’s seat of their own career. An up-to-date and visible talent architecture is vital to help them align their learning and their career growth by answering questions like: What skills will help me advance to the next level or find an internal role on a different team? What growth areas should I focus on in the next three, six, or 12 months? With those specific goals identified, employees will receive relevant suggestions for upskilling via LinkedIn Learning. 

Starting with a small group of job families was also key for Darin at Duck Creek. Rather than boiling the ocean, Darin started with a manageable number of roles in his finance organization. But even within that one job family, individual job descriptions were inconsistent and out-of-date. His team used LinkedIn Learning’s Talent Architecture builder to upload a CSV file of roles and have it make suggestions on a jobs-to-skill mapping. This allowed them to streamline cleanup and test what worked for that job family before expanding to the broader organization. 

How to move forward:

• Start small. Pick one job family, ideally a broad one within HR, finance, customer service, or marketing, and build from there.
  
• Use technology to move faster. Features like a CSV upload or a direct Workday HCM integration using LinkedIn Learning’s Talent Architecture tools can help you scale across job families quickly.
  
• Show early wins. A small pilot can demonstrate value and build momentum across the organization.
  

Roadblock No. 2: “I can’t get buy-in from other teams”

This one’s a classic. The truth is, when everyone’s slammed, it can feel impossible to get other teams to engage.

At LinkedIn, we aligned on a RAPID framework (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) to make decision-making roles clear from the start: who recommends, who agrees, who decides on each decision. It cut down on the swirl and helped us move faster without trying to get consensus every time. We also created a governance model early, including an executive steering committee, with our VP of talent serving as the final Decide, compensation and HR as critical Agrees, and Legal as important Input. 

For example, when changing job families (e.g., consolidate split, create, decommission), changing backend job titles, or adding additional levels to existing job families, we have aligned on this RAPID. This clarifies that the business leader and compensation team have to Agree to the recommendation, but the architecture itself is firmly owned by the talent team.

Bree is the organizational development lead at the Tripadvisor Group, supporting multiple brands — including Tripadvisor, TheFork, and Viator — with unique needs and cultures. Her challenge is aligning these diverse teams and all their stakeholders under a single organizational development strategy — and getting to the right approvals. To manage complexity, she leans on strong relationships, especially with Tripadvisor’s people operations and technology teams, to create scalable, relevant solutions that work across brands. 

Darin at Duck Creek also named two critical partners for this work: 1) HR business partners, “my eyes and ears on what’s happening in the business,” and 2) compensation. “We work together to make sure job descriptions reflect what’s really needed, so we can price roles right and support development,” Darin says. 

My second tip: Once you’ve identified who needs to agree, galvanize them to take action with the why behind the business imperatives that talent architecture helps drive. 

Everyone cares about employee experience and retention. While my team has deep conviction that this multiyear effort to clean up our talent architecture is needed, we also knew that until we had both good data about roles and a technology platform that employees could use, we could not empower employees to own their own careers. The kinds of things we most often hear in our employee voice survey includes:

• Employees don’t understand the skills needed to be successful 
• Employees find internal mobility to be difficult and that it’s easier to find a role externally than internally
• Employees lack information about other roles and careers across the company, limiting employees’ ability to own their own careers 

HRBPs and leaders see a more direct value to partnering on this work when we’re able to point to more tangible, visible benefits like investing in talent architecture to quickly give employees the opportunity to own and drive their careers. 

How to move forward:

• Clarify decision-making. Use frameworks like RAPID to define roles and avoid bottlenecks.
  
• Build a coalition. Engage HRBPs and compensation teams, and engage additional stakeholders across HR, the business, and your leadership team who see the value.
  
• Speak the language of the business. Show each team what’s in it for them — unite them around a goal like better hiring, clearer performance expectations, or improved mobility.
  

Roadblock No. 3: “We’ll never be able to maintain this”

This one hits home. When I joined LinkedIn, our job architecture lived in a messy patchwork of decks, spreadsheets, and PDFs. No clear ownership. No system to keep it updated. So, no one really trusted it as a source of truth. We had a large number of job families, and to be honest, we were not sure what some of these even were. Our talent architecture was an overgrown garden. 

