When Digital Transformation Drives Skills Transformation: Booking.com’s Oliver Drury

When Oliver (Ollie) Drury joined Booking.com, they dove into digital transformation by simplifying their tech stack—and reducing variables—using a middleware to stitch everything together. That enabled them to have a simpler set of variables from which to create their skills ecosystem. Their driving goal was to solve skills for the entire organization. In this conversation, Ollie shares how they’re working to accomplish a skills-based transformation by first focusing on digital transformation.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...

• Join the RedThread Research Community [5:01]
• Learn more about Ollie Drury and his work [5:59]
• Why they’re creating a skills-based organization [7:09]
• Why they focused on digital transformation first [8:00]
• How they’re building for reversibility [18:04]
• Major obstacles they’ve overcome [24:08]
• How they’re measuring effectiveness [26:08]
• The lightning round [27:58]
• Who leads skills at Booking.com? [34:29]
• Why employees own the skills data [38:05]
• How culture impacts the journey to skills [42:38]
• Steering away from the reward use case [47:53]
• The biggest thing Ollie’s learned [49:35]
• Why Ollie is passionate about this work [50:22]

Resources & People Mentioned

• Join the RedThread Research Community
• MuleSoft
• Tech Off
• Workday
• Gloat
• Neilsoft
• Crunchr
• BOOK: Work without Jobs
• BOOK: Inspired
• BOOK: Hidden Potential
• BOOK: The Technology Fallacy

Connect with Oliver Drury

• Connect on LinkedIn

Connect With Red Thread Research

• Website: Red Thread Research
• On LinkedIn
• On Facebook
• On Twitter

Subscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES