Join up the employee experience

Published in October 2025, the Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success looks at the talent management and people experience solutions market for EMEA’s HR leaders – here Fosway analysts emphasise the need for unification of the employee experience and a focus on skills.

The talent solutions landscape has often been fragmented with niche specialist solutions circling strategic HCM platforms. But this brings challenges, not just around cost and consolidation, but also of adequate integration across platforms. IT often views this as a data challenge, but it is also as much one of user experience.

The MACH solution architecture – based on Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless – is not a passing fad, as the challenge of integration between specialist platforms is often still a significant weakness. That weakness is compounded as the need to create seamless user journeys grows. Only 3% of HR teams say their HR solutions all work seamlessly together, and this has a negative impact on adoption, innovation, useability and user experience.

Skills-based organisations are a critical focus

With 87% of buyers highlighting that being a skills-based organisation is a critical part of their HR agenda, ‘skills’ is still one of the hottest topics for HR. From talent acquisition and strategic workforce planning to talent mobility and learning, 90% of buyers see skills as a critical initiative to future proof their organisation. Only 16% say they are skills-based organisations today, so there is huge potential for growth in this part of the market. It is clearly on the radar for HCM providers too.

But HCM solutions have struggled to deliver more than a skills container, relying on specialist skills intelligence providers to underpin HCM skills success. Skills specialists still retain significant differentiation today, but we may only be a couple of acquisitions and roadmap cycles away from the HCM vendor truly disrupting these disruptors.

The future of work is about tasks as well as skills

In the race to stay ahead, the ‘skills intelligence’ specialists are also pivoting and expanding to become solutions that provide task and work ontologies as much as they provide a framework for linking people to work through skills. AI is now a key resourcing option as we think about the future of work; but AI doesn’t do skills – it does tasks. To understand the shape, expertise and nature of what people do in work and what is done by AI, you must define task and work ontologies. This step provides specialist providers with a market advantage ahead of HCM vendors which are still wrestling with skills.

The shift to tasks and work also enables HR to build a more strategic role in workforce transformation, bolstering its position as a strategic partner. It is still early days, but work transformation is potentially the most significant shift in the talent market for years. Strategic workforce intelligence is the catalyst for conversations with the C-suite about how the organisation can successfully transform and the consequences for their people.

This is an excerpt from the 2025 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Talent & People Success. Get the full insight and discover all the latest market and solution trends by reading the whole report here.

What should you do next?

• AI is the dominant business story of the 2020s. Build your AI people strategy with evidence not guesswork. Our AI research is unique in the market and available now. https://www.fosway.com/fosway-ai-insights-talent-people-success/
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Other recommended reading

• Our latest cycle of research into the lived experience of EMEA’s enterprise HR leaders is now live: HR Realities 2025.
• The 2025 Fosway 9-Grid^TM for Cloud HR – full report. Released earlier this year. All the latest market and solution trends in Cloud HCM – get the full analysis today.

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