I love a good gardening metaphor to describe this work. You don’t “finish” talent architecture, you tend it. You weed, trim, plant. If you don’t, it gets overgrown — and people stop being able to navigate it. 

We want people to visit our garden, and to do that, we have to put our talent architecture in a place where the entire organization can access it. For us, our back-end role information is in Workday, and the way employees will interact with the data will be through an integration with LinkedIn Learning Career Hub. 

Darin’s team ran into this too. “We created career models four years ago,” Darin says, “and they’re already outdated.” For example, the customer success organization didn’t exist in its current form when the mapping was last completed; that required an entirely new set of skills since the last refresh. And with a team of four supporting 1,700 people across nine countries, “the amount of time and effort it takes to create and maintain skills mapping is challenging. We can’t maintain it all manually.” 

Same story from Bree. Her team supports more than 2,500 remote and hybrid employees globally. “We’ve talked about building a job-to-skills map,” she says, “but it felt insurmountable.” LinkedIn Learning gave Bree and her team a head start though by making it easy to get description and skill recommendations based on LinkedIn data with nothing but a .csv upload of role titles. 

How to move forward:

• Treat it like a garden. Build in time and resources for ongoing maintenance.
  
• Make talent architecture easily accessible. Have a place where employees can access your talent architecture — ideally in a technology platform — where managers and employees can interact with the information, and get access to the career paths and learning to help them sharpen critical skills.
  
• Make it useful. If employees and managers see the “why” behind engaging with talent architecture — like clearer paths or easier planning — they’ll both use it, and help keep it up-to-date.
  

What this work can unlock

Once we had a solid foundation in place at LinkedIn, the value started to show up everywhere — from internal mobility to AI strategy. With clearer role definitions and skill data, we can start asking bigger questions: Which tasks are automatable? Where might AI disrupt work? And how do we prepare people for what’s next?

And the consequences of not having an up-to-date talent architecture? Employees leaving because it is easier to find a role externally than internally. But when you invest in this work, it becomes about jobs, projects and gigs, finding mentors, and connecting learning to what really matters to employees — their career growth. 

Liam Walsh, LinkedIn’s senior director of talent strategic initiatives, says our talent architecture “is a foundation for a skills-based approach to the entire talent lifecycle, from hiring, promoting, developing, and performance reviews. And more than that, an up-to-date talent architecture helps ensure fair and equitable compensation and titling.” 

Darin sees it as future-proofing. “We’re now hiring for jobs that didn’t exist four years ago,” he says. “And we know there are jobs coming that we haven’t even defined yet. We need a system that can flex with the business.”

For Bree, talent architecture informed by market-based information and job-to-skills mapping would remove a friction point. “Employees are always trying to identify the skills that they need to grow in their careers, and their managers are also trying to identify the skills their employees need to grow in the business, but that doesn’t always have perfect alignment,” she says. “So, having a talent architecture not only means that our employees are going to have better development plans, which creates better engagement, but better retention when they feel like they're learning and growing with the business.” 

Final thoughts: Start small. Stay nimble. Keep listening

This work is messy and, in truth, it’s never fully done. But it’s some of the most meaningful work I’ve been part of.

If you’re just getting started, here’s what’s helped me most:

• Start small.
  
• Build partnerships.
  
• Treat your architecture like a living system.
  
• And most importantly — listen.
  

Continuous feedback from other teams is gold. They’ll tell you what’s working, what’s missing, and where they’re feeling stuck. That’s how you build something people will actually use.

And if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed (which I’ve definitely felt), just remember: You’re not the only one figuring this out. We're all building — one job family at a time.

LinkedIn Learning Career Hub, coming late 2025, will help operationalize talent architecture by blending internal job and skill data with real-time insights from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph. With HRIS integrations, automated skill suggestions, and built-in reporting, organizations will be able to maintain a living architecture that evolves with the business and supports more strategic workforce planning.